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Note, I was wondering why nobody brought up the hallway before, for the reasons you mention. The reason for that hallway is two-fold.First, it is to provide a wall against to put the fridge and kitchen counters/upper cabinets. Second, it is to provide a small mud room space upon entering. A place with hooks to hang up jackets, and not have blasts of cold air go into the main areas. Also, for the corner unit of the kitchen corner, I plan on installing under-counter access (shelves) from the *hall* side to store wet boots, hats/gloves, etc. makes good use of under counter space that is usually not well used, at least I think so. I suppose I could do all that without a wall, although there would still be the kitchen counter there, since I switched from a U-kitchen to an L-kitchen. I suppose I could move the fridge to the other end of the counter. I'll give that a try in homestyler.com and see what it looks like.
..........snip First, it is to provide a wall against to put the fridge and kitchen counters/upper cabinets. Second, it is to provide a small mud room space upon entering. A place with hooks to hang up jackets, and not have blasts of cold air go into the main areas. Also, for the corner unit of the kitchen corner, I plan on installing under-counter access (shelves) from the *hall* side to store wet boots, hats/gloves, etc. makes good use of under counter space that is usually not well used, at least I think so............ snip
First, the height of the unbalanced fill towards the back of the full basement is ~6 feet. Squirl has a nice summary of code requirements for block walls here. The cabin location is on the boundary of two soil types, and the engineering properties listed for the soil run the gamut (multiple categories listed), but would put me in either the second or third category (some ML-CL, but also GC and ML). The soil is actually pretty stout. Although I am just at the edge of the extent reached during the Wisconsin glaciation (near the northern tip of the Salamanca reentrant for you geologists out there), the soil is definitely till so it is poorly sorted. Although there is a lot of fine grained stuff, there is also a lot of small to medium size rocks, and some larger grained stuff.Regardless, the code says that if I want to stack 8-inch blocks, I can't go more then 4 feet of unbalanced fill. So the question becomes - am I truly unbalanced? The portions of the wall just to the left of this ~6' "unbalanced" portion are in fact balanced by the wall going across the back of the full basement:Is that enough balance? Is the fact that it rapidly drops to 4' "unbalanced" as it gets away from the wall make a difference? Would filling the voids and/or adding rebar in the voids make a difference? I suspect the answer is "ask an engineer". But other suggested answers/guesses are welcome. I'd really not want to go to 10" or bigger blocks.[/list]
Thanks guys for keeping the thread alive while I went back to the drawing board. Took a while.Where we left off, I was taking Don_P's advice and replacing my 3 x 9-1/4" LVLs with 2 x 11-1/4" LVLs since these also did the trick, but just were taller. That (taller) became less of an issue when I took the advice to not notch the rafters and have them sit on the beams, but attach them to the face. Also, I needed to go from a 10/12 to a 10.5/12 pitch in order to get enough headroom to meet code for 50% of floor space > 5' was also > 7'. This also meant lowering the floor, forcing me to use 2x6 joints @12" oc. So I get a stiff ridge beam but a flexy (but strong enough) loft.And finally, the barge rafters would be supported by vertical 2x6 lookouts rather than extended top plates. And these would just be 2x6's, not 2x12's like the real rafters.This is what I came up with (just noticed I forgot to trim those top plate extensions - ignore those):I also increased the slope of the porch rafters up to 4/12 and increased the size to 2x8's. The dormer will dump onto the porch roof, which is problem discussed starting here. So I may increase the number of rafters below the dormer from 2 to 3. Note, the dormer spans from the ridge beam to the wall, so there is no load on the adjacent common rafters. I haven't shown the dormer sidewall framing here.Both the ridge beam and the rafters are 11-1/4", so there is some stickup above the beam. I understand this is better than the other way around because the rafter is in compression rather than tension under load. That said, it is about the same price to go to a 11-7/8" LVL or to plop a 2x4 on it's side up there. But I will leave some space to allow the venting out the peak.Here's the side and back view:<<SNIP rest of that post>>