Week 31 - Permits

This week began with big excitement. I had my final building inspection from the city! I am now through with permits on this particular project. Yeah! There are still several outstanding items that the contractor needs to do. Most are small, but not all of them. There are also many, many things that I need to finish.

A three day stretch of dry weather made it possible for me to finish the carport concrete removal, finally. I debated continuing to try and remove the bulge along the edge in the back corner, but I decided against it. There is nothing really to hit any more since the top is rounded off, and I don't want to remove anything behind the line. I'll just have to bury it.

I also managed to get a picture of me swinging the sledge hammer. Doesn't this look like loads of fun? In any case, unless the weather reverts again, I'm done making gravel for the season, although I still have the patio to do ... next year.

Because I'm done with the concrete for this year, I'm also done building the side yard path, and the flower bed beside it. I still want to put in about 10 more feet of structured path, but that won't happen now until spring. If I have any reasonable stretches of dry weather in the months to come, I will be sifting dirt and filling the hole next to the carport. That gets the highest priority for now.

I also plan to move and/or remove several more plants around the yard and take apart the rest of the carport itself, as opportunities permit. I have found that, in my yard, it takes about three days of dry weather before the dirt is reasonable to work with. We'll see if that happens any more this year. Besides, if the weather is bad, I'd rather be working inside anyway.

Inside I finally got back to as small task that got lost in the shuffle. The transition between the bathroom and hall floors was a slight break since the stone is 1/16" thicker than the wood and because the stone tiles were too uneven along the edge to fit smoothly against the parquet.

What I decided to do in the end was to take up the last row of stone tiles and replace the whole strip with wood which can be fit more accurately to the space.

Once the board was in place, I set the bolt plate into it. The whole thing makes a more definite transition than simply butting the two floors together. If I had it to do over, I'd consider removing two rows of tiles and putting in a full board but I don't have a long enough piece of floor board at the moment to do that.

At the end of the week I also had a final inspection for my City of Portland G-Rated building grant from the Office of Sustainable Development, which I applied for early in the project. So now the whole thing will be profiled by the city.

Week 32 - Flashing & Doors