We bought our house almost 50 weeks ago and started demolition about 11 months ago. New concrete has been poured, walls have been built, a new subfloor installed, and a hole was cut for the stairs. But this past weekend, we made the most significant change to the house so far. If you recall, our house has a pitched roof – that is, it’s not flat. It comes to a point at the top. In order to maintain this shape there are horizontal pieces of wood running from one side of the house to the other. These pieces of wood are, essentially, pulling the exterior walls of the house together and preventing the whole house from going splat.
original wooden beams
The goal this weekend was to replace 4 of the wooden beams with steel rods, with the eventual plan of cutting down the rest of wood and having those 4 rods do the work of 12 or so wooden beams. Crazy stuff, if you ask me. It was a looooong weekend, and we will be forever in debt to the friends who helped us.
These are the steel pieces. There are 8 steel rods – 2 for each wooden beam. They meet in the middle and are fastened together by a turnbuckle. Ryan had to thread all the steel rods by hand. On the left side of the picture is one of the steel saddles. This is what anchors the steel rod to the house. Confused? So was I.
rods and saddles
The first step was installing the saddles. Easier said than done. In order to install each saddle, we first had to cut off the 25 foot long redwood beam, install a piece of blocking (sorta like a piece of filler wood), chip out a section of the roof framing so the saddle would be flush, pound the saddle in, drill holes for the bolts, and bolt them in. Sound like a lot of work? There were 8 of the them.
Ryan, cutting down the existing beam
beam is down, and blocking is in
John, chipping away the extra wood
saddle is in!
After each set of saddles were installed, we measured the distance between them to determine exactly how long the steel rods needed to be. Then someone had to cut the steel rod to size, which was like watching a fireworks show.
measuring
Once the rods were the proper length, we could finally install them…this part took at least 3 guys: one on each end and one in the middle.
Screwing the rod to the saddle
The last step was to adjust the middle. Ryan devised a clever way of being able to tighten both rods at the same time using the turnbuckle. I don’t know that I have the words to adequately describe how it works, so I’ll try to get Ryan to describe it later on. I thought it was brilliant.
Tightening the turnbuckle
One rod finished!
So with six people, we were able to get 3 of the 4 rods finished in one loooong day.
