Sunday, March 23, 2008

Updated pics

There's not a lot of new things to write about, but I have some more photos to share.

Here is a pic of the 2nd floor of the workshop. Jonah likes to run around the temporary brace in the middle.

More of the main floor framing is complete:
Standing in the great room, looking towards the master suite:

Future home of our bathtub to be enclosed in a sun room:

Future home of the french doors in our master bedroom:
Since we have a lot of family stuff this Easter weekend, I haven't done any work on the house. I have been spending some time designing the sliding door for the shop and making a material list so I can get started on it.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Workshop weathered in (mostly)

On Monday the roofers finished up the shingles on the detached workshop. This provides us a dry place to put some of the extra building materials we received that same day. All that space inside the workshop filled up pretty quickly with windows and interior wood trim. Since this picture was taken, the house wrap has been put on.



The building inspector signed off on the shear wall for the shop, but kindly pointed out that our building permit did not include the shop. Yikes! I went to the county office today and figured out that this was an oversight when they issued the paperwork, and they corrected it on the spot.

All that is left to do on the shop exterior is to put windows, doors, and siding on. Depending on what Rich and George want to do, we may end up waiting to put the siding on at the same time as the main part of the house. On the interior we need to finish the stairs and stair railings, and electrical work.

Even with all the distractions with the shop, progress continues on the house. A bunch more first floor walls have been completed.

Here is a picture looking at the kitchen from the front of the house. There are 3 windows in front of where our sink will go, with 3 clerestory windows that are placed directly above them. We just figured out that the clerestory windows we received are bigger than the ones we had ordered, so we are getting those replaced.


Here is a picture taken from our future great room, looking into the dining room. Past the dining room is the laundry/pantry. Sitting on the floor is a very large beam which was accidentally cut too short. Even the pros make mistakes sometimes. We have a new beam on order and it should arrive in a week.


With the latest delivery, we were expecting to get the trusses for the garage. Unfortunately, due to some miscommunication between vendors, they did not show up. This has been straightened out, and we will get the trusses soon too.

Now that we are getting deeper into the first floor framing, the framers have noticed some slight differences between our house plan and what's actually physically possible. Most of these differences are related to window/door sizes and placement. So far we've been able to come up with ways to deal with these differences, but it makes me nervous on what other types of things we may have missed when proofing our house plan.

Compared to how smoothly the last few weeks have gone, this week seemed to bring a lot of issues to work out. None of them were a huge deal, but it did remind me that there are a lot of things that can and will go wrong. It's all part of the construction .... fun. Yeah, that's the word I'm looking for. Fun.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Electricity, elec-tri-city

We finally have electricity! The power company showed up a little earlier than expected, but we had all the holes and trenches ready by the time they were ready to work. It was a bigger production than I expected with 4 large utility trucks and half a dozen crew members. We have the power going to a temporary pole that we can plug our tools into. It is much nicer to work without that generator running all the time.

The first floor subfloor is done and ready for walls. The location of all the walls have been snapped in chalk so we can see a life-sized blueprint of our first floor. It looks just like we pictured it would. I'm sure it will change as we get the walls framed up, drywalled, etc. We've been extremely happy with the work our framers have been doing. Each contractor that stops by comments on how good the framing looks, and even our building inspector was so impressed he wanted to take pictures of the work.


Rich and George have been busy getting the workshop all framed up so we have a safe and dry place to put our window and interior trim delivery next week. Since this photo was taken, half the roof sheeting has been put on as well. Tomorrow they will finish up the roof sheeting and later this week our roofers will start.