Ah, the vicissitudes of putting an addition on your house

Actually, the project is coming along rather well if you don't mind reasonable delays. And most of the delays are reasonable. It has rained almost every day the guys had to work outside. We had to wait two weeks for both the windows and the floor joists. The joists arrived a couple hours later than expected, and so did the flooring, but they guys were able to keep busy while they waited for those; rebuilding the cricket.

As always, click the pictures to see them bigger

A cricket is a small roof you build to prevent water from accumulating in a place where the roof doesn't slope, such as where the south edge of the addition attaches to the old north edge of the house. Here's a shot of the incomplete new cricket. Eyeball the edge of the roof and the top of the cricket, and you can see that the angle is the same for both. This will keep the water channeled away, and save lots of grief years from now.

The building inspector did throw a noticeable monkey wrench in the gears, though. The guys from Brobst Home Improvements did a nice, standard job of sealing the windows and doors into their openings, but the inspector insisted on an additional flashing along the bottoms of the openings. Everyone I talked to said he was crazy. But the guys came out and re-installed them. Here's a shot of the opening with the flashing in place.

Well, I guess the house won't sink now if we get a flood. They re-caulked, re-nailed, taped, and re-installed doors and windows without complaining.

The big event of the day, though, was the floor joists. Hugh Lofting Timber Framing made their last delivery today—a nice truckload of big timbers, all of them about twice as long as necessary so the guys could cut them to the exactly correct length, and get two from each timber. That one post that had been out of plumb for the past couple weeks is now nice and vertical. The floor joists fit into slots in the main timbers, so they are not trimmed to a special shape. This made them useful for other projects, so as my pile of timbers vegetated in Hugh's parking lot, most of the joists got called into the ministry, as it were. Which meant that all but about three of the joists are new wood. I joked with the delivery guy that the new timbers didn't match the old ones, and he said he could make them look weathered and dirty, but there'd be an extra charge. The Amish guys offered to get some of the abundant mud around the site and rub it onto the beams if I liked. So nice-looking ceiling beams will be part of the story of the house, too.


The timbers had to be lifted into place by hand, then pounded into their slots with a sledge hammer. The fit was pretty tight. I don't picture the house coming apart any time soon. This shot shows the view from the upstairs boy's bedroom. You can see his air conditioner. That part of the wall will be hallway into the addition. Good thing he's enlisting, because pretty soon, his bedroom will be gone!

The flooring is good-quality 16-foot by 8-inch full dimension tongue and groove pine (or is it fir?). You can get poorer quality, but they are the dickens to get to fit together. The good ones go together nicely with a few hammer blows. Here is the partially-completed deck floor. You can just see a chisel in the doorway. He used it to pry up the sill so he could fit the floorboards under it. They had put in spacers, but it was very tight. It amounted to lifting the entire roof of the addition to slip the boards under the sill.

Since we're trying to keep this project mostly cash, we're stretching things out to spread out the payments, so the only flooring they put in was for the little deck, the opening that stimulated my Rube Goldberg rain protection these past couple weeks. (See two posts previous. It worked, by the way.) The rest of the flooring is stacked inside the addition to keep it out of the rain. The plan was to build some rafters on the deck floor so we could insulate the kitchen ceiling underneath the deck. As it happened, Hugh had a couple SIPs lying around, so he sent them down with the joists. They cut a SIP to fit and laid it on the flooring. We now have a nice R-40 ceiling under the deck.

SIP, in case you don't know, stands for Structural Insulated Panel, and it's what a lot of the exterior walls of the house are made of. You take two sheets of something like plywood, space them six or eight (or more)  inches apart, then fill the cavity with high-density foam insulation. You get something that is air tight and has a very high R value. They are tongue and groove along their edges, and you can get them with electrical conduit pre-installed. SIPs are usually made to order, take eight weeks to arrive, and are quite expensive. The SIPs Hugh sent were a little beat up and weathered; maybe I'll get a good price for them. Here's what the deck SIP looks like along an exposed edge. It has a temporary tyvek cover to keep rain off.


We'll put a railing around the deck, and cover up that exposed corner. The railing will have a built-in stile so we can easily climb onto the roof when the need arises. The plan is to have a rubber coating put over the SIP to be the floor of the deck itself. The Brobst guys will do that next time they come out.  I hope they don't delay.