my kind of counseling
15 July 2009
what i've been up to
01 July 2009
Well, I haven't posted in a while, partly because I was burned out on blogging, partly because I've been busy:
I went up to West Virginia to build some stuff for my parents for a few weeks, basically rebuilding their front porch and building a new garage on the side of their house.
The existing porch.
We demolished the lower part of the porch (which was all rotten) and re-framed it complete with new concrete footers. I put in four columns instead of the original three- the porch beam had begun to sag in places. The new shorter pans corrected this.
We laid out the new footprint for the new garage.
To be able to dig the garage footers, we had to saw up and demolish the existing driveway slab. (that's Cevin, my sister's fiancee who helped me the whole time)
My Uncle Jeff came and dug out the footer trench one evening.
Meanwhile, framing continued on the porch. The subfloor went down and the column bases were built out.
We set our grade stakes with the laser transit and poured the concrete, but the truck chute wouldn't reach the far corner, so Cevin and I shoveled and raked a cubic yard of concrete back into it. We slept well that night! 
The columns were wrapped in poplar with a craftsman-esque design and the skirt walls were framed in. Contrary to my earlier design, we like how the porch felt with open sides and decided to not put in the solid rails. However, we'll have to raise the dirt up to within 30 inches of the floor to meet code requirements. The big wrap around steps were the last thing we got finished.
A mason is coming to lay block on the footers and then in a few weeks I'll be back up to frame the garage in and finish the porch. But for now, I'm resting up!
