Construction Update October 2 to 7, 2011

This is the stairwell opening into which our new stairs are to go.  I had hoped to find someone to build them for me, as it might save me a days work.  In Kelowna there is a company called Rise 'n Run that we used in our projects there... and they saved us both time and money.  But after calling four companies, the only one I could find to even quote on them was a company in Nanaimo.  It didn't seem to me that they would be quicker... or save me money.

On Sunday afternoon I did the layout for the new stairs which had a 7-5/8" rise and 10" run.

I enjoyed cutting out the stair pattern with the circular saw...

I then cut out the corners with the jig saw to avoid over cutting and losing strength.

I just tacked the stringers in place to see how they looked before cutting out the treads and risers.  The stringers looked good... but we would assemble them in the garage on the workbench where we had better control and wouldn't be working in cramped conditions.

We used lots of glue, screws and air nails.

We made all the risers from 1/2" plywood and cut the treads to length.  In about two hours we put it all together.  We now just let it sit while the glue dried.

We wanted to put the siding back on the house before putting the stairs in place... as it would be really hard to install the siding after.  We put horizontal 2x4's for nailing the siding to with two layers of 1" Styrofoam insulation between... and it is here we could correct the small discrepancy of the house being not square with the old garage and our new building.  It was less than one inch out of square... no big deal.

But before I could cover the 3x8 posts at each end, I knew I needed the engineer's approval.  Ritchie Smith asked me to send him several photos of the posts with close-ups of how they were attached and very soon after emailing them to him he gave me the green light to go ahead and cover.

So the next morning we re-installed the vertical channel cedar siding... anxious to get our new stairs in place.  But it was not as simple to get the stairs into place as I had imagined.  They were really heavy... and there was not enough room to get them in from the front step... try as we may it was a "no go."

So plan B was to take out three or four studs in the new master bedroom closet so we could slide them into place parallel from behind.  It was a piece of cake... howbeit a heavy piece of cake!

We were so excited to get them installed... but my first time walking up and down told me I had miss calculated the headroom clearance and made the opening for the stairwell too small.

I made a call to the building inspector to find out for sure what the building code was for headroom clearance.  If I was going to fix it, I only wanted to do it once.  The inspector was very helpful and told me the minimum code was 6 foot 5 inches... 77 inches vertical clearance from stair nosing to header.  I checked and as it sat at the time it was 75 inches.  Close but no cigar.  It had to be changed.

So out came the chain saw.   We pulled out all the nails from the joist hangers and in no time the surgery was complete.

Here is an action shot of the header and about a foot of the TGI's coming down.

And here is the finished repair job.

With a simple stud cut to the right length and a lever with fulcrum we had the header moved over a foot and up tight to the floor plywood as tight as ever.  This repair fix took no more than about an hour and we now have headroom clearance of 80 inches... 3 more inches than the minimum code required.  It feels alright now.  You can see the pencil line where the joist hanger used to be on the joist.

If Michael Jordan comes to visit he will have to duck his head... but for the rest of us it will do just fine.

This is the first wall that we built... the short wall back of the storage, over the garage.

The next day we had more walls built... and I now had to do something to protect our house from water penetration.  I needed to get the cricket built.  Shirley hadn't heard that word used before for the small false roof used to divert water away from an obstacle, a chimney, etc.  Check it out.

So we snapped a couple of chalk lines to layout the cricket.  One on the wall of the new studio and another on the roof where we would cut away the shingles.   There would be a new valley with a fall of about two feet when completed.  But first we have to cut the shingles and remove the ones that go in the area of the new cricket.

Once again we used the tractor to haul away the ripped off shingles.

Then we started to build the cricket... each support rafter was progressively longer as the cricket widened.

Once the cricket was built we put 6 mil poly from wall to wall, over the skylights and everything, holding it in place with 1 x 4's and then tapping the poly to the new plywood wall.  Brendan said that this was a 100% fix... and we are ready now the new roof in this area.

Friday was a sunny day and we not only got up all the floor joists for the loft, but also most of the T & G floor plywood.

The higher we get in this new building the more spectacular the view gets.  This storage loft is begging to have a few skylights... and I am thinking they might be the Velux opening type.  They may also be helpful for ventilation on hot summer days.