Home Improvement Today?

Where in central MI? I grew up 'down river' and will be back this summer.

 

Up in Midland. I'm guessing you are referring to the Detroit area?

 

Just south. Woodhaven, Trenton, Wyandotte...

Backpacking Isle Royale this summer!

 

That is some beautiful ground. Enjoy.

 

Deck Footing inspection complete. Wood delivery on Thursday. Concrete gets poured on Saturday.

 

They have a quite convenient drain on them already. Easily operated by a foot. I don't like leaving the tank pressurized so it gets blown down after each use anyways

 

Are you required to use rebar ?

 

nope. no rebar. but i have 19 - 20"x 42" holes in my back yard right now. it will take just over 5 Yds of concrete.

 

Are you using tube forms?

 

You just fill thw holes or bigfoot / sonotubes ?

 

Here the building department let's you use bigger footings with no rebar for decks. They assume minimum bearing pressure on undisturbed soil at 1500 psi which is low for this area. Hell if you hit caliche you could probably dowel into it for footings.

 

No tubes, just fill the holes. I slightly scraped the sides at the bottom so they are wider at the bottom.

 

Built some boxes for our 2'x12' skylight wells out of the matching 2x6 decking material with mitered corners so the v joint profile wrapped around .

Using the decking for the wells gives the effect of the ceiling material turning 90 degrees and running up to the skylight seamlessly




Boxes installed , I ran 6" screws from the top through holes I had pre-drilled when assembling the boxes




Peel and stick installation around the skylight curbs

 

We pressure washed out deck this past weekend and we are letting it dry out before we put some stain on it. In the past we've put a semi transparent stain on it with a red tint. The rails were painted by the previous owners so I'm assuming we have to keep painting them. For the rails, my wife and I were thinking about white, BUT we have some trees in the back which I'm afraid is always going to make the white paint look horrible. We were thinking about going with a brown stain for the deck, but now I'm unsure about the rails. The house is a brick house and the trim is a darker khaki color. Would you go with a semi transparent or solid for the deck and what color for the rails. Please feel free to post pics so I can get some ideas. I'm bad at visualizing the outcomes of painting.

 

Not going to lie, i'm a little jealous of some of the things that you get to build.

 

IPE decking, incoming.

 

Let's see a shot from below looking up for the full effect.

 

I tried this morning but the ceiling ends up underexposed and the skylights overexposed each time

 

The steel posts that carry the front 84' long , 5 1/8" x 10 1/2" glulam beam have 3/8" thick , 4" x 9" bolting plates that are welded to the tops of them that will accept 2 , 5/8" x 6" lag bolts to connect the posts to the beam . The bottoms of the steel posts will get field welded to the steel plates we cast into the concrete columns .

The 3/8" top plate is to be let in to the glulam beam so that the bottom of beam and bottom of plate are flush when installed .

Our fabricator is coming Friday so I dealt with the job of routing the beam to accept the 7 post plates today .

I made a plywood jig the same width as the glulam beam , with a couple wings I could clamp to the beam and a cut out the same size as the 4" x 9" steel top plate . I used my laminate trimmer instead of my big router because I would be doing this upside down in place and I used a 1/2" straight bit with a top bearing that would follow the jig .

I ripped a piece of 2x6 down to 5 1/8" to represent the glulam and ran a test to check my sizes and depth

(Corners were squared up with a chisel ~ not shown)



Fits pretty good






After confirming the sizes I laid out the post locations , clamped on my jig and routed the plate locations for the 7 posts






We also framed the chimney chase for the zero clearance wood fireplace and as we were sheeting both sides of the upper walls we installed some R22 Roxul mineral wool insulation as we went