Raising the Roof

It has been a productive week - first the interior walls were framed up, and we began to truly feel what the rooms will be like, Then the roof trusses got put in place. You can see how there will be a nice roof overhang  where some of the deck will eventually be. Maybe by the end of next week, the roof will be shingled (along with a new roof on the house and shed).

Walls!

Suddenly we have walls, and the addition once again looks big. Like several elephants in the backyard, actually. We look out the window and think "What are we doing?!?" But it will be Ok...won't it?

The process of putting up the walls is quite neat - 2 guys and 2 special jacks, and up goes a 30 foot wall section, and that's heavy, with 2 by 6 studs and 1/2 inch plywood!

Here is a short video of the process, and a picture as it is now with 2.5 of the walls up!

Subfloor

The subfloor was on last week, making the new basement look very dark! Then the big window from our master bedroom, door to the balcony and the balcony itself were removed, and the new (smaller) window roughed in. Maybe if you click on this view of the house, you might be able to make out the red line marking the new roof line - the reason the other window, door and balcony had to go.

The subfloor looked like an inviting dance floor, maybe under the full moon a couple of days ago...but the gap with the 9+ foot drop into the basement next to the house put us off! Today they are framing the walls - if they get them up before the predicted rains start, there may be more photos in the nest day or so.

Backfill!

Today the landscape of our yard changed dramatically. These photos show one last shot of the weeping tiles and basement window well areas, then the skid-steer and tampers at work removing the mountains of clay and packing the dirt in beside the foundation walls, and then the view with much of the yard leveled again!

Interestingly, our builder told us at one point that when the hole was dug, it would look huge. When the basement walls went up, it would look not so big, when the joists and subfloor are on it will seem huge again. I didn't believe him - but so far he has been absolutely right! The psychology of visual perception!

Correction...

That orange beam referred to in the previous post is NOT the beam supporting the bathroom, but it is a load bearing beam! The beam supporting the ramp which will connect the addition to our sunken family room was put in yesterday and the bathroom supporting beam will probably be put up with the rest of the floor joists today. 

Sunken family rooms were so very common in houses built around the time of ours (late 70's) and for a good long time after. We love our family room, and it truly IS the room in which we live, gather, listen to the stereo, post blog posts(!), etc. But it has been one of  the most challenging things to work around in making this house accessible and designing the addition. 

The joists!

It's been awhile since there has been something to "see". weeping tile was laid, and the foundation walls got sprayed with black (and very smelly) damp proofing - we wished we had closed the windows before they started! Then they were covered with pink styrofoam insulation. But it still all looked substantially like a hole with foundation walls in it - just some colour changes. Now things are happening rapidly again - yesterday, they put in an important structural beam (orange top) which will support the special accessible bathroom fixtures, and today they got the floor joists across where the two bedrooms will go. The subfloor may be on by the end of the week, and possibly early next week, the mountains of fill will be pushed back into the gap around the foundation walls! 

Most readers probably know this, but I didn't until one of my kids told me - if you click on a photo, you get a very good high resolution enlargement of it!