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?