Open the French Doors, Even When it is Raining!

Often in Maine a rain shower will cool off the outdoors when it is really hot out. Those are the days that you want to open your house up and let the nice breeze flow through your home, however if you don't have an overhanging roof above windows and doors, the rain will invade your house. A few years ago my husband and I decided to replace our sliding door with a french door and I also wanted to have an overhang so that I could open up both doors and let the fresh air in any time that I wanted. We enlisted my father for this project. He has built additions onto houses and knew what we would need to do in order to make the overhang structurally sound.

This is what we started out with.

We started off with making the supports for the two rafters that we would later construct. We used 4x4 pressure treated lumber and created a right angle triangle with lag bolts that tied each piece to each other and to our house.

Next we cut into our siding to build the rafter that would be attached to the house. This piece did not need the middle support piece because this was also lag bolted to the home. It was not going anywhere. We used metal plates to attach the pieces of the rafter to each other.

Almost completed!

We then built two more rafters using 2x6 pressure treated lumber and metal plates on both sides of the rafters to attach each piece to each other. Plus we used nails in a few places. This looks like a quick project, but this took us all weekend. You need to make sure to get all of the angles correct. After the two rafters were hoisted onto the support, we hooked them into the support with screws and attached strapping with nails to tie the whole thing together. At this point I should have stained first, but instead we screwed the clear roofing material to the strapping. It made my job much harder when I stained the wood.

The following weekend we switched out the sliding door for french doors. We also purchased
screen doors that roll out and connect with magnets. It is really nice because it tucks the
screens away from damage during harsh weather.

I love how this project adds some much needed angles to the home and breaks up the blandness of the back of the house.
Not only did this project enhance the function of the home, but it also made it more ascetically pleasing.

Thrifty can be Beautiful; Only $313 for a Guard Rail System Surrounding an Open Stairway!

During the past 18 years my husband and I have taken on various home improvement projects. With our first home, we were living on one school teacher's salary except when I had to take a part-time job in order to afford a new water pump for our well. Therefore our budget was extremely tight. The first home we bought was a foreclosure that was quite inexpensive. Our monthly mortgage payment on our first home ended up being less than we were paying rent on an apartment.

Because of our home improvement experiences from the last 18 years we have learned how to make beautiful homes on a tight budget. On this blog I plan to write articles that will hopefully inspire you to be creative while spending less. I will share with you a variety of projects from all three of my homes and hopefully future homes.

Before

For my first article I am going to share with you the second project my husband and I did at the new camp that my husband and I purchased this winter, a sturdy and gorgeous guard rail system. When we bought the camp the guard rail was unsafe and very typical looking. (You will soon find out that I am far from typical and like to think outside the box.) This had to be our second project to make the upstairs safe for visitors. Our first project was heat. I will share that project with you in a later article.

Before

The pictures to the left are what we started with. As you can see, there is a support bar across one side to the other. However, the bar really did nothing to keep the guard rail together. Also there were 3 lag bolts and 3 long screws in one of the posts because it had come loose and the old owners tried to fix it. The whole system would shake very easily and I would have never dared to lean against it.

After getting a little advice and doing some research on-line we decided that we needed to get down to the joists, or in our case the trusses, in order to make the support posts sturdy. So we began demolition and cutting into the floor. To find the first placement for a support we took out the subfloor. That took a very very long time! For the other two posts that would be connecting into the trusses from below we decided to make a hole in the ceiling downstairs in order to figure out where to cut a square opening for the post to fit down through and line up with a truss.

Did you notice how bundled up we were? All we had was a space heater. We started off with no water or furnace.

After demolition and creating holes for three of the eight posts, we were ready to begin the construction phase of the project. We fit the posts into the holes and took measurements. We used 4X4 posts. Some were hemlock and some were pine.

We secured the posts to the trusses. This is a picture of the post that we went down through the floor. The other two we worked in the ceiling from downstairs but did a similar process of shoring the posts up with brackets.






Then we started building the support system for the posts that were not going to be attached to the trusses from below. We used special bolts that are supposed to be way stronger than lag bolts, but I don't remember what they are called. One of the employees at Lowe's told us about them. We also used them to attach the bottom 2x4s down through the subfloor and hopefully into the support underneath. The box costs around $20, but we didn't use them all and have used the leftovers on other projects.

We then worked on assembling, sanding, and staining the base part of the system. 2x4s became the top railing spanning across the two center posts and attached to the two anchor posts. I mixed Early American Minwax with Ebony Minwax to get my desired stain color.

Once we had the base set, we started cutting the electrical conduit that would be the spindles for our guard rail system. You may ask why electrical conduit? I originally wanted to use steel cables, but that was looking to be an expensive option. I like the look of wood and steel together. I was walking around Lowe's and discovered that electrical conduit is $2.30 for each 10' strip. Wow! So, to save a lot of money we used the electrical conduit. It gives the guard rail system a slight "Industrial Look". 

We cut the conduit with pipe cutters until a generous neighbor lent us his electric saw that, as he said, "will cut right through the pipes like butter". He was correct. Once all of the 2x3s were stained and the conduit cut (we could get 3 spindles from each strip) we moved on to the last part of assembly. We cut two 2x3s to fit in at the top and bottom of each section between posts. Then lined them up and figured out where we would want the spindles. We marked where we wanted the holes and drilled the holes the size of the diameter of a spindle and the depth that we needed. We put the spindles in the bottom 2x3 first and then put the top section on and worked our way from one end to the other trying to make sure that each spindle made it's way into the top and the bottom 2x3 holes. We then used a rubber mallet to get the spindles in tightly.

We tested a 2x3/conduit section to see how well it would fit.

I love how the stain captured the grain of the wood!

We used L brackets underneath to attach the bottom 2x3s and went down
 through the top railing with trim screws to attach the top 2x3s. We pre-drilled
the holes in order to not split the 2x3s.

My daughter helped us one day. At this point we had a gas stove and no longer
needed our "Mr. Buddy" space heater.

My husband and I are really proud of how this project turned out. We have
gotten a lot of compliments from the many people who have been to
our camp so far. It is so nice to see a vision become a beautiful reality!

The finished product!