This documents an addition to the house shown.
This picture was taken from Google maps, it looks to be from
a year before this project started.
As you can see this is a flat ranch house with a clean look but
very little character like most houses in this neighborhood.
It appears that in around 1976, the original builders of this house
disposed of used bricks in the basement of this house, in a
hidden room, behind a
sheet rock wall in a 10 foot long, by 27 inch wide, by 9 foot
high "crawl space". Sounds crazy, that much space was just
walled off. It's not what you'd call living space, but it has
about 20 square feet of floor space.
We turned this space into a very deep narrow closet.
We managed to clean the mortar off of 825 of the used
bricks for use in this project. We used and other 100 or so broken
bricks as clean fill.
Lightly tapping the hard mortar on the used brick with a small hammer
does the trick.
The used brick is only used as a cosmetic element
in the project, and so does not provide any structural support for
the house or porch.
The finding of the "free" bricks provided the original
inspiration for this project.
This next image shows what we came up with for a stab at the
garden wall design, just playing around without mortar.
We noticed that the pillar in the rear of the wall looked like
it could be the bottom of a column (post) that holds up a porch roof.
We thought that using the garden wall as an entry way to a
porch would look very nice.
We found if very handy to look at lots of other porches. Heres some google and bing images of porches: google porch, bing porch. It's good that google has competition.
This next image shows the close to the current state of the project.
It's pretty much done.
Notice the pair of foo dogs, or are they called Ming lions, have been added to ward off evil
spirits, without which we would be doomed.
Click on an image to see the latest
version of the project image gallery which has more than 500
high res images from when before the project started to
project finish.
The total cost for materials bought was around $3,000. See the spreadsheet for the full brake down.
We use a GNU/Linux OS, but if you have not gotten wise yet, we hear this all works on Windows too.
Here are some links to
model renderings:
Rant: As you can see it's kind of like a gable dormer, but too large and with no side walls; and it's kind of like a cross gable but the crossing gable is much smaller than the existing gables; and so this is not a pure cross gable. This lack of symmetry in the height of the crossing roof ridges could make a regular cross gable unstable, not to mention more difficult to frame when most of the roof is already shingled. Since we do not expect to get any useful living space in the area in the roof attic the solution is easy, just brace the new roof through to the bearing walls that just happen to be there already. Those little 2 by 4 braces that are added to the old roof are very important, we'd guess they increase the load bearing capacity by at least 5 times as without them, likely much more. The braces are transferring load directly to the bearing walls. Without the braces the load is carried by the existing rafters midway in their span. That's just obviously a bad thing. It may be over-kill, but it's cheap and easy to do. In my experience, most builders do not consider such things; many builders do not even understand what joist bridging is for, and exclude it in their projects. To my disapproval, half the companies (3/6) I worked for never installed joist bridging in their floors in their residential house construction, even then joist spans where over twelve feet. By just about any reasonable measure standard joist bridging will at least double the load-bearing capacity of a floor.
The Blacksburg site page Building Review and Permitting has the telephone to call to get you started in getting your permit. The people who run the Blacksburg Building Review and Permitting office do not maintain their own web pages themselves, so don't count on everything being up to date on that part of the Blacksburg.gov site. Here's a link to Blacksburg permit forms that they have on the site.
Rant: We find it a little disturbing that all the Blacksburg.gov web page URLs only vary by the query part of the path, just a page number. Will these blacksburg.gov links brake when web pages are added or removed? Could be a lack of foresight, or lack of understanding of what hyperlinks are, etc.
We got our permit by submitting the following papers:
You may need additional forms if you are hiring a contractor(s) other than yourself.
The enforcement of building standards has changed drastically since most of the houses in Blacksburg were built.
We passed the rough inspection on June 19, 2013 and the final inspection on October 11, 2013 with no issues in either inspection. The finishing of the brick garden bed, post casings, and deck where not required for the final inspection, given that the permit was only required for the porch roof, trim, ceiling and supporting posts. The posts did not require decorative casings to pass final inspection. We added the pretty post casings after the brick garden beds were built after all inspections. The deck was the last major part of the project that was finished on about July 4, 2014. Clearly this was a spare time project with only one person doing the work.
Update: 2015-Jan-06 I've been inspired by a floor tile mosaic
that I saw at the Roanoke Old
Southwest Parlor Tour
You may find the following links useful:
