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.

first day of vacation garage work

This was the progress I made on my first day of working on the garage. I am taking this week off from work in order to make quick progress before the winter (and to get away from Boeing work for a week). The first picture shows the original back wall that is falling down. The picture doesn't show it well, but there was one horizontal beam underneath the roof joists. It is all that is holding up the roof. It is starting to lose the battle. That beam is what started me down this adventure, I wasn't feeling safe parking my cars in the garage anymore.




The concrete work a few weeks ago created a stable platform for me to lift the roof, and to build the new back wall on. This picture shows the new back wall with the set up I used to lift the roof. My neighbor, Chris, lent me his engine hoist (the orange thing) and modified it with a flange to hold a 4x4 timber onto the end.



These two pictures shows the right hand corner where I set up the static beam that I was trying to lift the roof final height to.





These next two pictures show the left hand corner where I was lifting from. This was the corner where the floor had sunk the most and the roof had followed it. The beam closest to the wall is actually two 4x4's attached together. The closeup with the red arrow shows the break between the two 4x4's. I started with the upper block out, then I lifted the horizontal beam up on that end using the engine hoist. Once the horizontal beam was level, I measured the gap between the horizontal beam and the top of the corner post, quickly cut a 4x4 section and pushed it in and put screws through the side braces. It was a little scary, the roof was making interesting sounds as I lifted it.





All of the above was without any of the new lumber set up for the back wall. I didn't take any pictures because I didn't want to leave the roof being held up by my contraption very long. These pictures were all taken at the end of the day (Sunday).

Yesterday (Labor Day). I made made lots of progress also, but haven't taken pictures yet.

Monte Cristo

Rebecca and I hiked to the former mining town of Monte Cristo yesterday. It consists of abandoned buildings from when there was mining for gold and silver. It is off the Mountain Loop Highway, right where the highway ends. It is a flat hike of 8 miles round trip. It was a hot day, so we left Ruby, Rebecca's black lab, at home and only brought her little poodle, Lance, with us.

The buildings were all wood, and built at the turn of the century, so there isn't much left. The building you see in the photo was put up by the National Parks department because there used to be a road you could drive all the way to the town and it had alot of visitors. Mother Nature has washed out the road, so now you can only hike to it.

There are rusting artifacts laying around everywhere, but the main attraction is this railroad turntable that was left behind. The writeups at the camp say that they tried to remove it also, and move it to a new location, but it was unable to be removed, so they left it.


We had lunch at the townsite, but it was cut short when we belatedly discovered gross little worms crawling over the picnic table.