Front porch jacked & leveled with curved rafters done, new headers, temporary posts, roof installed, chimney flashed in copper. Extra dirt hauled, back & front yards graded since all of our digging. This past weekend was truly packed.

Done...capped, and flashed, safer and better looking than before.

He and Luis, his brother, work together and they have supplied scaffolding to reconstruct the chimney. In the process, we placed a heavy duty stainless steel flexible chimney liner within the existing clay flu. It had to be maneuvered from the top and bottom, but it makes the outdated coal box functional again and ready for a wood stove insert.

Manuel Espinosa Godinez is the best brickmason I know. He has an amazing story of how he got here as well. He's rebuilding the front stairwell/stoop here. It had no footing and was sinking beyond repair into our soft soils.

This porch has been hurting over the years. The main issue has been here in front of the front door. So we took out the brick stairwell and we prepared for new footings. The old footing was obsolete. The house is basically resting on semi-solid ground. Wherever water penetrates and finds a place to rest, the ground gives way and the foundation buckles. So we are reinforcing this problematic area only to build it back the way it was. We barely beat the snow yesterday.

Meanwhile...

If you click on this photo, you can see the old 8/12 gable and of course the new. Historical guidelines are such that this gable needs to be within the old, in set from the old walls in this case 1 foot on one side and 3 feet on the other. Looking closely, you can see that the 2x8 rafters are notched out in the overhang to achieve the same detail as the old home. This notch allows us to fasten v-groove board in the eaves within the notch, and then we went overtop all of that with our roof decking, so that when the roofers come in, their nails won't penetrate through our decorative eaves. I actually bought some reclaimed v-groove board to match the old in the eaves here. We took a couple of 4x6 timber out from a wall we did away with in the old section of the home, and cut those down to create our "outriggers" with bevel cuts on the ends to give it the same detail. You can see old outriggers (painted) in the top of the photo and the new ones are protruding from the gable end.

Walls being framed. We made excellent progress on this cold and windy day.

We have a floor on the addition! (Well, the frame at least.)
Brrrrbbby the way, it's been below 30 degrees most of the day. But look at those blue skies! We'll take it.

West Elevation Drawing

South Elevation Drawing

foundation done (17.5' x 19'8") with four brick piers, visible in the bottom left corner of this picture built to support the screen porch (6.5' x 13.5')) , ready to frame the addition hopefully on wednesday-friday!