June to February part IV

I am still posting the overdue information from last fall, and trying to catch up. I think with this one I should be all caught up on what we were up to last year. 

Ooops.

The next big project after the siding was installed in the back and the garage was poured, was to purchase and install new garage doors!

So you can imagine how excited we were since it only took 3 years to get to this point. :)

But before we could have the doors installed, we needed to prepare the wall to receive them. So the first part of September, Shawn spent evenings and weekends framing a wall inside of the garage.

Back in July of 2010, I blogged about the fact that our garage footings ended up short of where the exterior wall actually needed to be framed. The good news was (and still is) that the trusses only need 1.5" of bearing to transfer the load from the roof to the footings. We still didn't like to leave the load bearing right at the edge of the concrete footing (like you see in the pictures), so we added an additional load bearing wall right next to the exterior wall to help transfer the roof load onto the footing directly. 

But fixable.

On normal houses the exterior wall pretty much lines up with the concrete, so framing for the wall to receive a garage door is not difficult. Our house because of the fact that the wall cantilevers, and the fact that the ICF forms add an addinal 2.5" of foam, we needed to add another framed wall inside the garage so that the new garage doors could actually close against it. You can see in the picture above the brand new 2x4 wall that Shawn built right next to the foam on the inside of the garage.

On this picture you can also see that the footing on this wall was not out of alignment as bad as in the first picture which is the other side of the garage. We measured from the exterior face of the sheathing of the garage wall to make sure both walls ended up the same distance in from the exterior. Remember that the exterior walls was framed right, so the garage is square. It's the footings that are askew. You can notice on the second picture that the framed 2x4 walls is not butted against the foam. On the other hand, the exterior face of this wall actually matches the same of the exterior of the footing foam. You can see in the first picture that the wall cantilever outs on the exterior of the garage. We will have to build this up when the time comes for siding/stone facing to be installed here.

What a great helper.

Work seemed to go better with a little extra tiny set of  hands for help. Bianca had a great time collecting wood  and keeping mummy busy while she climbed on  anything that looked climbable. She got the hang of the  ladder very quickly!

 You can see the finished wall on the picture to the left. This is what it looks like from inside of the garage. 

Because the garage wall ended being extra wide with the addition of the new wall, we felt it would be a shame to waste that space between garage doors if we were to just cover it with drywall.

And you can also see the nice set of built-in shelves that Shawn built between the two garage doors. They are deep enough that a gallon jug of antifreeze fits well. It will be handy to store auto care products within easy reach.

After Shawn got the wall all built, he covered the gap with cement board siding sheets that were cut to fit as you can see in the next picture.

After the inside of the garage door openings were covered, Shawn painted the top, and top halves of the sides with our siding paint color.

The bottom sections will at some point in the future (hopefully this year) get covered with stone facing.

Here's another angle showing the wall, and the new shelves. You can also see in this picture how high the stone veneer will come up on the wall. It's about 3 ft from the floor.

I really like the fact that because the footing and wall didn't line up, we had to do this little extra fix. (Shawn probably would not agree about "liking" extra labor... and don't get us started on contractor screw ups!) But now our garage wall is a lot deeper than it otherwise would have been. I think in the end when the exterior siding and stone veneer are finished, this will be a neat and unique little feature to our home that is not common. I like not common. :)

Structurally, the wall is sound with the extra load bearing directly onto the footing. The addition of the interior wall was mostly to make the garage doors work. Once drywall and siding are on, it will look great.

Not long after Shawn finished the interior wall, the contractor we selected came and installed the garage doors. We opted to go with a little bit better doors that had a little more insulation than standard doors. We also decided to go with belt drive garage door openers and we really like it that they are not very noisy when the doors open and close. 

Here is a shot of our new garage doors right after they were installed. And if you notice such things, In this picture you can see only two of the window inserts had come with the doors. Rest were on back order. Regardless, we were very excited to finally have garage doors! We were also very much looking forward to not having to scrape snow off car windshileds when winter came! And keeping the cats from coming in and marking everything in here. The list is endless of why we like our new garage doors.

After the garage doors were installed, Shawn returned to the job of siding the exterior of the garage. If you will notice, you can see in this picture that we redid the Tyvek paper. Here Shawn has already installed the trim. Notice the trim that went inside of the garage door opening. This is the little "extra" detail that will be on our doors. I like it a lot.

Shawn is now starting the first row of siding, and on the picture below you can see the progress

. 

It's hard to see in the picture, but the trim above the garage doors has a keystone detail in the middle that turned out nice and matches the same detail of the front bedroom window. This picture shows where we stopped the siding job last fall. Shawn didn't finish the last two rows because over on the porch side, the soffit and fascia has not been finished yet (one more thing we hope gets done this year!)

So once the garage was enclosed, we looked for the next project. We decided it was time that we probably got to the chimney on the roof and covered it with some siding. So early October, Shawn and I climbed up onto the roof. 

The chimney is basically a framed box that was literally just nailed to the roof. We were surprised that in the three years it had been up there it hadn't been ripped up by some of the strong winds we've seen out here. So to beef it up, Shawn installed some bracing an used threaded rod to anchor this sucker down.

Here you can see inside the chimney and the anchoring job on one of the corners.

I won't take too much time to go over the steps for siding the chimney. In summary: We basically re-tyveked the chimney, then bought and cut to shape sheets of cement board siding and picked the windiest day in October to haul sheet goods up on the roof. It was a miracle Shawn didn't fly off, but luckily the work went without incident.

After the siding was installed, Shawn installed the trim, and put a temporary cover on the top. So here are some shots of the chimney siding work.

 

Looks great!

And to end this post, here is a shot of the old house as seen from the roof of the new one. You can see that the leaves are starting to fall from the trees, and temps had started to drop as well.

I am now caught up to about mid-October of last year. I can't remember that there was much more work that we did in the fall, so I'll have to rely on pictures we took to remember. So next post should be a smaller one to update through the winter, or I may even be able to get caught up on whatever has happened the first six months of this year! Which up until a couple of weeks ago, there wasn't much to really update on. But I'll save details for the next post. Good night.