Headed in the right direction

After months of bumbling about, and doing things the dumbest way possible, I think I am starting in a direct path toward the finish. This project has been marked by me doing incompletely research and not fully understanding what I am doing, but moving forward as best I can, both hoping that everything will work, and expecting for a lot of it to fail.

Today two of my instructors, Liz and Carlton, along with a friend of theirs came over for what was planned as a work day, but ended up being a consultation. Carlton has a lot of experience both building houses and dealing with bueracracy related to building structures, and he gave me an outline of an action plan.

Firstly, I need to really be sure that I am inside of the property by five feet. To do that I need to know exactly where the property line is. To find that out I need a survey. This information may be easy to obtain. Surveys should be on file at the courthouse downtown, so tomorrow I will head down there and see if I can talk the people working there into helping me find the survey of the property where I am building. If this information is not there I am in some trouble. Not big trouble, but I will need to hire someone to survey the property and tell me where the line is, or move the structure to the middle of the yard, or just build it and hope for the best. Seeing where that has put me before, I think my best plan is to find out exactly where the line is.

Once I have the exact location of the line, I can figure out what kind of situation I am in. I feel pretty confident that the side yard fence is on or within a foot of the property line there, but the back of the yard is a mystery. The fence sticks out further then all of the other fences on our street by about two feet, so the property line might be two feet closer then I thought. I don't even have a good guess. When I know, I will be able to evaluate my remodel plan.

Here is how the building looks right now:
If you where looking from above it would look like this:

I plan to keep the four innermost posts where they are, and move their beams forward, centering them over those four posts:
So I will be ditching the left beam, and the five outside posts. Once I have done that, I will put up the joists and the rest of the roofing as I had planned before:
My big concern here is the distance from my back overhang to the property line. When I know where the property line is I am going to have to figure out if my overhang crosses the five foot rule, and then go down to the permit office and ask if that is a violation or not.

My other concern is about the amount of cantilever of the beams and joists and if that is going to be ok. I talked to Carlton about that and he said that he has some books detailing the method of doing those calculations, so I am going to sit down with him this week and see if we cannot work it out.

Carlton also told me that my building is going to need some cross bracing, so I am going to do some research on timber frame construction and come up with some good drawings of my frame with proper support.

I am feeling very good about this. I think I am finally going about things in the right order and maybe the physical progress that is made from here on out will actually be progress instead of work that has to be redone.