Alright, an example. Forgive my verbosity. The DIYers among you will probably appreciate and/or recognize the details here:Our house has a screened-in back porch that is roughly 12' x 20', which was haphazardly constructed by a previous homeowner. It's not particularly attractive, it leaks in a hard rain, and it obscures a lot of natural light that would otherwise get into the house. So we decided this winter, we'd like to tear it down.
Here are the "before" photosThe plan was to rebuild something in its place with a much higher ceiling, and use translucent roof panels to permit lots of natural light. We settled on a gable style design which matches the existing 3/12 pitch of the main roof behind it.
Here are some concept renders -- now,
don't worry, the engineer-y and structural folks among you will recognize that these spans are way too long for such wimpy framing and we will probably need proper trusses on the front and rear gable walls. Don't worry, this is not a framing plan, just a concept drawing. We'll probably end up with glulam beams and slightly shorter spans. There's an architect in the family -- we'll handle this.
The demolition involved here
also included pulling up some cruddy ceramic tile that the previous owner installed inside the porch, as well as some natural stone that was crudely cemented all around the left and right sides of the porch. And hey, while we had a demolition hammer rented ... we really ought to go ahead and break up
all the cruddy stone-n-concrete that wraps around half of our house's perimeter.
^^This may sound like scope creep, but we knew we needed to do this for a while. Might as well get our money's-worth for the $65 to rent that demolition hammer from Home Depot.
So we did the demolition. It was a huge day of work, and then another day to get all the debris loaded into a dumpster. Luckily many of the above-ground materials (siding, dimensional lumber, sheet roofing) were able to be passed along via CraigsList >> Free Stuff. Yay for less waste!
We ALSO knew that our yard has some site-drainage issues that we need to correct sooner or later. Some of this stone and concrete that we broke up was helping hold back some surface water from draining toward our foundation -- so we needed to fix that now in a more complete way, e.g. by installing catch basins and rigid pipes, and/or french drain, and/or dry wells, etc.
And that ^^ has now become a whole project of its own. I've spent the last 2-3 weeks researching endlessly about how to do
good drainage. The litany of considerations is long: which drainage situations suit a dry well vs a french drain vs rigid pipe; how to properly slope any sort of in-ground pipe; discovering that I don't have adequate hand tools for digging down 24 or 36", so now it's time to get a decent spade and mattock; and THEN, where to lay out our drain pipes and basins so as not to get in the way of the concrete footings that will eventually hold up our new porch roof!
Eventually I just went to Lowe's and over-bought a bunch of pipe, fittings, basins, and so on -- in the common approach where I will just make returns later.
This week, finally with much of the research phase behind me, I dug a ~24' trench this past week, which utilized two catch basins, one length of rigid pipe, one length of pre-fab french drain, one DIY dry well made from a trash can, and a lot of landscape fabric, stone, and gravel. At this point, we still have a LOT of trenching and pipe-laying left to go. Although, some of that will be much easier, because we will be pulling up some existing flex-drain pipe (see prior photos) and replacing with rigid pipe that has proper slope. So there's an existing trench to utilize there. But it's still going to be a butt-load of work, with something like 80 or 100 more linear feet to get done.
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And all this is happening before we can commence REAL design / build work on the new porch roof!
So, there are a few lessons and concerns in here, and I am happy to hear thoughts / corrections on any of them:
- Scope creep is a real thing and all-too-easy for home projects. In this case, I was prepared for the enormity of this project and its multifarious nature. My wife was, I think, less prepared, and tends to have less tolerance for the jungle of variables that emerged here. But, we need to be wary of scope creep in the future, and accordingly plan MUCH longer timelines than we might initially expect.
Expectation-setting is key. - More importantly, I am curious at which point (if any) you all might have decided to postpone, re-scope, or outsource part of this project. I will say, I have mostly enjoyed the work so far. But the PROBLEM is that I will not always have the bandwidth to allow a project like this take over all of my waking thoughts for multiple weeks at a time. At this point I feel like I've had drainage-on-the-brain for most of December! This is the issue with "mental load" that I brought up in the thread title. I am a knowledge worker and I will need to get back to work soon -- actually I'm going to code-school in the spring so I will be intensively using my brain for the foreseeable future. This creates an issue of capacity -- I want to do DIY projects like this, for all the Mustachian reasons we know,
but at times there just won't be room in my head for such a thing.
^^ Of these, item #2 really is the heart of the concern for me.
What do you guys think?