Deck, Deck, Goose

Immediately after the garage was finished (minus the doors) the contractors started on the rear stairs. We demolished the "original" stairs (actually built in the 1930s when the house was already 40 years old) because the city condemned them as unsafe. We knew this before we bought the house. We continued to use the old stairs for awhile, especially during last year's kitchen remodel, but after that it was time for them to go.

That left us with a 2nd-floor door to nowhere and no easy way into our new kitchen from the outside. Everything had to come in and out the front door and up/down the main staircase. Now, with the new back stairs we'll be able to easily get to/from the new kitchen and the backyard. This will be especially important once we start parking in the garage (imagine!) and hauling groceries that way.

Here you can see where the old stairs used to go, circling around two sides of the house from the upstairs kitchen. Apart from being old and rickety, we just didn't like where the stairs were placed. They went the wrong way: when we go downstairs we want to go to the left, not the right. These stairs lead in the wrong direction if you're heading to/from a car in the garage.

So with the city's blessing, we re-routed the new stairs to lead down and to the left. The new stairs will hug the house, taking advantage of the "L" shape just to the left of the doors, folding back on themselves and taking up less space than the old ones. Got it?

The first step to making this work is to build a new landing on the 2nd floor. Here it is being framed. It's all being built with pressure-treated lumber, with some redwood pieces where it's visible. The new landing and stairs should last a lot longer than the old ones (and they lasted 70 years).

Here's the same landing a few weeks later. It's bigger than the old one, and gives us a nice little deck just outside the kitchen/laundry door. I'm thinking this is where I might put our new meat smoker (thanks, Steve and Paul!).

And here are the new stairs. It's all dark wood now, but Kathy's already started painting it white--which is a much more tedious job than it sounds. There's a lot of surface area on those little 1x1 stringers and banisters and steps, etc...

As you can (kind of) see, these stairs head in the opposite direction from the old stairs, hugging the back of the house and passing directly behind the garage. Craftily, we planned a tiny 1-inch gap between the stairs and the garage--very close, but without touching. That's to satisfy the city, which forbids the historic structure (i.e., the house) from connecting to the non-historic garage. The gap keeps the two structures separate in the eyes of the historical committee, and also prevents us (theoretically) from stepping off the stairs onto the back "deck" of the garage.

We use the stairs every day now. It's a much shorter route when we're unloading groceries, and a great shortcut when I'm working in the backyard. Now if we can just find a way to pay for all that hourly labor...

The House of Sand and Fog

Ta-dah! Here's our more-or-less completed garage. It's unpainted, of course, but at least we've got the doors up.

I made these carriage doors myself, and they came out pretty good if I do say so. We didn't plan it that way. We got some quotes on garage doors, but even the cheapest estimate was almost $5000. The city says the doors must be wood, not metal or fiberglas. And we can't do roll-up doors because they'd block the stairs into the "attic." So that meant swing-out carriage doors were our only option. Which is fine, because that's the style we wanted anyway.

I figured heck, for $5000 I can buy all the materials for one-tenth that price and make the doors myself. How hard can it be, right?

Pretty hard, as it turns out, but it's doable. Each door is a combination of 2x4 and 2x6 frame construction on the back side and smooth MDO (medium-density overlay) ply on the front face, with 1x4 and 1x6 trim pieces on top of that. The frame pieces are held together with dowels, wood glue, and huge long bolts. The MDO facing is water-resistant and very smooth for painting, while the trim pieces add a bit of texture and character.

The doors weigh about 100 pounds each and swing on three heavy-duty ball-bearing hinges. Hanging them was a real bear. Kathy and I struggled with shims and braces, wrestling each door into place while trying to hold it steady long enough to screw the hinges in straight. And of course, it was hot that day.

The windows aren't in yet, but I'll cut and mount those from the inside. Then I'll cut diamond-shaped trim pieces to match the stained-glass diamonds on the main house. I'm hoping it'll look nice when it's all done.

Garage, Part XCXVIII

It's now late August and the garage is actually... done!

Well, almost. The professional construction is finished. Kathy and I still have to paint the garage and take care of a few small details. But the contractors have packed up, they've submitted their final invoices* and we've got the place back to ourselves.

One of the last steps was hot-mopping the "deck" portion on the back of the garage, seen here. The garage roof doesn't extend all the way over the entire garage. That would have interfered with the house, so we roofed over only the front three-quarters of the garage and left the back portion (that is, the end away from the street) flat. It was waterproofed with black roofing tar covered with a layer of white sand, and that's what this photo shows.

You can also just make out a shiny new metal scupper (gutter) running along the back edge of the garage. This catches rainwater and guides it into a rain barrel that we'll place just out of sight in the lower-right corner of the photo.

The city permit says we're not supposed to have access to this "deck" area. Otherwise it would need a safety railing around it and all sorts of other complications. We're planning to set a few flowerpots on it and that's about it.

The back end of the roof just needs a few more cedar shingles, as you can see, and then it'll be all done. At last!

*The #^&@! garage remodel cost more than the cars parked inside it. Seriously.