Details and Tidbits

OK, this is the fun stuff. Kind of. Mostly just fun for us, but you get to watch. Think of it as our version of a vacation slideshow.

This is a close-up of one of the concrete piers. Zorak made the forms. The boys mixed the concrete (about three tons of gravel, two tons of sand, and a whole lot of portland cement - 3-2-1, scoop-and-mix!) Smidge did the tapping. Fun for the whole family! We like the octagonal shape - the corners aren't as likely to chip, and they look really cool when you stand back and take in the whole thing. We didn't use round forms because one day we plan to put in a rock knee wall beneath the balcony to create a sun-room off the basement. The wide, flat sides of this design give us a surface against which to build the wall. (They're the same width as concrete blocks.)

Here you see a regular, plain old ledger board bolted to the house (all the way through to the interior of the basement, not just into the bricks - we've seen pictures of how that goes, and it does not go well. So, nice and secure. Yay.) The beam leaning against the wall shows the jointing (made that word up - expect to hear it in construction circles next season - we're cool that way) for the balcony. Stay with me, it'll make sense in a minute.

Close-up of the notches for the beams, boards, and other woody stuffs. These serve to provide additional strength and support to reduce the risk of hard failure (screws shearing off, nails pulling out, and other nasty gravitationally instigated mishaps). Kinda looks like Lincoln Logs meets Jenga, doesn't it? Zorak had way too much fun with this, I can tell you that.

And this is how it all goes together. Zorak is hanging one part of the cantilever beam on the outside notch of the picture you just saw (another board goes on the inside, and then there is a board between the two, so the cantilever beam is three layers thick). You can see on the right hand side, at the corner of the house, where the first notched beam is now bolted to the ledger board, and how the ledger board sits inside the notch, on a ledge of its own. It's a sort of ledge-within-a-ledge schematic. All of the posts along the wall are secured to the concrete piers with base posts, to the house with anchor bolts, and to the ledger (which is also secured to the house). A tornado may take down the house, but this balcony and, the wall it's attatched to, will remain standing.

How do you move a 9' tall 6x6 beam 1/8" to plumb? You break out the Animaniacs tools! This is actually the sledge-o-matic for squashing aluminum cans, but we found it works great for making minute adjustments to the beams without marring the surface. We call it the tweak-o-matic, now. Again, look for this term to surface among all the cool DIY-ers this season.