Friday, September 07, 2007

Another day, another wall

These garage pictures are probably very hard to decrypt if you have never seen the garage. It is a small building, so it is hard to stand far enough back to take a good picture showing exactly what is going on. You will just have to take my word for it that it has seen better days, and the basic structure needed some strengthening.

Today's pictures show the work I have done on the side wall. All the previous work was done on the back wall to support the tail end of the rafters. The side wall has a support on it that holds a big cross beam for the roof. The roof is set up as two halves, the front half and back half. The back wall supports the tail ends of the rafters for the back half the roof, and this main beam holds the other end. The center beam also holds the tail end of the rafters for the front half of the roof. In other words, if the center beam fell, the roof would fold in the middle and fall into the center of the garage, onto my car, myself of anything else inside the garage. And this is why I want to support it better.

This first picture shows what it looked like before I started building the side wall. In the center of the picture is the vertical board that the center roof beam sits on top of. The bright pieces of timber are the beginnings of the new wall. The grey metallic horizontal thing is actually a long steel pipe that the previous owner had wedge in there to add support to the roof. It was a very innovative solution.



This next picture is a close up view of the top of the vertical board that holds up the center beam. It is difficult to tell, but the center beam is starting to compress at the end because it isn't as solid as it used to be.


This last picture shows the new wall I am starting to build. I will be adding another section on top of this base wall that will be right under the roof rafter and will support the main cross beam more solidly. My goal for today is to finish that section. Hopefully I will have pictures to show the complete wall soon.


After I get this wall complete, I will be pouring more cement. I need to build up the floor in the room that makes up the other half of this building so that I can work out its "issues" also. By the time I am done with this project, it might have been easier to just build and whole new garage. But, since the building actually sits right at the edge of my property, there is no way I would be able to build it in the same spot again.

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