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another south girder
Monday, July 2 2012
Late this morning, I mowed the grass for the fourth time this season. Since I'd mowed the grass two weeks ago and there hasn't been much rain of late, the grass hadn't grown all that much, making the job a relatively easy one. Part of the reason for mowing the grass was that Gretchen would he hosting another poetry workshop this evening, though the other reason is to make our house presentable for our house sitter while we're off in the Pacific Northwest.
As Gretchen was preparing for her workshop, I was down at the greenhouse assembling a girder from a two by four and a two by eight mated along their length to form an L-shaped cross-section. I needed this girder to widen the existing girder holding up the south end of the roof. The windows that will eventually form a glass wall there will all be slightly cantilevered out beyond where there is any structure to support them, and to accommodate this glass at the top, I need to widen the existing two-by-six girder by nearly six inches. The additional girder bulk will have another useful effect: correcting a slight sag that has developed in the existing girder. Spanning a 14 foot chasm with a single two by six girder is never advisable; indeed, before I'd jacked up the roof as part of this project, that girder had been supported from below at two separate places along its span.
After people began arriving for the workshop, Gretchen took a couple of them out on the east deck to show them my project from afar. It was looking pretty spectacular at that point, because I'd taken down the tarp normally covering the south wall and was in the process of maneuvering the new girder into place (a tricky procedure given its weight and the fact that an existing sloped wall made of glass lies directly beneath it).
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