Balcony

Construction of the balcony started yesterday morning, and progress throughout the day was excellent. A wall-plate went on first, onto which were attached numerous joist hangers (not my favourite thing, but essential, apparently, to meet building-regs. To digress for a minute, the traditional method of half notching both the wall plate and the joist would demand timbers twice as deep). Anyway, the joists fit in the joist hangers perpendicular to the wall plate, with the other end resting atop a double plate setup bolted to the vertical posts. The posts are either concreted into the ground (at least they will be) or sit in met-posts that will be bolted to the concrete foundations that were put in at the beginning of the project (the part that the stone arches were going to be built off of).

The balcony extends beyond the end of the house, with a walk-way leading to the front.

As I say, progress was good, but this morning, in daylight, when Jan and I took a more detailed look, we were a little disappointed in a few aspects. Firstly, the walkway around the side looked too narrow, and also has a distinct kink in it because the final post does not line up with the others :

Secondly, the spacing of the front support posts was all wrong. The posts are supposed to be positioned to give a free field of view directly in front of the two pairs of double doors. This had been achieved, but the alignment was not particularly good and, critically, the size of the two gaps differed by 6".

It appeared to be a simple lack of attention to detail, and all problems have been resolved during the course of today. At least I think they have. I will be out again at first light tomorrow with my tape measure !

These remaining two pictures come from this morning, so things are a little more advanced by now. You can see the cantilevered overhang section starting to take shape :


The narrowness of the walkway has been solved by moving the vertical posts from being fixed to the inner face of the outer joist (as shown above), to it's outer face. This means that they will not impose on the deck-boards at all, and will probably be more visually appealing from the outside too. It adds about 6" to the width, increasing from 30" to 36".