dapello-barbe

A friend came to call, and I have new photos for you.

The siding is going up. No more yellow OSB look for our house. They have most of the gray vinyl siding up (it's atlantic gray) and about half of the trim (it's white). No shutters yet though. They will be black (as will the front door when they paint it). With the dark brick around the foundation, the whole color scheme looks really good.

Our first official walk through of My7 new home. Yesterday I convinced a friend from church to come out to my house and take a look, and am very glad I did! He is a general contractor for the BIG houses up on the lake, so I figured he could tell me
a thing or two to have fixed. On the good side, he said that, if anything, they over-engineer their houses. It's built to stay! The down side list was a little longer. Nothing major, but several things which over time would have become nuisances. The two best suggestions he gave us were that we needed to get them to put braces behind the pipes feeding the bathroom faucets and have the pipes clamped to it. Ever been to a house where, when you turn off the water, the pipes bang? Lack of bracing... The other suggestion was to get R-11/Sound insulation from Lowes and insulate the walls of the bathrooms. Nothing is more embarrassing than being able to hear someone in the bathroom... All in all our list had about 15 things that needed to be attended to. The walk through went well, and they assured us that all would be taken care of, and that we could do things like running speaker wire (Ian says surround sound is cool) and insulating the bathroom before the sheetrock goes up. We'll see.

Perhaps the single greatest step to transforming a framed house into something which you can envision living in, is the hanging of the sheetrock, and apparently it only takes 1 day to hang a pretty good sized house! Several years ago I had the pleasure of sheet rocking a house in Alabama during tornado relief work. It was a small house, and a crew of 8 of us took a week to hang the sheetrock and do the taping/muding. These guys just hung our house in one day, and my guess is that the taping/muding won't take but a couple of more days. Truly amazing. Fortunately we had the chance to run the speaker wire a few days before the sheetrock went up. As for the insulation of the bathroom... that's another story that you'll have to ask us in person, but it's a good one!
As a frame of reference, this picture is taken from in the kitchen looking into the family room. The ceiling of the kitchen is there in the foreground. Kristi is standing in between the two "extra" windows we got, they really make the room much brighter.

It's amazing what the joint compound does for making a house look really nicely finished. I stopped by the house this evening after a nicely grilled out dinner, and found that the second coat of joint compound has been put up. Now all the joints throughout the house are smoothed out, and all the screw/nail heads have been covered. From the looks of the stack of buckets in our living room we've gone through 75 gallons of joint compound and counting.

JB, the lumber for my house has been delivered. I'm sure glad that we have a big lot. There isn't a square foot on the front or side of our house that doesn't have lumber on it now. Now we are really hoping for a few nice days in a row for them to start framing.

Framing started today! It’s a beautiful Saturday morning, and we are on our way to New York Tech for the weekend. On a whim, I decided to stop by our house on the way out of town. They all send you there love. And we all hope you will come over and see the new house!

Sure enough, the workers are here, and most of the floor joists are in place already.These 8 guys really work quickly, much more efficient than our Habitat for Humanity team. We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to watch the first wall go up. Sure looks easy when you have the air powered nailers. and its up (just watch your fingers!).

The first floor is done (framed at least), and there are several walls up on the second floor now. The two story family room looks really impressive now. It's a shame we missed those walls going up. They must be at least 18 feet tall! We're a little perplexed however with two additional windows which seem to have appeared in our living room.

The side wall of the house is supposed to have 2 windows at the second floor level, and none on the first floor. Looking at what's built however, we have an additional 2 windows on the first floor(on the side of the house, first floor). That'll be an interesting question to ask about. We like the additional light that they let into the living room, and since our house is at an angle to our neighbor's, the view is good too. The only down side is that a long couch might not fit now. Hmmm.

Both the first and second floors are framed now! There is plywood down on the floors on both levels, and it looks like the walls are all there as well. All that is missing now is a staircase to the second floor. Well, the staircase and a few little things like windows, doors, carpet, sheetrock, plumbing, electricity, paint, lights, phone, .....

Watching a house being built can be a very deceiving experience.
If framing goes this fast, surely the house will be done before.
We've had great weather all week which has really helped the framers out a lot. A few more nice days and we can get our house under roof without the plywood getting wet.

It truly is remarkable, how fast they work. The roof is completely on the house now. This isn't a factory pre-assembled roof truss system either. The same 8 guys took a large pile of 2x8's and LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber, an engineered wood product) and built a complete roof on the house. The roof is fully sheathed and covered in tarpaper now. We climbed up a wall to get to the second floor and walk around.

The house has really taken shape now that the walls are up (and covered in OSB sheathing) and the roof is on. There are holes cut in the siding for all but one of the windows, and you can see where all the doors are. We played a quick game of "hey look at me, I'm walking through walls". Can you hear mom saying, "it's all fun and games until someone walks through a wall without a floor on the other side."

All the windows and doors have been put in their respective places. All except the one window which hasn't been cut in yet, and the two windows which are "extra", and they don't have actual windows for yet. The one window which hasn't been cut in yet is waiting on the staircase to be built. It is to be at the landing where the stairs turn, so it makes sense to find out where the landing will be before they frame the window.

The foundation is DONE! The house is really beginning to take shape now. We were taken quite by surprise at how deep the foundation is though. Originally we had been told that the crawl space would be just big enough to crawl through. Now, as you can see, we have a "stoop" space. In the back it's about 5 feet tall, plenty of space for the lawn mower. You can now see the garage (half cut off by my photgraphic technique), and our soon to be front porch. So far Steve (the construction superintendent) hasn't gotten too tired of our calls. We've called him every few days or so with little details that we want clarified or fixed. The latest problem had us a bit cross though. It appears as if several of the neighborhood kids decided to play kick-the-vents on our crawl space (the day after we took this picture in fact). Every one of the plastic vent's around the foundation has been shattered. Steve assures us that they are easy to replace and mortar back in. If that's the worst that happens in this story, though, we'll be really happy!
The wood for framing the house got delivered today as well. When we stopped by, there were 5 or 6 bundles of framing lumber, and 4 stacks of plywood for sheathing and flooring the house. We wouldn't have believed it if we hadn't seen it, but they also delivered 50 large tubes of construction adhesive. That flooring should NEVER squeak! We'll continue to take pictures over the next few days so you can see the house going up.

I have just had our final pre-construction meeting. Yipeeee! I sat down with Steve and Sandy (Steve is the construction superintendent, and Sandy is the sales agent from Yankee Barn who 'sold' us the house) around a big round table and went over all the nit picky details of the blueprints, also with you on the other end of the Web Cam, giving Steve all the information over the internet link. Odd thing was though, the blueprints weren't blue at all! In fact they were large white sheets with the drawings on them. We highlighted the specific features we had changed and other things which make our house unique from the "standard" Rutledge II floorplan. During the meeting we met Kurt, who is the developer's on site supervisor. When he saw what we were doing, he chided "They're probably pouring your footers right now." We all had a good chuckle at that, construction couldn't possibly start that fast could it?
The answer to that is YES! During our pre-construction meeting the backhoe was out at our site digging the trenches. We went to see just after the meeting, and they were just beginning the pouring of the footers. The footers are the basis of the foundation. Trenches are dug around the perimeter of the house, and in the interior where additional support is needed. Then the trenches are filled with about 16 inches of concrete. So here's a picture of the foundation of our house. The garage is on the right side, and the large concrete footer in the front will be where the front step are. For good luck (and a bit of personalization) we each threw a lucky penny into the foundation.
In another stroke of good luck for us, we found out at the pre-construction meeting that our lot slopes from front to back a good bit more than they originally anticipated. That means that the house cannot be built on a slab foundation. Uh-oh! Since the contract was already completed for a house on a slab foundation, they couldn't change the price on us, so we are getting a crawl space foundation for free. Talk about really cool for us! Now we can go back later and wire the living room for full THX digital theatre surround sound ouch(Kristi just flicked me in the back of the head...). Still a very lucky turn for us. The crawl space should help us with moisture and heating/cooling of the house.
Up next.... The laying of the foundation block.

Now we have “just” to build the house…

The plot itself is about 100 meters from the sea (a bit less I think). Although there is a house between us and the sea, we have a great sea view. The land is 5725 m2. It isn’t huge but big enough to build a nice house, grow some trees and even have a little garden.

The exposition is good, as the sea is east, and not north, which would have been bad. The south is nicely open, so we will have the sun. Opposite to the sea, west of the land, is a nice forest. Although not part of the land plot, the forest starts immediately behind it and we are confident that it will stay a forest and not become buildable land in the future. Currently there aren’t any new plots that are declared buildable in Viimsi, and now that we have a plot that’s a good thing.
What a weekend! Without surprise it was four busy days. I visited many plots and went through a lot of feelings. Two times I thought I had found something, but it wasn’t it.

So it went until Sunday afternoon and we were driving home, a bit discouraged. I just decided to stop seeing a plot we had seen before, and I discovered I hadn’t looked at it properly the first time. One must say the real-estate agent that showed it to us the first time wasn’t very good, while the second time we went there with Ira and Nat They are relatives of Ingrid and have built a few houses before.

They are of great help in this process, advising, negotiating with the real-estate agents, etc.And so I discovered that it was great place. Very well situated, a good price, a correct size, a sea view (yes!)… I signed the pre-agreement today and we are really happy! More on the land soon…