The new garage roof will be a hip, and so we need to build a solid jack rafter to support the hip.  The challenge is that the existing roof is a truss roof and so I'll have to beef up the end truss to be able to support the extra load.

The solution to that is fairly simple: take two of the old trusses and assemble them into a single unit 3 trusses wide!  That'll give us plenty of strength and allow us to re-use a couple of the trusses we're going to remove to make room for the kitchen. To prepare for this, however, requires that we have place to put the trusses and save them.

I didn't want to put them on the ground -- I was going to have a big crew help out removing them, so why not put them in place right away?  To that requires that the garage walls have to be build and tied in with the house.  All that was left of this was to tie in the top plate of the new garage wall to the existing structure.

As you can see in the picture and insets, we jacked up the truss and cut out about 18 inches of the top plate in the old wall.  This allowed us to pound in the new top plate over the old wall and to nail it in place.  This makes ties the new structure into the old one quite nicely, and really adds a lot of strengthy to the new garage walls.  With a little bit of corner bracing we're ready to move the trusses.

The final bit of prep work that had to be done was to finish building the front wall of the new kitchen.  We built a huge saw horse in the yard, and assembled the wall with the bottom place on the kitchen floor and the wall sticking out over the saw horse.  That was quite a site for all the passersby.

We had to build it this way because there isn't enough room in the new kitchen to build the wall.  The front wall of the addition will extend far enough into the existing great room to allow for the new front entrance, which is just under 4 feet wider than the new kitchen.

Tomorrow's the big day: tear down the roof and raise the walls!