San Juan Island Small House Update
Plumbing, paint and pergola update
It’s been a couple of weeks since our last update as we’ve been waiting on some material to arrive before moving on to more work on the roof assembly. When we last wrote, we had just placed an order with a local mill here on San Juan Island for delivery of the cedar materials for our pergola. They arrived on Wednesday but in the meantime, we took our in between time to catch up on several small jobs we’ve been needing to get to.
First, we finished up some outdoor plumbing, installing water spigots at the rear of the house, rear of the garage, and at the front of the house where the front entry is. We also connected the front porch downspout to the tight line drain system and were able to cover up the area where the lines are buried (they’ve been open since having the backfill brought in around the house, making some of our ladder tasks tricky up front, so this is a welcome change!). Then we installed shut off valves for the water to the house and the outdoor spigots.
We also primed and painted all the decking for our eaves using a nice yellow color from Mythic Paint (www.mythicpaint.com). The color is just as we’d hoped! Nice and rich but not too fiery. We also got all of the eave brackets painted and the red and yellow should look really wonderful together.
Next on the list was to build the carriage doors - both the big double entrance set and the small side door. We opted to build them ourselves and did this from home, which was a nice change of pace because the weather was very hot (for the PNW) when we were doing this work. We got them built and assembled them early this week. Today I did all the priming on them so they are ready to paint in the next couple of days. We transported them to the job site using the very handy free truck rental offered by our local storage unit, Sound Storage of Friday Harbor. That made moving them easy. We also cut the first pieces for building out the jambs and got the hardware ordered for hanging the front carriage doors. They are heavy duty black steel straps (24”) and should look smart against the red trim.
And finally the big delivery of the cedar timbers arrived Wednesday (they are gorgeous!) and today we spent a lot of the day preparing to install them tomorrow. Shawn took measurements for the height of the 8 x 8’s and then cut them to the right size using his track saw and rolling the beams to make the majority of the cuts and then finishing the cuts with a hand saw. Then we installed the post bases. Once they were assembled, we brought them over to their individual pillars. We still have three more to cut and prep for the front entrance, but that will wait for tomorrow. Our next step will be to epoxy the pillars onto their threaded rod which is buried in the concrete footings. There will be a lot of bracing to install as well. Raising the pillars isn’t easy, and probably looks ridiculous, but it’s just doable for the two of us and should look sturdy and substantial once we are finished, unless we drop one on ourselves, in which case we won’t get to enjoy our work. :-)
It should be an exciting couple of weeks of progress coming up. It’s sort of felt like being at a standstill for the last little while, but in order to move on to finishing the roof, we have to get the pergola built as it provides us with built in staging for the high work. Looking forward to seeing it come together in the next little while and moving ahead.
