Addition, part three

Well, the exterior is assembled. All it needs is a coat of paint; the primer should hold us for a while, though.

Here's a shot of the west side. I think it'll look better after we paint it. Everything to the left of the peak in the middle is new. We took off the cedar siding on the old part to make it look more uniform. The new siding is stuff called fiber cement. Very durable and impervious to about everything.


And here's a view looking at the northeast corner. The carpenter did a nice job joining the old to the new buildings. You can see the little deck with its own door and window. It has a sheet of rubber for its floor, glued atop an inch or so of foam insulation and an R-40 SIP. Total R-value of that part of the roof is about R-50. The major roof will probably be about R-44, good enough. We'll use sprayed-in foam, so it'll be without air leaks, too.

We'll paint the addition to match the cedar so it won't look so much like we glued a townhouse onto the place. In fact, Val is talking about a painting party. Lots of pizza for attendees! Details later.

One feature of those tall walls, since the structure is post and beam, is that they are not attached to the posts and beams. That means they can bulge and wiggle. This is not good, so I attached hurricane straps to the studs. Saved myself a pile of money by doing it myself, I hope. The wall feels nice and solid now. Sometimes the wall wasn't exactly perfectly flat, so I had to pull it in before fastening it in place. It took some jury-rigging with C-clamps and a come-along. If you eyeball the west wall, though, the addition is straighter than the original building. My repeated thanks to Martin Steinberg, the best neighbor in the world, for his advice and help on this and many other parts of the project.

So what's next? We need to run the water heater exhaust so it doesn't go into the addition space, we need to run the wiring, dig a channel in the concrete for the water and gas lines to the island, install fire block, and we need to insulate. Most of these I can do, but it'll be a while before we get to the insulation contractor.

The workmanship is pretty good, with lots of nice touches. For example, they put a piece of aluminum flashing behind the joints in the siding as additional rain protection, in addition to caulking the seams. The furring strips you see make the new siding on the original structure match the siding on the addition, since the two buildings didn't quite line up.

The carpenters were Amish, and they prefer not to be photographed, so I took a pic of Isaac or Levi's  hat.

As always you are welcome to come out and see the place first hand, and you can look at lots more photos in Picasa.