| Blog series by Dan Lyke consisting of 4 parts so far |
Part 1: The state of what is
We live in a little 768 square foot cottage on a little lot on the southern edge of Sonoma county, of wine country fame, in a cute little town called Petaluma. If you’ve seen Basic Instinct, or Peggy Sue Got Married, or, especially, American Graffiti, or any number of other films, you’ve caught a glimpse of the community we call home. My shop currently fits in the garage of that house (not counted in that 768 square feet), a space it also shares with laundry. The garage was des...
Part 2: Thinking about living roofs
I’m still looking for reasonable numbers on roof loads for a living roof. I’ve run across people claiming as little as 7 lbs per square foot per inch of soil, and living roofs in as little as 4” of soil, and numbers as high as 140PSF. The online calculators and charts for joist calculations (I’m treating this like a floor because a living roof wants to be a fairly flat roof) I’m finding go to a max of 100PSF live load and 20PSF dead load. I’m finding ca...
Part 3: Musings on foundations
Okay, the Tuff Shed folks left us thinking that all we needed to do was provide a couple of level pier blocks. Reading through stuff on building foundations to codes leaves me wondering a bit on that, I believe that we’d need to build a foundation at least 12” deep and 12” wide with reinforcement steel, assuming we’re on fairly firm soil, soil bearing strength of 1000 pounds/square foot or so. So I’m pretty sure that the Tuff Shed sales pitch is slightly misleadi...
Part 4: Engineering a wall
Any wall within 5 feet of a property line needs to be 1 hour rated. With a living roof, each end of the rafter will be supporting a thousand lbs. Furthermore, I live in earthquake country. Building a wall isn’t a trivial matter of slapping up some 2×4s and calling it done. I’ve looked around for information on AAC and SIPs and those foam concrete forms, and even asked some people about information on them, and it sure seems like we’re coming back to stick-built for p...
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Blog Series
- A Shop for Dan - 4 parts
- Cedar Closets - 1 part
- Front Door Trim - 4 parts
- Morning Glory Lattice - 1 part
- New Windows - 1 part
- Reclaiming Mahogany for Baseboards - 3 parts
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