Matt and I have plotted building a patio cover/shade over the backyard couch for a long time. The thing most lacking in the backyard when people come over is some substantial shade. We usually huddle around the dining table umbrella or the kids area umbrella but living in the valley means we need some serious shade if we intend to spend any amount of time out there. And being as we're in a pandemic and spending a lot of time at home, improvement projects are actually valuable. We thought about just sinking some simple posts and putting up a sail shade like the pic below but Matt said if we're gonna do it, let's do it with a more permanent solution.
As I mentioned in this post the patio cover that was most inspiring to me was this one below. And I looked at a ton of iterations of patio covers on pinterest. I sent it to Matt's dad and our tenant Eric and both were excited to have a project and signed onboard to be genius and labor.
Over the course of the past few weeks Matt, his dad, and Eric have been planning it, talking about it, and starting it. Eric is nothing short of a genius and not only made a 3D model of the proposed plan but it had a sun path on it that showed what the sun would be under the cover during different times of the year. We all figure that it's not just the Fredrich backyard but all of ours, theirs too. On June 5, Matt and his dad dug holes for the posts and set them in concrete with brackets to hold the poles in place.
They had to go back to Lowe's to get more concrete bags when the 3 they had turned out to be not enough. Always estimate at least 3 trips to Lowe's more than you think!
In our discussions about the structure, Eric made some good points about my original idea. One of which was if we have a metal roof, it'll be hotter underneath than we want it to be and suggested having a layer of wood between us and the metal which we were down with. We were going to get some sort of either drywall or plywood and I had the idea when I saw this to do... shiplap.
Matt and Eric went to Lowe's and ordered the material and hand selected each piece and waited another week until June 15 for it to be delivered and then it turned out to be wrong since the ceiling material they had chosen and put on a cart, the pine planks, had been snatched from customers or someone and didn't make it to our house. Matt had to make another trip to Lowe's to talk to the manager about that and figure out a backup plan.
Since it's almost 19 feet wide we went with three poles and two posts in between them.
They put up a large ledger board along the house that we'd be running the joists from (I learned a lot of construction terms in this journey).
By the time the sun set we had one ledger board, two fascia boards, three posts, and 10 joists equaled the main structure.
The following day Matt's dad was going to come over to start the ceiling and roof and I had a moment of panic. If I intended to paint that ceiling white, I had better do it as the planks were on the ground before the roofing because after that it would be darn near impossible to get it done easily or accurately. I'd be working with little gaps and it would take forever.
We decided to postpone the roofing and take a day to figure out what the ceiling plan would be and do it right... to be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment