The Miserable Structural Inspection

You may be asking youself: "Self, why is the structural inspection done so far after the structure has been completed?"

That's a really good question. It turns out that plumbers have a tendancy to be saw happy. They'll quite gleefully cut through structural support beams without a second thought, to make room for drain pipes, or water service pipes.

And, you see, when structural members have their support threatened by being reduced from 12 inches wide to only 5 inches wide, well, they have a tendenacy to lose their vaunted support.

See, the inspector has to deal with all of this. They need to come through AFTER all the ... modifications have been made to the structural system. That way, they can run their practiced eye over said structure and make an educated guess as to whether said structure is supportful or whether it's possible to huff-n-puff-n-blow-your-house-down.

Our house. See, our house, it's not quite huff-n-puff-n-blow-your-house-down, but neither is our house safe-n-sound. Here's a quick overview of what's up (but might be coming down):

The explicit pain of failure

303.3 Venting

We knew we needed to connect the bathroom vents to the outside, we just hadn't done it before the structural inspection. We didn't realize that they would be inspecting that as well. As you can see from this picture, we've fixed that problem. The ducting wasn't that difficult, although, we did have to box out around it in order to make it easy to run. This won't look weird, however, because it's right next to a header, which will be "hanging down" from the ceiling anyway, once we drywall. The vent upstairs is much easier, as we can just run it up into the attic and vent it out through the soffit at the roofline.

502.3 Porch Girder

This came as a surprise. As it turns out, we had no clue that we were going to have to double the girder around the porch. The rationale is that they're afraid the single girder will droop in the middle, between the concrete piers and the wooden posts. There's roughly 8 feet of space between each wooden post/concrete pier. By doubling the girder, we're adding support to those parts which are 4 foot from either post/pier. Or at least, that's the theory. On the other hand, by placing the double girder, we've made a nice little place to which we can nail lattice work. We're going to run lattice work underneath of the porch girder, over top of the concrete piers.

502.4 Garage Ceiling

We have no picturs for this. Basically, we needed to install joist hangers on the headers which formed the bottom of the stairs in the room over the garage. A Joist Hanger is a U shaped piece of metal that fits at the T junction where two boards meet perpendicular to one another. You fit it up tight and pound some nails through it into both boards. It basically provides support at the joint where the two boards meet.

502.6 Ceiling under Tub

Those $*%# plumbers notched one of our ceiling joists too much. We're using 12 inch ceiling joists and they cut about 7 inches out of one of them in order to fit the plumbing for our whirlpool tub. This particular joist, as it turns out is a 2x12, so we've still got 5 inches of wood. Plus, where the notch is cut is sitting DIRECTLY over a header created out of 2x12s. It's supported. It's way supported.

602.6 Dormer Window

The header in our dormer window needed to be doubled. Needless to say, it didn't quite look like it does in the picture. The picture is just the best one I could find of the dormer header.

602.7 Fire Stopping

sigh. If I had realized that every single hole in any wall that penetrates above or below the wall had to be filled with fire prevention material, I wouldn't have been so cavalier about drilling so many holes when we were running all of our wires. The fire prevention material is used in case of a fire. See, the fire can "run through" the holes that are drilled in walls. We want there to be a fire break between every floor. That way, if a fire breaks out on the first floor, there's at least a small chance it won't make it to the second floor. Every hole in every wall that connects to the floor of the second floor is just one more way of a fire getting up to the second floor. So, all those holes need to be stuffed with prevention material. It's like caulk. Red caulk. In and around every hole.

802.10 Porch Header

This was a serious pain to fix. See, unlike most of the other things, this problem was with something exterior. You know, where people (meaning us) would actually see things. We had decided upon a look for our house a long time ago. We built the porch between October and January. It's been shingled and vinyl sided and we had just begun to make progress on providing a ceiling for the porch roof. Our house was starting to really look like a house, from the outside.

See, to do what we needed to do, we really should have anticipated this back when we began. Now, to make the fix, it's going to effect the way our porch looks. I hate it when good dreams go bad.

So, you can see what it looks like mostly finished. You can see where the board needs to be doubled. You can see that it looks like it's going to be a tight fit.

But, it's not. Not really. The angle of the picture is poor. If you could view it head on, you would see that there's about 5 inches of space in between the outer board (the facia board) and our inner board (the header). What's really the problem is that all of the roof rafters need to be cut back in order to fit the doubled board.

See, roof rafters have a notch cut into the end. That allows them to rest upon (and be anchored to) the header. In order to fit another header board up there, the rafters need to have their notches cut out to be wider than they currently are. That will allow them to fit the doubled header board.

Only, the rafters on the front of the house will be too short we cut the notch wider. The rafters might break on the ends (where that facia board is connected) if we cut the notch wider. The rafter wouldn't be able to support the facia board because there would be enough strenght in the thin sliver of the newly cut roof rafter.

So, in order to fix the problems, we realized that we've can't place the board as high as we would like, so that it would be hidden, out of view. We can't do that. Not on the front. Now, we've got hang a board lower on the header and change the look of the house.

802.12 Rafter-Top Plate Connectors

A rafter-top plate connector is a hurricane strap. We think. Regardless, that's what we installed.

A Hurricane strap is an angled piece of metal which is connected to a rafter and the top place of your ceiling. It's an additional (and necessary) method of attaching the rafter to the top plate. Basically it's used to hold your roof onto your ceiling/house frame. Without these, the roof would have the tendancy to separate from your house.

802.2 Stairwell Ceiling