Adrian de-Berkley's the Groshlet-lite

This is not a Grosh, it’s not really a Grosh-lite nor a Groshlet. Maybe a Groshlet-lite.

So, why aren’t’ I working on my project car? Well life mainly, but this is also an issue. We have a rental we bought last year that our daughter has been living in up until now, but we will soon be renting out. It’s got a car port on there that some dipsh!t had extended in the past. Here is a sketch of the issue.

You can sort of see the issue here from an upstairs window.

So some knuckle head had extended it from 8' to 12' by adding on 4'. They put up a couple of new supports and extended the Joists by 4's with some 4' long doublers joining the old Joists to the new joists. But they hadn't removed the old header beam/rail. Now the original header was made up of four, yes four 2x8's with two 1x8's in the middle. It weighed hundreds and hundreds of lb.’s on its own and was pulling down on the joint totally unsupported. Guess what? It sagged, really really sagged. There isn’t much pitch on the roof to start with, but the ‘extension’ was now totally flat so pooled with water, snow, ice etc. The water then ran under the shingles and totally rotted out the roof boards and was doing a good job on the joists and pieced together overkill beam. It was a total mess. By the time I started teardown the roof board OSB was falling to pieces, you could stick a finger through it! Surprisingly the OSB on the original roof was fine, just the extension was totally rotted. Perhaps due to the saggingit had a greater pitch.

So I’ve got two long full days into this now with a good friend and helper.

You can clearly see the gray area where water has been standing, even the joint from the old to the new is clearly visible.

Let’s start with the tear down.

Get the old rotten OSB and shingles off first

Note the ugly fence to next door. That place has been purchased by investors/flippers and they are flat out re-habbing the place. The old siding has gone in this pic. I talked to them, they will be asking a price when finished that makes me very very happy for the value of the neighborhood.

You can see the E36 M3ty extension to the joists and the totally OTT original and damn heavy header beam here

Rotten roof hitting the deck

Starting to peel apart the old header beam to remove it.

Older OTT Header on the left (with zero vertical support, so pulling the whole thing down), added one on the right.

This is the top of one of the added vertical supports on the extension. Note the precession cut!

Yeah, things were going a bit rotten with standing water on top!

Both beams out. Now to start trimming

Folks, don't use your head to remove nails, claw hammers are a lot more effective

Situation at end of the first day with roof jacks and temporary beams to support it all.

Adrian_Thompson wrote: Folks, don't use your head to remove nails, claw hammers are a lot more effective

This NEEDS to be your new avatar pic.

Day two (Two weeks later)

Didn't take as many pics. I forgot to mention that other than the first and last vertical support on the extension, there were two other smaller ones, irregularly spaced sitting on a 2x4 that was lying on the (not very even concrete) ground. This was replaced by pressure treated 4x4 set on leveled concrete with lag bolts. You can see this in the pic.

Over that is the new header we made. Doubled up 2x8's with the joints overlapped. One end supported on a ladder. Lift the other end and temporarily attach with a plate to the old vertical, then rinse repeat at the other end. The we added three new 2x6 supports equally spaced along the span.

Then it was time to start on the roof joists. Instead of having short extensions with short overlapping pieces like the old hack job, we put in new full length joists that double up with the old ones over their full length but are 48" longer and sit on top of the new beam. We got half way through before we were too tired to carry on. Note. These are just sitting on top right now, I need to go back and fasten them to the beam when done.

Eagle eyed observers may note that in addition to the three new 4x6 supports, there are also two 2x4's one at each end. We attached these to the face of the two good supports at each end (6x6 one end 4x6 the other)the new beam sits on top of these in compression and is also ties with plates/straps to the outside faces of the old supports. Only a small strap is shown in the pics. THAT IS NOT FINISHED!

We are out of town next weekend so it will be two weeks before I carry on.

It's a pain to get the new joists in as we constantly have to move the supports we have under the old/short joists. for each new joist we have to:
1. put a support under the joist we will be working on.
2. Move the temporary beam and supports back from that one joist.
3. Put the joist in position and mark the end to be able to cut it to length.
4. Partially remove the new joist and support so I can cut the end to the exact length.
5. Reinstall the joist and run home the 10 screws holding it to the old joist (pilots all pre-drilled)

there's even more to it than that as one person (me) is up a step ladder at the end while my helper is moving his platform in and out to reach different points on the joist as it's going it.

We were happy to get half way done before packing up for the day.

Nice work.

Wonder what the thought process was that decided to leave the old header beam in place?

Looking good. By now your probably wondering why you didn't just tear it all down and start over. Is the green awning somehow into the lean-to?

crewperson wrote: Looking good. By now your probably wondering why you didn't just tear it all down and start over. Is the green awning somehow into the lean-to?

If it wasn't attached to the house we would have done. But I didn't want to berkley with the attachment to the house and need to disturb the siding. What I haven't mentioned yet is that it's also been extended length wise, again poorly and I have to re-do some of that too!

No attachment to the green awning, about 6" gap, I need to clean that and re-paint it too.

NOHOME wrote: Nice work. Wonder what the thought process was that decided to leave the old header beam in place?

Single digit IQ is the only reason I've come up with so far.

Should be glad at this point that he didn't try to make it taller too.

I had to click on this thread just to figure out where your new avatar came from. I'm pretty sure that heads like bleeding more than they like thinking.

It is incredible how much you bleed from even the smallest of head wounds.

Well its been a few weeks, but we went back and finished the de-construction of another useless joist and added the rest of the new joists.

YOu can see the useless joist in this pic. See the light colored one that looks new but stops short? Well what you can see is that it's 4, yes four, 6x8's joined together for no particular purpose except added weight hanging in the middle of nowhere. I really do wonder WTF the previous people working on this thing were thinking.

We also raised the one support beam on the back corner and added another right at the corner so it wasn't hanging in space. We raised this corner nearly 2" so now the 'peak' is level all the way across rather than 'sagging' once not supported by the house.

Someone mentioned up thread that it would have been easier to tear it down completely and start over, I now agree with them.

But, it's ready for roofing in a couple of weeks time, next week is the dream cruise.

So why did it take so long to get back to the carport? Well we built a planter / retaining wall in the mean time.

Laying out the path of the wall and digging the foundation trench

Add weedstop, 2" of crushed stone and 2" of sand. YEs, we changed the layout from the first pic.

Starting the leveling process. I was really really please with how close I got to level by eye across the whole thing, within about 1/2" by eye.

Started at the wrong end!

Basically done except the cap stones.

The place is going to look so so much better for renting it out.

So why haven't I put the cap stones on? Well this is a story of monumental stupidity on Home Depots behalf. I while ago we ordered a lot of stone and an outdoor fire place for our own house. We told them the three sizes of stone we wanted for the layout. The deliver it and we check. They had ordered the wrong thickness of one of the types of stone, so two of the sizes were 2" thick and the third size was 4" thick. We got them to take that back, but we haven't had a chance to work on our own house due to the work on the rental.

So, we order the blocks and cap stones for the planter. We specifically give them my wife’s cell # to call when they would be delivering so she could meet them, and had written on the order 'Place on grace, not drive'. Well despite having my wife’s cell they call our house before delivery, where of course no one was home, then they deliver them to the driveway, not the lawn as told to. So we call them back and they move them.

We then build the wall and go to put on the cap stones and find they've delivered the wrong color. So we call, complain and arrange for the correct color to be replace the wrong stuff. Guess what? Again, they call the house, even though we've asked them to remove that number as we're not normally home so my wife doesn't know they are coming. Then they not only deliver a pallet of the wrong color again, but even better they deliver it to the wrong house. They drop it at our house not the rental. Now, normally when you replace something you take the old one back correct? Well the stuff to be taken away isn't at our house! so what do they do? They take the berkeleying fire pit we haven't had a chance to install yet. Yup, that makes total sense, replace cap stones and remove a fire pit. So, more bitching on the phone and they re-deliver the fire pit, but guess what, they still have the wrong color cap stone at the wrong house.

We are still trying to resolve this. This is a level of incompetence that if you wrote it into a sitcom people would reject as being too far removed from reality.

I love Home Depot, but for stone like that, I'd probably go to a locally owned place. Looks nice though!

It looks like the same type of people built the original lean to that build the original Grosh. Watching you work around their bad work makes me even happier that I tore down the whole building first.
Have you considered steel for lean to roofing? Goes on quick and the snow slides off easier, especially with a gentle pitch like that. Probably more expensive and it IS a rental, so........
Nice work though.