It gets hot in the attic in the summer, even with the solar-powered attic fan whirring. By noon, it’s difficult to work up there — it’s too hot. Your energy drains away, you lose focus, and it’s easy to trip on a board, or bang your head against a rusted nail. It’s not enjoyable.

So these days we try to get the work done early, which means we wake, drink coffee, eat a bit of breakfast, and by the time the sun has topped the trees in the woods we’ve been working for a while.

We were grilling out with John, a good friend, the other night and he asked: “So … do you guys really know what you’re doing?”

We were talking about our current project: removing the old gable rafters in the attic, re-supporting the rafters that frame the existing pyramid roof. We were talking about how we’re restructuring things.

And our answer was, in short: “More or less.” And, “It can’t be that hard.”

With enough screws of the proper length, and super-strong decades-old oak boards, and a lot of thinking time built in — well, the house will hold up just fine, we think.

The true test will be when there’s a foot of wet snow on the roof in the winter. That’s when we’ll know the answer to his question.