Framing - Coming Soon!

Earlier this week the framing team got to work putting in the floor joists.

A view from below.

It sat like this for 3 or 4 days and I couldn't figure out why they'd have a crew come and do all that work only to stop and leave it and not finish the job. This was my inexperience that frustrated me. I was up there today and ran into the framer. He was saying that the floor inspection was scheduled for Monday next week and that as soon as they got approval they'd be getting to work. So, hopefully that will be getting started next week. He said that he expects it to take 6 weeks to get the framing done. I was able to show him an area where we wanted to move a wall just slightly in a hallway to open up a powder bath. He was super helpful and friendly.

More wood was on the lot today and he said it was only the first floor. The lumber for the second level will be delivered soon. The pictures above show how I left it for the weekend. I hope to see some walls going up next week!

Slow and steady

Small but steady changes. The crane came back this week and put up a few trusses over the garage but overall, not a lot of externally visible changes, but some small things were done. The timbers for the porch are all mostly in place but I'm told that getting a 4:12 roof to line up with an 8:12 roof is pretty tough and that is what is happening over the porch. This is what they should be working on this week. Entry. Straight ahead will be the fireplace between those two windows. Upstairs, this is one of the last areas that needs to be framed out. The crane will be coming back in this Thursday for the last of the trusses to be hung over the other half of the garage. Though not a lot of visible work was done on the outside of the house this week somethings have been going on inside. If you look at the picture above there is a 2x4 along the ground in the doorway. This is how they framed the whole house. It seems that this week they've been cutting and removing the 2x4 on the th...

Foundations

One of the things I really want is a big, open garage. We planned it all out in the drawings but recently we heard back from the structural engineer that they will have to put a post/column in the middle of the garage. We talked with our builder about what could be done. She asked about a bigger truss but the truss guy says that they can't build a bigger truss. We decided to pay the engineer to do the math and see if a large steel beam could be used because according to our builder she doesn't expect the beam to add that much cost, if its possible. The engineer is currently working on seeing if its possible. If it is possible they will likely have to make the footings bigger and that would add concrete cost but overall the cost can't be predicted until the engineer updates his plans. Once the plans are updated our builder can let us know about costs and at that point we can decide if the increase cost is worth it or not. I feel that paying an engineer a little mo...

Forms and Footings

Things are moving right along. This week they poured the footings. They got the forms up and poured footings within a day or two. One day later they took the forms off the footings and started setting up the forms for the foundation walls. Here the common foundation is not slab like I'm used to from homes I worked on back home when I was in college or high school. We will have a crawl space but it will be about 4 feet tall so its more of a crouch space than a crawl space. This picture below is my daughter who is 4' 6" tall walking around with me on a site visit after soccer practice. In other news, the price of lumber keeps climbing and we have a new estimate on cost, which stinks, because it's a bit higher than the first estimate. Because we had the delay with the financing issues in November/December and we pushed the start date out to late February/early March the costs went up about 35%. This totally sucks but we really have no choice at this point. Below is a sc...

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