22  Beam me up, Scotty

April 2025

*In for a penny, in for a pound.” –old English idiom

After our last meeting, we met with Anne Droudt, our architect, to get her take on the lack of ridge beam. As it turns out, she had already consulted with Corey, our structural engineer, by phone and gotten his take. Anne knows that I was ambivilent about the shed dormer originally, so she does think we could get by without it or with a smaller dormer. However, she also thinks we’d miss out on her vision of what could be a show-stopping primary bedroom.

The real issue here, of course, is that we have no real idea of how much it will cost to shore up the roof with a ridge beam. We can’t get a cost estimate unless we open up the far wall to look at the structure there, and once we do that, the building code would require us to do whatever it takes to bring the roof up to code. In essence, the rule seems to be, “If you touch it, you’ve bought it.”

Given the financial engineering we’ve done for this project, I’m not terribly concerned if adding the ridge beam adds tens of thousands to the project. I am concerned if it adds hundreds of thousands. As I said to Anne, I don’t want to end up asking the question, “Well, how do we like our quarter-million dollar dormer?”

While Anne is circumspect about how much time and money the ridge beam will require, she does give us confidence that in the grand scheme of problems encountered during renovations, this one isn’t a show-stopper. With that encouragement, we circle back with Kris and Heather and tell them to move forward with the addition of the ridge beam.

Meanwhile, Carolyn and I have been looking at the materials being planned for replacing our 1,100 square feet of deck around the house. While we loved our mahogany deck up until this point, it has become a maintenance headache. We’ve decided to go with Trex, a synthetic decking, to avoid having to constantly clean, sand, and re-stain the deck. And while you may think the composite Trex material would be cheaper, the cost is really a wash over time. We’ve chosen the color Biscane for our Trex decking, which is a lighter shade than the mahogany, which should help keep the deck cooler those sunny, hot days.

We’re also going to put all new railings up for the rebuilt deck. I’m in favor of installing cable railings that allow us to see through the rails, but we’ve been warned those are expensive. That said, given that we’re already expanding the budget for the ridge beam to support the shed dormer, I figure we might as well go with the more attractive cable railings. As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound.