By October, the rain had started back up and the water issue came back to the forefront. With good weather scheduled for a weekend, I picked up supplies and started planning for the project. I was figuring that I would just start the prep work of getting things painted and ready to start the replacement.

Word got out to the family and again I had a crew that was ready to work come Saturday morning. What was supposed to be a light weekend turned into a full blown project. Learning from previous mistakes, I was ready for them to show up and we got to work right away painting the new beams and tearing down the old ones.

I still didn’t get enough pictures of the before work and some of the true teardown would be nice, but those aren’t nearly as important as the pictures of the new strucutre. At left you can see my father pointing to the nasty stuff that had collected underneath what was previously supporting the cover on the garage side. Here’s a better picture of the wires sticking out of the wall.

I was quite upset when I saw what was there. Instead of being a good strong support, it was a 2×4 on end and a 2×4 on side that was holding everything to the building. While it took a bit of work to get ride of that, I was planning on something way better.

After all the cross beams were removed, the only thing left was the header for the cover. This was three 2×6 boards nailed together. This was in good shape and left as the base for the new cross beams to be supported on. You can also see the two ladders that we used for removing the cross beams. This really was the way to go. Two people each armed with a reciprocating saw made the cross beams come down quick with one holding while the other cut.