DAY 89: Framing Has Begun!

At each step of the house I have the sense of "this finally feels real".  The excavation, the footings, the foam forms, the wall concrete pour, the basement slab pour all felt like "this feels more real than the last thing".  But, there something about actually seeing where rooms are going to be.  Here are the beginnings of framing by Kodiak Builders:

This was the favorite part for the kidlettes:  seeing stairs go up.  Now it feels real to them!

The girlies standing in Cole's bedroom:

It is now 5:00 pm and I just checked KSL weather.  Can you believe this is our current temp, in the evening, on December 30?  WOW!  

Salt Lake City Current Conditions

56°F
Mostly Cloudy

DAY 87: Bracket hic-up

Upper left wall shows 4 silver brackets.  Those are the brackets that the floor joists rest inside.  On the engineered plans the brackets were to be placed on ALL the walls.  We only have the brackets on the East and West walls.  Since we have concrete walls, it's a big hic-up.  The brackets were placed in the walls when the concrete was wet.  Kodiak Builders (they are doing the framing) has been great to help.  The brackets that go on concrete were going to be $70.00 a piece.  However, they found someone to manufacture the brackets for $5.00 each.  Today our problem is that Brent can't find the right screws for the cement.  It's going to hold up the framing.  Ugh.

DAY 86: Lumber Sighting

First signs of lumber!  The basement framing is about to begin!  YAY!  Cole really wanted the chance to roller blade on the bare slab of concrete.  It didn't work out...

DAY 85: Backfill by Brent

The day after Christmas, Brent rented a big toy and back-filled the garage basement storage.  He said he would have had fun but there was "a crazy lady who kept screaming" (yours truly).  In my defense, and since I'm the author of the blog I can say, I was scared! Soft dirt and previous excavation edges were stressing me out.   But once he figured out a good spot to place the backhoe all was well! 

 

Cole compacted all the dirt:

About 4 1/2 hours later Cole stands on the finished job.  That's a lot of dirt inside those footings.

DAY 80: In The Beginning...

While searching for potential Christmas card pictures I came across these four photos of our lot.  We took the photos just after we purchased it May 2009.  When I see the old pictures I feel like we are actually making progress.  These are just pictures of weeds, so nice to see the beginnings of a house now!

Looking East:

Looking North:

Looking South:

Looking West:

In this same file of pictures I found this awesome photo of Me (I'm sporting the fancy red tie), my sister Nancy, my Dad, and my sister Amy (the baby), circa 1970 or 1971.  It's hard to remember my Dad with anything but white hair. 

Merry Christmas!

DAY 78: Basement Slab

Today, December 19th, our basement slab was poured.  WOW!  Merry Christmas to us!  I can't believe that we can keep working on our house in the middle of December with so few weather complications.  Once again I was greeted by cement trucks, a pump and workers when I pulled up to the lot:

Your have to look closely at the picture below to see Brent's (and some of Cole's) work this week.  He had to lay out a wire mesh which covered the PEX tubing.  You can barely see it.  Rick, the subcontractor, said that Brent did a fantastic job on laying out the PEX tubing.  He also told me that building with the ICF adds about 6% to the cost of building a home, a figure I've yet to believe.

DAY 78: History of the Garage

Our garage will be detached.  I get a lot of confused looks when I talk about it.  So, a little history...

Our lot has proven to be a tricky lot.  We LOVE our lot, the view, the shape, the location, everything.  But the shape became problematic when we began the 2 year design process. Houses #1, #2, #3 all had three levels. I liked the designs but they never felt right.  The master was always upstairs, which I disliked very much.  Also, the houses were just too big.  We were not after a big house.

Our architect proposed the idea of a detached garage on house design #4.  When the garage is detached it has different set-back rules.  It can be closer to the property line.  This changed the footprint of our house which allowed the master to be on the main (yay!).  The other idea I loved is that a detached garage is truer to a bungalow style house.  The garage will not overpower or dominate the house simply because it isn't a part of the house.

So, the new hurdle.  The garage was excavated 4 feet too deep.  We did not discover this hic-up until after the footings were poured.  Brent wanted to make the most the new development.  We took it back to the architect and engineer and have designed a storage under half of the garage.  It will be fantastic, but will end up adding costs.

This is the size of the storage under the garage.  You can't see the new excavation with the powdery snow:

 This is the new footing that will be poured today:

 Here you can see the full size of the garage:

DAY 66: a-MAZE-ing

This looks like a life-sized maze to me.  Brent and cousin Derek laid the Pex for the radiant heat in the basement.  Brent needs to put pressure into the lines to check that it's all connected.  Next step: floor pour!  Yay!

Mark Whiting came again and worked on more of the backfill.  It's exciting to see the footings and foundation covered!  

Still need to fix that date stamp...

DAY 65: Jour de St Nicolas

The chocolate Santas made it to our house on the Day of Saint Nicolas.  The kidlettes look forward to this tradition!

DAY 64: Gas Problems (this was Cole's title suggestion...)

Last Monday was the drilling for the geothermal wells.  A little detail that we will now include....

The second drill went through the gas line. (fuzzy picture, it's a phone picture)

I drove up to the lot and Questar had descended.  They had to dig and repair the line.  
 

One of my new neighbors asked "what was up with all the sirens at your lot?"  We missed the action with the police, firetruck, ambulance, etc. (perhaps I'm exaggerating, but there was a response from some of those departments).  What a way to introduce ourselves to the new neighborhood....

DAY 62: Pads for basement radiant heat go down

Brent's project yesterday and today was the pads for the radiant heat.  The most frustrating part of the project (as I understand it since I was not there) was leveling out the ground.  We had already worked on it ALL DAY last Saturday.  Yesterday he spent another day with my cousin Derek leveling.  Today they were able to lay down the pads.

My cousin Derek came down for two days to help:

This DeWalt saw belonged to Brent's father Lowell.  Lowell was a contractor (and a JH band teacher).  He did a lot of construction.  Brent said that he would help his dad unload this saw at the work sites.  This many years later we're using it at our house.

And of course Estee always enjoys posing for the pictures (it beats working in her book):

 

Note to self: fix the date stamp on the camera.  We're not in Europe (pictures taken 3 December 2011). 

DAY 62: Lines for Geothermal are in

This is our proof that the 200 feet deep wells for the geothermal heating have been dug:

 

Pretty amazing that our heat source will come from 8 of these small black tubes.  This week our excavator was back working on different trenches: