The Big Addition: Design and Prep

Last modified: 10/09/2007

Welcome! There are some recent additions in the 'inspiration' area; pictures from Post Ranch in Big Sur.

 

We've been working on this addition project in earnest for more than 2 years, even though we've been thinking about it for 12. It took some time to design. Review: knock down the garage and carport, rebuild it as a 3-car garage with a great room on top; and a little change in the master suite. All with Zero Maintenance materials (more on that later). The master suite change swaps the bathroom and bedroom, and extends the bedroom like a tree house over the back deck. Lots of architecture, structural and soils engineering later, we have a design, by Fuse Architects. The concept and the three main elevations are shown here, as well as a color palette. The propsosed Swisspearl fiber cement siding and the roof are shown against the existing cedar. Inspiration for the bedroom treehouse extension comes from the Post Ranch in Big Sur. Pictures here from September, 2007. This is the root of the triangular tree...

The first work done on site was a survey way back in February, 2005. Then in August, 2006, we had some soils testing done. Some pictures from that day are shown here.

The concept.... East elevation showing the garage doors,... South elevation. Here you can see the... West elevation. The sliding door will... Palette. In natural light, with some... Inspiration: A Post Ranch treehouse in... Inspiration: Inside of the corner of the... Inspiration: Reading nook - we will have... Soils testing: Now THAT is what we... Drill rig in place... They drilled two bores, each about 20... At four foot intervals, they pound a...
   

Getting Ready

Getting ready for construction, we're going to need a place to park. So we ordered up some gravel. 12 yds of it. Moving this by hand would be very painful. Luckily, fire buddy George has a new toy he wants to play with, so he stopped by to help. One tractor, one shovel, one rake, 2 people, 1 hour. Next: the front of the house really needed to be cleaned and stained, so to avoid spraying stain all over a brand new roof later, Andy did this now. Best cedar cleaning product ever: Lovitt's. Amazing stuff. They also have a stain which we have not tried yet. This time, used up some leftover Penofin.

Our onsite storage showed up, and moving the contents of the garage into it was something of a Tetris problem. We started the early demolition, removing the railings from the top of the garage to be reused later.

George actually knows how to use this... Obviously, I have always wanted to do... Which way is up on this thing?!... Man, this is too much fun!... The result of only 45 minutes work. The... Tough picture to take on a bright sunny... Front door area. Cleaning and staining... Rear corner. Yup, Andy does windows,... The cargo container showed up a little... This is what the cargo container looks... The railings start to come down. First,... Then the posts...... One last section.... A little later after the railings are...
  

 
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