Week 30: I'm Back!

It's been quite a while since the last update. Things have been really busy all around. I spent a week or so putting in the tv, internet, and phone wiring for the houses.

The orange tubes you see above are flexible conduit that we run the wires inside of, rather than directly through the walls. Since we have foam insualtion (see below) that totally fills the wall cavities, it wouldn't be possible to change or upgrade anything in the future without totally destroying the insulation.

In the past few months it's been a much more involved dance for Melanie to juggle. While that's a bit of a metaphor melange, there has been an awful lot going on. Gone are the days when there was one subcontractor out there at a time, and they were there for a few weeks straight. Since the house was dried in, our busiest day had electricians, plumbers, HVAC, and fireplace installers all there at the same time. At this point the rough in is done for the electricians and plumbers. The fireplace is installed. The heating units and ductwork are installed, and their three wells are all dug (but the wells have yet to be connected to the units).

In addition to those above the insulation is in now. We're using icynene which is not only a great insulator, but because it is sprayed in and expands to fill all the nooks and crannies in the wall cavity, creates a really tight building envelope.


The drywall is up throughout the house, so things are really starting to feel like actual rooms, instead of a construction site.


The decking has started to go on (instead of the bunch of plywood boards to walk on that we've been living with for months).


And the siding is on a good portion of the house.


We've also been busy making a lot of the remaining decisions over these months, picking out tile, hardwood floors, wall colors etc. Hopefully you'll get to see some of those things in the next update.

Week 17/18: Grab Bag

This is a collection of a couple of random things from the past few weeks.

This is our septic field, all covered up now. It's amazing how much more open it looks out when all the underbrush is gone. It's still pretty hilly, but you could actually walk in a straight line for twenty feet if you wanted to.


Since our plumbing rough-in is imminent (starting this coming Monday) we needed to go ahead and figure out what types of fixtures we wanted in all the bathrooms and kitchens and what parts of those need to end up inside our walls. We decided that it made more sense to just get it done with and get it all at once, rather than only what we needed right at the moment. Melanie spent many hours picking them all out and deciphering which pieces required what. So here is our hall below. It's pretty much all Grohe, with a mixture of different styles in the different rooms.


If you're ever looking for a fun way to spend a Sunday, this is not a good choice. On some of our lumber there was black discoloration. It wasn't terribly clear what was mold, what was markings on the lumber, and what was dirt. We also had no idea if the mold was harmless or nasty. Since we couldn't really get a clear answer from anyone we talked to except the mold removal folks, who may be a bit biased, we decided we would feel better if we did something about it. However, we weren't exactly thrilled at the prospect of paying an arm and a leg for someone to spray toxic things around our house. We discovered that you can actually use borax (as in the laundry product) and it will not only kill mold but make the wood deadly to various wood eating insects. Plus it's much less toxic than a lot of other options. So Gail and I suited up (my Darth Vader mask was probably a little bit overkill, but it was handy), got a couple of garden sprayers, and a few boxes of Borax, and went to town.

Week 17/18: Dry at Last

At long last we are safe from the elements. The house is framed, the temporary roof covering is on, and the windows are in.

This is from probably about a week ago. At this point they were working on putting on the tongue and groove planks. We have these on the edges wherever the underside of the roof is visible. Unfortunately, our framer didn't order enough of it initially so we had a delay of a few days waiting for more to arrive. Especially irksome was the fact that while we were waiting for it to arrive, our windows, which had already been shipped sooner than they were supposed to, were sitting around being fragile and vulnerable. In the end, they all made it through safely. There was a crew of unfortunate guys out on the 4th starting to put them in place and cover the insides with plastic (to protect them until the roof was done). By the middle of the following week they were all up and the roof was moving forward again.


And here it is, done for now, with tongue and groove, plywood sheathing and a waterproof barrier on top. The permanent roof shingles should be on in a few weeks, along with a few skylights. Once the framing was going up we could start to see the space more easily, and we found a nice bit of space under the eaves that we could expand the master bedroom into. Our architect also happened to have some extra skylights that went unused in a prior project that he let us have at a good price. After a little juggling of trusses, we decided to put three of them in to these new spaces, which should hopefully make it much brighter and nicer up there.


This is the end of the guest wing with all the windows in and roof on.


And here's part of the main wing.


Finally here is the latest panorama. This was taken on the 3rd, so this is pretty much how it started out at the beginning of these two weeks.

Week 17/18: The Lesser Wall of Creston

There's a lot that's been happening in the past two weeks, so I've broken it up a bit this time. First, our retaining wall, which should stop our driveway from cascading down the mountainside. Our new excavator has been hard at work, and by now it's nearly done.

It started off with a large pit carved out of the side of the hill. This is right next to the guest wing and you can see some of the braces for it at the edge of the picture. At this point the footing has been poured and is ready for some blocks.


And here's the 1st pallet of blocks. We had about a dozen pallets like this, and a fair number are still there for use in the larger retaining wall in front of the house (with even more still to come0.


This is where it's at now, there are only a few more feet to go before it is up to grade. By next year hopefully this will be looking as lush as the pictures we showed you a few months ago.

Week 16: Big Bird!!

We had a special visitor this week!


On Thursday morning, our crane Big Bird rolled up. At full extension it has 160' of reach (that's 16 stories). It was only there for about 3 or 4 hours, but that was enough to get all the roof trusses up. Unfortunately, the steel posts that support the deck showed up about five minutes after the crane left. They would have been a lot easier for the framers to get in place with the crane, but it looks like now they'll have to wrestle them into place manually.


As a first for our blog we have a video, about a minute of big bird in action, lifting a roof truss into place.


Here's one of the framers nailing the trusses into place. Unfortunately there is a bit of mildew on the trusses and some of the studs. We think it may be the purely cosmetic bluestain, but we're having someone treat them with borate which should prevent the mold from growing as well as keep us insect free.


As you can see on the right edge here, all the trusses are in place for the main house. Back in the day, roofs used to be made with rafters that extended beyond the walls. We were originally supposed to have 2x8 rafter tails, which are purely cosmetic, put in place to replicate the look of an older roof. However, we were going to have trim over them, and then gutters in front of that,which we eventually decided was a bit silly, to be covering up one cosmetic feature with another. So we changed them to 4x8s (twice as thick) and will be skipping the trim and attaching the gutters directly to the rafter tails with decorative brackets. We've found some pretty copper ones but we may end up deciding they're too pricey.
In addition to those, there are all sorts of different lumber sizes going on with the house. The trusses are constructed from 2x4s, as are the interior walls. The exterior walls are made with 2x6 studs (from Germany incidentally), which not only makes them sturdier, but gives us almost 60% more insulation. There are also going to be a variety of larger timbers (probably around 8x8s) on the screened porch and the walkway.


Here's this weeks panorama, this is from earlier in the week, before the roof trusses were put in.


This is part of our septic field, one of three 100 foot trenches full of styrofoam peanuts.


We've gotten the 1st shipment of blocks for our retaining wall, all told it's going to be around 60 tons. Once we get a chance to take some pictures of the huge piles, we'll put them up.

Week 15: To the Roof!

The sample wall section we were working on last week is finally done. There was a lot of painting involved (thanks to Melanie), then we all had to get it from the second floor porch of our rental down to the driveway (wood is heavy). We nailed on the siding and trim once we got it down the stairs, then somehow crammed it in the back of one car and the roof in the other. We bolted the two together on site, stuck a stake in the ground to hold it in place, and there you have it. That should be about what our house will look like, sans windows, doors, and the stucco that will be going on the bottom (where there is the band of plywood now) painted the same color as the trim.


On to the actual house, there are stairs in now between the lower and main floors, so it's quite a bit easier to get down there and look around. There had been a couple of days of rain and there aren't any windows yet to keep it out, so there was a fair amount of standing water in the basement that had to be swept out with a squeegee.


There are not however any stairs up to the top floor at this point. Melanie got a chance to climb up there on the ladder you can see on the right side here. I hear the view from up there is amazing, but I haven't gotten a chance to take it in yet.


This is where the screened in porch will be. The darker pieces of wood you can see at the top are LVL, a stronger, engineered wood product that they use here since it needs to support the weight of the floor above without the benefit of studs every 16".


Here's a trailer full of the roof trusses, which I'm sure you'll see more of next week.


One of our neighbors on the mountain has a fancy camera tripod and software for stitching the shots together into a panorama. He's been nice enough to take some pictures of our site and send them on to us. This is one from this week.


And this is one from the previous week.

Week 14a: A Creston Bestiary

Half of the 1100 acres that make up Creston are designated as common land, to be left undeveloped perpetually. Also, well over a square mile of land adjoining the development is protected as part of the Foothills Conservancy. Finally, the northern end of Creston adjoins the Pisgah national forest. All this adds up to a fair amount of wildlife roaming near the development. Since Melanie is out there everyday, and Gail is often with her, they've seen a lot more than I have. There have been several deer, a racoon, rabbits, lizards, snakes and more. There was even a long rage encounter with a bear. Although I haven't been out there nearly as often, I did get a few pictures of some of them. Here is a group of turkeys that likes to wander around the site.


There are some neat bugs too, this is a good sized centipede with some striking coloring.


This wasn't taken by me, but it is one of the bears that lives around there. One of our subcontractors not only had a bear climbing on top of his truck, but found bear prints inside it. Apparently he had left the windows rolled down and one climbed in and was investigating an empty bottle of milk until the top popped off, startling the bear.