The joists are all in place and repaired. I want to get the facia up and painted this weekend, so I’ve only got three trusses up. I also put studs on the front set to hold the siding.

I biuld a temporary deck ontop of the joists to make working easier. Eventually, the flat decking will go on top of the rafters for the roof decking.

Siding starting to go on.

Here it is. Trimed and painted. Though it looks good from the front, I still have a wall to finish, and a roof with a sunken balcony to install.

OK, time to get started on the carport. Tool and supplies under the carport to be.

As I was working up on the deck, I noticed a soft spot. When I got down I found a broken joist. there was a bad spot in the 2×6. A knot weakened the whole section.

I was too far along to pull it out, so I jacked it back into place and patched it with a brace.

I took off Wednesday to put in the door, and hopefully get the paint up
where the carport will block me. I thought I’d be through with the door
by about 3:00 p.m. or so and finish up the paint. It was 8:45 when I
finally got to a place where I could quit for the night on the door.
Hopefully I can get that little bit of paint up Thursday after work.

With the opening now going to the floor, I had to deal with the hole being
too wide. My door is 36 inches, the window was 42 inches. New studs
go in on one side.

As with everything I’ve done on this dad gum wall, there was electrical
work to do. I had two outlets in the wall under the window. Of course
they were on different breakers. One of them was supplied by a wire
that just ran through the wall, then along the outside of the house.
Obviously I was going to fix that, but that meant a trip under the house
again.

Since we’re going to put a carport here, we decided to replace this window with a door.

I finally got the hole pached. Now for the paint.

I’ve learned to despise the phrase, “Might as well” as in, “while the wall is open we Might as well”
There was a live wire going to an outlet in the bedroom that had been just run up the outside wall. It was caulked into a seam in the siding and painted. I figured that while I had the darn wall open, I might as well fix that. I put an extra outlet in the living room downstairs, behind the entertainemnt center, and another one in the bedroom. I also ran some cat-5 (computer wire) through the wall down under the house.

We had some insurance money left over from the hail damage, so we decided to pour a slab at the side of the house and put a carport on it.
I could afford the concrete, but not the labor, so I supplied that my self. I tore down an old chimney that was pulling away from the house. The top had been knocked off of it years before we bought the place when a previous owner put a new roof on it. They just knocked off the top, then roofed over the hole. Unfortunately, that was decades after it started leaking. More on that in the chimney topic.
I built the forms and used old brick from the chimney to back-fill and reduce the amount of cement I’d need. Then the truck showed up and I floated 6 cubic yards into a 17.5 x 24 foot form myself.

The old chimney was falling away from the house. It had been knocked off and roofed over before we bought the house, but there was enough of a gap between the top of the chimney and the soffit for pigeons to nest. This space was right outside my bedroom window and those noisy, flying, feathered, leaky bags of poop were really getting to be a nuisance. I’d been needing to yank this thing down since we bought the place.
I knocked it down and discovered that the studs next to it were so rotten that I couldn’t nail the patch pieces to them. I had to go over to the next stud. Toward the top, the inside wall boards were so rotten that I couldn’t get the replacemeent stup to stay. I had to use cross braces and shim out the new stud.

It’s taking away from my bike time, but we decided to start working on the house.