July 09, 2007

If a monkey had a hammer

They might frame a house better. Although I should keep my mouth shut since they house has stood in the same spot for about 140 years.

The house is balloon framed in a slightly weird way so the framing for the shed dormers/roof on the cape actually sit on the floor joists for the second floor. The bottom band which you would think would be the rim joist is actually a full dimension 1x6 which is of course notched into the full 2x4. The original floor joist is a 2x6 sitting on the rim joist and has 2 2x12s sistered onto it.

This one is a top view of the same basic one before. You can see the 2x12s stop just short of the of the rim joist and on most of them as kinda nailed in with a joist hanger. Basically it's almost a good idea, but not really.:)

And I almost forgot a few other details. The free span on this thing is 20' , the spacing is 24" OC, and their ain't no bridging so if you stick your head in the span you see a nice long tunnel.

June 18, 2007

We attack the house again!

So much for that regularly scheduled update thing. A lot has happened since November, but not much on the house. Mostly just maintenance. The only rooms left to do in the house were on the exterior walls and since that means we had to remove insulation we didn't think it was a good idea to remove it in winter......Like I did in the living room and loft:)

Here's a quick peak at the new stained glass workshop in the laundry room. We had to do that to make room for the remodeled bedrooms upstairs.

This one shows the grinder on the new roll-out shelf and the replacement laundry sink.

Here is the new and improved light table. It's constructed out of a 6' section of pre-fab laminate countertop. A word of advice before attempting something like this. Make sure that the top is flat. This one was bowed in the middle I guess to allow water to run and not go over the edge. Some guerilla glue cure that in the light table are. It uses a 12" circline fluorescent. Make sure you use soft white because daylight will burn your eyes out.


Just what everyone wants to read in while doing home improvement. Did I mention that this and another fixture were inside a cubby hole that we screwed shut to prevent cat loss.


In case you were wondering why we are redoing this room. The angled portion in the top right corner of this picture was pre-demolition. Yes it was that ugly with that many layers of wallpaper covering up a fist size dent in the wall.


An in progress shot that people who've been with us from the beginning will understand as normal.


An after demo shot. I missed the floor in this one, but we were good little kids and cleaned up after ourselves. Most of it actually made it to the dump in the same weekend. It only looks like we are only 70% redneck from pad next to the garage.