The Attic

Our attic has traditionally been pretty awful.

The old coal fireplace leaked nasty sticky oily coal soot all over the place in there, so you always got filthy. It was dark. And with the joists uncovered you were always in peril of falling through the ceiling into one of the bedrooms.

The new attic above the addition is pretty nice, actually. Especially with the roof not fully covered in plywood so there is still quite a bit of light in there.

This weekend the workers left the attic access accessible, so getting in the attic no longer required legs about six inches longer than mine, and we spent some time up there on Friday evening, going through the structural drawings and talking about shear walls and framing. You can see here how low the ceiling is. The attic will be a great place to stow our christmas tree, and not much else.

It's almost a shame we will never have this view again, because there won't be any windows in the attic. Except, you know, not really needing any more space.

This is what had Noel a little puzzled. The shear walls come up from the basement and are continuous to the roof. That really ties the house together so it can behave as one in any seismic activity. He was a little surprised to see walls going in in the attic.

To be honest, in a really big earthquake we are hosed. We all are. But this will be good for a pretty big earthquake and that's about as good as you can hope for. Anything else is going to be more than we can afford.

For those of you who feel like we are tearing the whole house down, we are not. The back of the house needed to be structurally updated, but the entire front is intact and fine. I just generally have not been showing it to you because it has not changed.

posted by ayse on 07/24/16