It’s been raining here for the last 5+ days. It’s that asinine late winter rain where it rains for half an hour, sunny for half an hour, hail for half an hour…forever and ever it seems. Our framing and shear wall inspection went mostly okay the other day. The inspector wanted us to add some blocking behind some of the seams between siding sheets, which was no big deal.
That’s not to say it was no big deal altogether because there was one bombshell. Even though the plans show the buildings at 4′ of separation and were approved as such, the inspector felt that there was potential for fire to move rapidly from the garage to the outbuilding because the eaves were close.
I wanted to point out that a garage, by nature, has a higher concentration of flammables than probably any other location in the house. Which, of course, means that if it catches fire, with all the accelerants inside, proximity of the eaves will hardly be a concern.
After all of that, the inspector mandated that one of the walls be covered in fire-retardant materials, to at least a 1 hour burn rate. That sound like a problem, but it’s not too bad. It just meant that we needed to cover the siding of the building with something like a cement-based siding or sheetrock the interior of the rear garage wall.
No way in hell was I going to tear off the wood siding we had literally just installed which left me the “alternative” of completely emptying the rear of the garage and slinging insulation and drywall. It took me the better part of 3 hours to get everything out and another 2 hours to get the insulation and drywall up.
Not much more to go, not much money left either…the race is on.
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