Overdue Update

Since the last update, we've made a lot of progress thanks to all the wonderful help we've had. We made the framing for the soffit details, put up tyvek (the Fairbanks siding of choice), stained all the tongue-and-groove for the ceiling, wired the ceiling, installed much of the vapor barrier on the ceiling, installed a chimney support, put up a lot of the stained tongue and groove, blew in some of the cellulose insulation, burned off some cellulite while doing that, did some long overdue site cleanup and tool organization, fixed the muffler on the truck,

What's next? Check our calendar lower on the page. A few highlights: Several pieces of work we're contracting out happen. August first the roofers come, a week after the plumbing is roughed-in, then we finish insulating, then do wiring, then the drywallers come, and with luck by mid-september we'll have the radiant floor poured and get heat installed.


Mom hauled 1800 pounds of 2x4s. Twice. Then she carried 200 pieces of tongue and groove.


First several courses of wood ceiling tongue and groove.


Early winter? No, I'm covered in cellulose insulation.


Ciao Italia!

Thank you

We have been so busy and tired that we forget sometimes to stop and thank all those who have offered help, advice, support, and more. So, Thank you so very much, we appreciate everything!

We are still making progress and we will post photos when we get a little break.

Starting to look like a house!

We've been busy the last two weeks, but no one more than my dad who has worked on the house about 12 hours a day constantly because Marcy and I had to work day jobs and could only help afternoons, evenings and weekends. Thanks dad!

dad

We also had wonderfull help from Jess, Maeve, and my mom who all did a lot of dirty work like hauling wood and running errands, plus they carefully cut and then stained the cedar decking for later. It looks beautiful.

In this past two weeks we did some of the most complex framing I've ever seen, raised some very tall walls (one peak reached 25 feet in the air), built interior walls and did some insulating, set trusses and sheathed the roof. The latter is somewhat of a load off my shoulders, because we've been fighting the frustratingly wet weather, and the sheathing sheds water pretty well while we prepare to finish the roof.

Sheathing was some of the most physically challenging work I've done. Sheet after sheet of OSB, lifted over my head, held in place while nailing down, all on top of a 32 foot ladder on a steep roof. I'm beat.



Fairbanks Truss came at 5:30 in the morning, which saved us about $500 on delivery with a semi since the trusses are so tall. Paul and John were nice enough to be up that early for us.


Trusses were set three at a time with the boom truck.


We had all the trusses set in about an hour! Sure beats framing a roof, plus we have more insulation space.


Here is the current status of the house. Next up is to finish sheathing the walls and get the roofing on.

Now I make everything sound pretty positive, but this wouldn't be honest if I didn't mention some of the mistakes. Even professionals make mistakes, and considering how amateur we are I think things are going pretty well. Everything has been fixed and nothing was critical, just frustrating.

Some Mistakes:

1: Pouring concrete over rebar (see previous post)
2: Mis-measuring (and mis-double-triple-quadruple checking) for a rake wall which required about a day of notching look-outs for the roof.
3: trying to save $250 on an extra non-structural truss requiring framing an extra rake wall standing up between trusses at the pitch change rather than laying down, which is tedious and slow - another day gone.
4: Ordering Dormer trusses rather than regular trusses for the pitch change, which tweakwed the layout and added a little complexity to the roof sheathing.
5: Removing a truss brace when other side wasn't braced, knocking them all down, which turned the boom trucks handy 1 hour of work into an extra day and a half for us to stand them back up manually.
6: Designing a house with such a steep roof in the first place - not so much of a mistake because it will look super cool, but I would guess I could frame a regular two story house with a flatter roof in 1/3 the time.

trusses coming! Help?

Our trusses are getting delivered at 5:30 AM, yes, the butt-crack of dawn, on Friday the 29th. We could really use some help setting them for at least two hours. Anybody? Anybody?
...

2nd Floor

We are stilling "making progress" as Craig likes to say. As of yesterday we now have all of the walls up and the 2nd floor almost completely done. Soon we will sending out for the trusses and the roof. Once the roof is on we can work all the time, in rain, sun, sleet, snow, any kind of meteorological event you can think of. The below pictures are kind of old but you can see some of the recent things we have done.


Big Picture Window............2nd Floor



Looking down from 2nd floor


Weird bug I saw





I decided to put these pictures up because last weekend I participated in a community race called the Midnight Sun Run. They also have a costume contest, my friend Cameron dressed up like Luigi, I was Princess Peach and my friend JohnT was Mario. It was one of the coolest nights ever.

Framing

So I thought I'd update our blog. Today is the last day of our 2 week break and the house looks pretty good. We are framing the 4th wall and will hopefully have it up by tomorrow or the next day. It's been steady work since the start and going back to our regular jobs will be like a vacation from now on.




Crew that lifted wall



You can sorta see the 3 walls



House with some OSB siding



Flowers ........................Raspberries

These are for my mom, today I planted the flowers and raspberries so that they would be fully established by the end of the summer.

Foundation Done!

We finally finished the foundation, which was a lot of both hard work and slow work. The hard work was moving 840 pound steel beams and drilling holes through the .4" thick flanges, sometimes upside down with a magnetic base drill. The slow part was getting everything perfectly level and square. It was also filthy work.


Lou with the mag drill .... Dirty Andrew

We had to return the mag drill before we finished the holes, so we had to drill 60 smaller ones by hand, which took a long time even with three of us.


Drilling upside down . . . . . Marcy drilling

Finally when we finished the holes, we bolted 2x6 lumber to the steel to attach the wood framing of the house to. We also spent a long time leveling this with a water level.


Now that we had a foundation, we we ready to build the floor.

Marcy spliced LVLs for the ends,which need to carry higher loads and we cut the I-joists.


Today we set the I-joists, squared everything carefully, nailed them down, cut the required blocking and nailed it between the joists, and started attaching the rimboard.

Here's our nice straight and level floor.

Stop by, Lend a Hand

From June 2nd through the 18th, Marcy and I will probably be on site nearly continuously (maybe even camping at night). So stop by to say hi or lend a hand.

We'll be building the floor deck and then the outside deck, so there's stuff anybody can handle, like staining deck boards, driving screws, etc. And no frantic race against time like with the cement.

Heck of a week

We've had a busy week! The culmination was pouring concrete, which ended good only through serendipity and pure luck, but was as close to disastrous as I could imagine.

The mistake I made was thinking rebar could be pulled up through wet cement like is done with reinforcing mesh on a concrete slab. We set it in the bottom of the footings, then after we poured, tried to pull it up via attached metal wires.

No way.

At least not with the "stiff mix" they poured for strength. This is cement that piles steep rather than flows level. More water in the mix might have made it possible.

With cement drying and us still needing to get the rebar positioned and allthread precisely embeded (holds down the house beams), we needed to work fast. And we owe everything to our friends. We asked Paul, Abby, and John to lend a hand before the pour, and then Johny and Alex happened to show up to pick up Paul and Abby for lunch, just as things started going bad.

Thanks to all their unsolicited help, we were able to shovel half the cement into a wheelbarrow (which I only brought as an afterthought), raise the rebar to the correct level, re-pour the cement and set the allthread before it was too late. This was on six footings, each with 1500 pounds of cement. And they did it all in about 15 minutes.

Now for the week in review (click photos to enlarge):

First M&M augured three 8' deep holes. We had to remove loose material so the footings rested on virgin soil. But one had roots so we had to dig around those and cut them out. Miserable job.


We put footings in the bottom of the holes, with a sonotube on top.

We also build square footings and set them in 6" shallow holes.

Here's everything after pouring concrete

House pad finished

Next we make footings for the foundation. We're waiting on a couple special order plastic forms called "bigfoot" so we'll probably pour concrete next week.

Apparently some child drew on my photo taken at the end of the day, but it gives an idea of the garage and house as viewed from the end of the driveway. The steep slope will require grass to protect from erosion. It's about 28 degrees. Stairs are usually around 38 degrees. Todays temperature was 58 degrees. I have 1 degree.