So many changes...

I got my camera back the other day from a place in town that fixes computers. Unfortunately they were unable to recover the photos I deleted. Bummer! So I'll try to catch you up to all the changes that have been made...and there have been a LOT!

Oh my goodness, I just took a look back at my previous posts to see what I've shown you. Wow! There are so many things to update you on. Here goes!

All the windows have been installed. I love them! The color of the vinyl is a nice deep color and will blend well with all of the earth tones we've chosen.

Exterior doors have also been installed. I was able to get the internal blinds in the doors that we got windows on...and stayed on budget! That's a huge accomplishment. If you've never seen the internal blinds before, there are two levers, one that opens and closes the blinds and one that lifts and lowers them.

The siding has been completed and most of it is painted. But since I didn't have my camera for awhile, I don't have any pictures. I'll take some this weekend. Choosing colors is difficult because I'm afraid of buyer's remorse. I guess I have a hard time making a commitment. It costs a lot to paint a house, and what if they paint it and I don't like it? I finally decided to go with the same colors as some condos near where we live now. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? Plus it enable me to see it in a big way before I commit.

Now for the interior...the interior has the big changes. You'll have to forgive some of the pictures, I only had my cell phone camera.

Where should we start? The drywall is up, taped, textured and painted. This color was hard for me too. I'm still not sure if I'm 100% on it. But oh well, it's done now so I'm stuck with it. It's about 2 shades darker than the color we painted up at our last house. I was a little worried it might be too dark, but since there are a lot of wide open spaces, I figured it could handle it. Hm, don't seem to have a picture of the color. I'll add that to my list. It's pretty close to the window vinyl color.

The corners are interesting. Instead of the square or rounded corners, we decided to go with the 45-degree corners. It's awesome!

Ugh! That's not a very good pic. The texturing hasn't been done. By the way, the guy who does the drywall is excellent at his job. In the garage it's just taped and painted, and you can't see any seems. Amazing!

Brian the Builder has done the installation of all of the ceramic tiles. He's done an excellent job of course. Here's the shower in the master bedroom.

He still has to grout, which I think he's avoiding. I don't blame him. How do you like the HUGE shelves in the shower? I love 'em. Guys just don't understand why a gal needs more than one shampoo. But these should be able to hold every bottle that I could ever want in there.

We decided to acid stain the basement floor rather than carpeting it. And we decided to do it ourselves. Brett's good at home improvement projects, and I'm a good helper. It would have been a lot easier had we stained it earlier in the building process, but it turned out great. Plus things were happening so fast!

A little blurry, but you can get the general idea. We did add a shiny sealant over it, and that made it look quite a bit darker than this picture. But the shine is great! (Adding shiny basement floor to my picture list.)

The hardwood floor has been installed. We chose hickory for a couple of reasons: we like the look of the contrasting colors and all of the knots, and it's very durable.

The installer is a true artist! When we get closer to moving in, Jason will come back and do another sanding and a final topcoat.

Tuesday the cabinets were delivered. Woot woot! Brian started unpacking them almost right away (I think to avoid the grout!).

They don't look like much right now, but from what I understand he spent all of yesterday moving them to their appropriate places and installing quite a few in the kitchen. I can't wait to see them tonight!

Big Changes...but gone

Sigh...as I was sitting down to move pictures over from my camera to my external hard drive, I accidentally deleted a lot of my most-recent pictures of the progress of the house! So frustrating! This is something you never think will happen to you. And then when it does, you think "how could I have done that."
Now that I've just spent the last two hours trying unsuccessfully to recover them, it's too late to post anything. So just to keep your interest piqued, here's a list of what I would have talked about:

1. Electrical rough in is complete.
2. Exterior doors have been hung.
3. The innards of the fireplace is in.
4. A lot of the siding has been installed.
5. All of the drywall is up. Taping and texturing going on now.

So tomorrow evening, I'll go through the pictures that I still have and do some posting!

Been gone too long.

How can time go so fast and so slow at the same time. The house has to be completed by the middle of September to be included in the local Tour of Homes. Did I tell you that? That's only TWO months away! It just doesn't seem like it will be possible. It seems like there's so much yet to do. The electricians have been in.

Three guys wired the whole house in about 5 days. With Brett being an electrician, he had some serious ideas about where some of the outlets and lights are going to be. We pretty much went room by room to figure out where we wanted things. First we just marked everything on one of the floorplan prints. Then since we were out there the first day the electricians were there, they had a few questions. They actually worked over the entire 4th of July weekend! The roofers did too. It is about the only thing that is totally complete.

 

We chose a lighter color than originally planned. Brett wanted black but our roofer friend told us that unless we installed the high dollar 50-year shingles, that the 30-year black shingles don't fare (fair?) well in our hot summers. So we decided to go with a color called Weathered Wood. It looks pretty darn good! And it will look really good with the house colors I finally decided on. More on those later.

Two of our bathtubs have been installed. They're just run-of-the-mill tub/showers. One for the guest bathroom and one for Jake's bathroom.

The insulation is the next step. When we were out there yesterday, it was just in its beginning stages. I think a lot of it will be the type that gets blown in, instead of the batting. I guess we'll find out soon.

It's all in the details....

Brian and Sean have been finishing up the framing details that need to be made. They did the rough framing for the fireplace.

They added the small walls that will separate the dining room from the living room. We didn't want too much wall since it would block the view from the dining room out through the living room windows.

They framed the area that will house the soaking tub in the master bathroom. Nice view, huh?

Brian had forgotten to frame in a door to the outside in the mudroom. Oops. So that got taken care of.

That's Brett enjoying a beverage and the view of the driveway from the door.

On the blueprint, there was a window in my craft room; we went back and forth between putting in the 2nd window or not putting in the 2nd window. Remember those the new energy codes that say only 17% of the surface of the outside walls can be glass? We originally had to eliminate windows, and since the craft room already had a window on the south wall, we decided to eliminate the one on the east wall. However, after seeing the house framed and sheeted, we decided it would look much better to have a window on the east wall too. Plus since the south window is under the patio cover, the east window will provide a lot more light in there. I can already tell that's going to be one of my favorite rooms.

They also finished the framing for the cover over the front porch. I can't wait to see it with the pine ceiling and rock around the posts.

A big project that has been going on is the plumbing. All of the rough-in plumbing is completed...I think. This is for the two sinks in the master bathroom. I think they'll install some thingy that will recirculate the hot water so we always have instant hot water. I think.

The HVAC guys have also been busy. They've installed the air handler and some of the duct work.

Apparently air flows around circular corners better than square corners....who knew. 

Oh and because they installed the air handler unit, our first piece of sheetrock had to be installed too! Pretty exciting, huh? I think so.

Yeah that doesn't look as exciting as I thought it would.

Then out of the duct work there will be all of these big tubes that will then connect to the vents. The round tubes fit nicely between the floor joists of the main floor.

Our windows were delivered this week. I love the color of the frames. No longer do you have just one vinyl color choice. Now there are 3 or 4, depending on the manufacturer. We chose Cascade Windows and the color we chose is Clay. I LOVE THEM! The color looks a little lighter here than they do in person.

Sunday Brett was installing the low voltage wiring for the speaker/intercom system. So I went out too to clean up after the messy plumbers and HVAC guys. I did a lot more sweeping.

Of course, Brian and Sean were back in there this week messin' stuff up again. That's ok. The more time I spend cleaning up, the less time they need to.

The Crowning Jewel

This week they worked on the crowning jewel of the house: the back deck! Hmm, well I guess it wasn't really the deck they completed, but the roof that will go over the deck. This is the place that we'll probably be spending most of our time once the house is completed. At our last house, the deck was uncovered and on the west side of the house, which means that in the summer it was 4 billion degrees out there. Ok maybe not 4 billion, but with the national debt as high as it is, that's how far I have to reach to make the exaggeration seem like an exaggeration.

This actually shows how the same ceiling will go from the great room out to the deck. It will be covered with pine tongue and groove strips in the great room through to the deck. It's going to look so cool!

They set all these trusses last Saturday with Brett's help. He worked the material handler that they rented to hold the trusses steady while they secured them. The material handler is the machine that can barely be seen on the right of this picture:

This process also included that last wall that separates the great room from the deck. I think he saved that one for last because he wasn't sure how it would look.

Originally these windows were to have an arch on the top instead of a point. But it's easier to trim around the pentagon shape rather than a curve. I didn't think I was going to like it since I was looking forward to the arch, but I do. The windows will have to be special order, but the wall 'o windows will totally take advantage of the view.

By the end of the week, they had almost all trusses set and the sheeting covering the whole house.

The only place they need to complete for the trusses is on the front entryway. I had to go home and look at the drawing to remember how this is going to work. There will be another peak to the left of the one on the right, and it will flow from that top one like the one on the right does. So pretty just a mirror image of what's there now.

Speaking of windows, we had to go meet the window guy for the first time. We figured out what brand, the sizes, styles, and color of vinyl we want. Do you want a picture (single non-movable sheet of glass), a slider (slide open left to right or right to left), a single-hung (slide up and down), or a casement window (has the hand crank and the entire window cranks open). These are in rank of lowest cost to highest cost. Code requires you to be able to exit a bedroom in case of emergency, so that requires a window that is able to open. And in some spots we just want to be able to open a window for fresh air. Most of the windows we chose were picture with a couple single-hungs and a couple sliders thrown in. No casements. An interesting window will be a pretty big one over the soaking tub in the master bath. It will be a picture over a 16" slider. The tub has a great view of Mission Ridge so we put in a good size window over it. It's something like 5' by 5' total, with the slider included in the 5' height.

The roofers should be starting this week. We need to pick out a shingle brand and color...probably by tomorrow. Which means we need to narrow down the colors of exterior paint for the house. The roof and exterior paint don't have to match, they just have to look nice together. And Brian needs to paint something on the underside of the decking that he'll be installing this week...another reason to pick out our exterior colors. We've chosen two colors but need to figure out which colors go where and if we're going to add a third color. A lot of decisions need to be made in the next 4 months or so. And they're starting to come at us pretty quickly.

We spent quite a few hours out there yesterday. I like to go out there and do cleanup...I make piles of the waste lumber pieces and sweep up the sawdust and nails inside the house. My back muscles are a little sore today since I haven't done that much sweeping in, well ever. I figure the more of the cleanup I do, the less Brian has to and he can concentrate on the important stuff.

Trusses!

I haven't posted in (gasp) almost two weeks because right now it seems things are going kinda slowly. But as I look back at the previous post, a LOT has been accomplished. In the last two weeks, most of the internal walls on the main floor have been framed.

It's like walking through a maze...not only are the walls framed, but since there was nothing on top to hold them up, there are braces of 2x4s nailed diagonally from the tops of the walls to the floors everywhere. You really have to watch where you're walking. 

They also framed the garage (or as our builder refers to it, the house attached to the house).  It went from this:

To this:

And finally to this:

Then they worked primarily on the trusses and roofing sheeting. The garage is totally trussed with most of the sheets of plywood on the roof.

(Picture courtesy of my mom!) Mom and dad came over on Tuesday. It was fun giving them a tour, and soon we'll be able to cook a meal for them in our new kitchen.

There are trusses everywhere...laying on the ground, laying on the tops of the walls, and quite a few are even in place. The big group of trusses here will be spread out over our great room. And that will be the angle of the vaulted ceiling.

I actually spend a LOT of time taking pictures of the trusses that are up high. I think they look pretty cool. Here's the first picture I had my mom take of them (I forgot to take my camera).

I'm thinking of framing a few and hanging them in the house. I think they'd look great in the mudroom. Here's another cool one:

Some of them kind of look like wooden spider webs.

Ok, back to the house. We're going to have some really cool beams that run through the house. Some of them also went up this week. 

This one runs between the kitchen and the great room. The ceiling in the great room will be tongue and groove some-kind-of-wood, and we're thinking of staining the beams to match the ceiling. The covered patio will also have the same planky T&G ceiling. It's gonna look awesome!

Brett's been building a couple of low retaining walls that will have concrete poured behind them. The lower concrete pad will have the heat pump on it, and the other one will hold up a concrete step that goes up into the side door.

He had to cut a few of the blocks in half. Have you ever tried cutting a 16" concrete block? He bought a special saw blade for the circular saw. It cut through one of them decently, but by the time he got to the second block, it was pretty warn down. There were even some sparks flying.

(See, trusses everywhere.)

Tonight after he did all he could do on the block walls, we sat in the great room on some camping chairs and just enjoyed!

 

One person's floor is another person's ceiling.

There's been quite a bit of activity at the house in the last week. The floor was completed for the main floor, and they chalk-lined where all of the walls would go.

Brian and Shawn even came out last Saturday to build the stairs to the basement. We got a half-inch of rain that day (very unusual), so I'm sure it was a lot of fun.

Looks a little hazardous, doesn't it?

Even more unusual, we got almost an INCH of rain the next day. Needless to say, there was a lot of water in the basement. Luckily there was a squeegee floor wiper thingy laying around, so on Monday I spread around what was still left down there so it could dry out.

We were busy almost every night last week; Brett was out of town, and Jake had either baseball practice or a game most evenings. So we didn't get out to the house until pretty late each night. Tuesday night Jake and I picked up McDonald's on our way out there. And since a) I got my car detailed last week, and 2) we hadn't had a first meal out there, we waited until we got to the house to eat. We sat on a wall that had already been built but was still laying on its side. I tried to get Jake to toast me with his french fries, but he just looked at me like I was crazy. Brett would have played along.

Brett came back into town around 9pm Wednesday evening, so I met him out there. We were losing daylight quickly, but since he had been out of town for a couple of days, he was pretty excited to see the changes.

While he was gone they had gotten a couple of the walls up and poured the footings for the dining room nook (which sticks out from the main foundation) and put up the header and two posts that will hold up the nook.

Again on Thursday, we didn't get out there until late because Jake had a baseball game. They had put up more walls and laid out the top and bottom 'rungs' of each of the interior walls. However, we did find a list of things that needed to be changed. The biggest one was for the doors on either side of the nook that lead out to the deck. They are too short.

See how they're shorter than the windows straight ahead? Brett did not like that at all since it cuts off the view from the kitchen to Mission Ridge. Well it does for him but not for me since I'm a lot shorter than him. And our builder Brian is, let's stay untall. Brian said he'll frame the deck first, then pull those walls down to fix them. Now we have to decide exactly what we want in that space as far as windows and a door is concerned. There were a couple of other minor changes, mainly moving a couple of doors that had only been marked with pencil so far.


Almost all of the outside walls are up.

We went to SavMart yesterday to finalize the appliances. We picked out the rangetop, double ovens, microwave, dishwasher, washer and dryer. That's nice to have marked off the list.

We had our first "dinner party" at the house. We called the Allens and had them meet us. Brian and Craig the excavator were still there, so they joined us too. (Craig has moved to the excavation of the Allens' property.) Cheri brought some spicy asian chicken wings and jojos, and that combined with the potato chips and popcorn I brought...tada! our first dinner party.

It's really beginning to feel like a home.

We've got floor joists!

It's amazing what two men can accomplish in a day. When we showed up yesterday to see what was done, Brian and Shawn had ALL of the floor joists installed. This is approximately the front entrance back to the great room. You can see on the right side of the picture the area that will be the stairs leading down. The dining room and kitchen will be on the left of the pic.

This is (from front to back) the guest bedroom, the stairwell, the master closet, bath, and bedroom. Great view, huh? The master bath actually cantilevers out from the main body of the house, so the joists run perpendicular to the rest.

Here's a better picture of that. I'm not sure why that first one is longer than the rest. But hey, I'm not the expert, I'm just assuming Brian knows what he's doing.

We also checked out the downstairs, which feels more like real rooms with the addition of the "ceiling" of floor joists above. Jake went with us and was checking out his new bedroom. Sorry I didn't take any pictures from the inside. His room is on the opposite side of the house from ours. No more hearing XBox coming up through the air vents. I did take a picture from the road though.

His room is the window on the right. He has a great view of Mission Ridge. We were trying to figure out if he could place his bed so he could see Mission from it.


Washington state implemented some wonderful (hear the sarcasm?) new energy codes this year. Only 17% of the area of the outer walls can be windows/glass; the insulation in the walls went from R21 to R23; the roof insulation has to be something like R41; and we couldn't have any unfinished crawlspace unless we put a layer of foamcore insulation beneath the concrete we did pour. So it was about a toss up between choosing between paying for the extra concrete, thus eliminating the unfinished crawlspace, or the foamcore under the other concrete. We chose to pay for the extra concrete, as it gave us more dry storage.

Two issues I have with this: one, with how cheap our power is here in the valley (like 1.5 cents/kwh), it's going to take us 100 years to recoup the added costs of the energy "savings"; and two, I want the family room floor downstairs to be stained concrete. How does the new energy codes affect that you might ask. Well a picture's worth a thousand words:

Well maybe not, as I'm going to have to explain it. See on this side of the concrete, the light blue stripe? That's the foamcore insulation that goes along the whole south edge of the south wall in the basement. It's on the inside of the house. Here you can see it with the concrete floor poured:

Imagine there's a 2"x4" running along the edge of this floor. And since a 2"x4" is really only 1.5"x2.5", and even with the 1/2" of sheetrock, it doesn't cover this lovely blue strip of foamcore. So we've been brainstorming on how to cover it up and not have to carpet the family room. 

This is what I want the floor to look like:

I'm not sure if we'll add the gloss to the top. And I'm not sure how we're going to cover that stupid blue strip. Any suggestions?