Back to DaVE & Noemi's Garage
Back to DaVE & Noemi's Garage -- Phase II

DaVE and Noemi's Garage -- Week ending January 13, 2001
This week's final view:

prev week	all weeks	next week

After the concrete pour, holidays and other committments Tim had meant no work on the project for a a few weeks. As always, we greatly appreciated Tim's staying in contact with us and keeping us informed, which converts delays from a hand-wringing frustrations into optimistic anticipation of things starting again. Tim's style is one of focus and dedication to one job at a time, and we knew that's how he'd tackle our job when he was available, so the delay was not a problem.

But we didn't sit still. During this time, we researched and came to decisions on various items:

• Roof: We'll go with heavy class-B rated cedar shakes for the garage roof, AND try to get the house roof done at the same time. A roofer came by to look at our house, and he repeated all the bad we alrady knew about our house's roof: it's old, not installed correctly, the chimney isn't flashed properly, the gutters that are still there are useless, etc etc etc.

• Pedestrian doors: We ordered a new Dutch door for the pedestrian entry door. For the bathroom door, we went to Whole House Building Supply in East Palo Alto, and ended up with two old doors. The first one is 2'6" wide, and the plans call for a 2'4" door. So what's 2 inches? As it turns out, the concrete stem wall takes up 4 precious inches of width in the bathroom, and we really do need a 2'4" wide door. The second door is 2'2" wide, though it came with a doorjam, which makes the whole assembly 2'4" wide. Perfect. Except that stripping the paint and restoring the hardward is a BIG job. I'm not adding up the hours I've spent to see how much more our $60 salvage door is costing than our $780 new door. Besides, there's a lot of learning going on here.

• Garage doors: Actually, we've taken a step backward here. We thought we wanted either a cross-buck (me) or half-buck (DaVE) design, but the doors on an old shed we saw at a demolition sale in Palo Alto is giving us new ideas. We did finally get a quote from Overhead Door, which is comparable to that from Artistic Door, though Overhead included a quote for grooved MDO in the place of genuine tongue-and-V-groove planks for a substantial savings of $3000.

• Skylights: We decided to install four operational (can be opened that is) skylights! Excellent suggestion by our contractors. The skylights will fit between the roof rafters and will not alter the basic framing.

• Air pipes: Great idea offered by Eric Murray. We've decided to add cast iron air pipes ourselves afterward, but on the outside of the walls, along the baseboards or something. We really don't know yet where things will be, and they're small enough that running them alongside tables or the floor is fine.

• Roof/Window details: More decisions: what kind of window trim? Rafters? Fascia (sp?) What kind of sheathing on the underside of the roof overhang?
  Details, details!

• Landscaping: Like I always see on This Old House, it's not too early to think about the landscaping! No fountains, cherubs or Koi ponds, thank you, just some fences, maybe a rock wall, and some bushes for privacy. When the garage is done, we'll actually have a private backyard!

So, we're all psyched to get back to it on Monday, Jan 8th! Mother Nature had other ideas -- Tim and Craig were rained out until Friday. But, the framing started on Friday, and continued on Saturday, so we're back underway -- this week we actually have a few walls, starting with our nifty high-tech Simpson Strong-Tie shearwalls. Bruce put these pre-fab wall segments in the plans at the points flanking the garage doors, to meet the strict shear wall building code requirements (earthquake stuff, I gather).

Tim recruited Dave for a wall-raising, and our (very patient kind) next-door neighbor even joined in.

prev week	all weeks	next week