oh yeah, construction...

so yeah, construction. we declared an end to major combat operations on the porch a month ago, but we've been working and tearing things up since then. in the last couple of weeks, we've put in 4 windows. day before yesterday we put in two doors and a bunch of giant beams. i started building the floor.

as expected, nothing about the floor has gone as expected. so we're right on target, right? this will require pictures to properly convey the complexity of the problem. let's toss out some numbers just for fun. the porch is about 37' long by 9' wide. the floor slopes down slightly away from the house about 1.5" in three directions. the floor must be:
1) level
2) strong enough that we don't fall through it
3) fairly even
4) not too high off the ground; we've already installed doors.

so the way we do the floor is to bolt 2x(something) lumber to the concrete, level it, put flooring on top. the primary, strong attachment points are called drop-in anchors; secondary shim-and-pin points are attached by tapcon concrete screws. stringers run every 15" or so (<=16"), and shim points need to be about the same. each point must be leveled to its 4 neighboring points. so in physics land, we call this a problem with MANY degrees of freedom.