Building a Raft: Part Two

Maybe we should call this "partially rebuilding the raft we built last night," because we came out this morning and realized that we'd used nails instead of screws on a part of the deck where we really need screws, so Noel spent most of our functional working time today pulling out nails and replacing them with screws.

In particular we needed to have them on the ties that attach the raft to the beams, because at some point in the future we will need to replace the water tank, and to do that we will want to be able to jack up the whole deck surface.

As it happens, the screws go a lot faster than hand-nailing each individual nail in the connectors.

And considerably faster than pulling out a few dozen small nails by hand. Because about the time we'd gotten all the joists we had screwed down to the beam and replaced the nails we'd done with screws, we noticed that we'd attached the wrong piece of wood to one end of the joists, so we had to back that out and put the right piece in, as well.

The rest of the work time we had was spent figuring out just how big to frame the opening for the water tank lid.

We're going to frame an opening and make a small hatch so we an get into the top of the tank, should that be necessary. We also know that our deck width does not divide evenly by 16 inches (the joists are spaced 16 inches on center), so we thought we might be able to lose that small weird joist bay in the framing around the tank. And it works out very well indeed.

You can see in this picture that we used some blocks for between the joists to measure out our bays from the other side of the deck, so the last bays will all be even. Then we placed the joists roughly in the opening to see where they would fall, mostly to accommodate my lack of good stereo vision which makes lining things up by eye difficult.

It works out just about perfectly, almost as if we had planned it carefully to fit that way. I should note that the location of the tank is largely random, though we knew it needed to be a certain distance from the house and oriented so the two plumbed openings were facing the house. Other than that it would be been perfectly possible for the tank to be eight inches to the left in this photo and thus not nearly as neatly lined up.

Luck was with us there, at least, even if we totally messed up the carpentry last night. But then Noel had to take off up North to play music, and I had some other projects I needed to work on, so that was as far as we got today.

posted by ayse on 04/08/12