Building A Farmhouse - Our Custom Home Construction

Well, these last two weeks were rather boring. They finished backfilling and then they compacted the garage area and the area for the front porch and back patio with a special compactable soil.  They then put some gravel and rebar in the garage area preparing it for the slab to be poured. Then, it sat for about a week. Garage compacted Front porch compacted Back patio compacted Garage with gravel and rebar We'd drive by every day and see nothing, which was disappointing and a little frustrating. Then, one morning after dropping my son off for school I swung by the property and saw the trucks and guys working. I stood and watched them work for a while. I'm sure they thought I was crazy. It was about 40 degrees, SUPER windy, which makes the cold a million times worse and I was in a t-shirt and basketball shorts. I always appreciate watching people do a good job at whatever they are trained to do. These guys worked fast and as a team. I chatted with them for a bit and then had to ...

  Not a ton to report this week. They are working on backfilling. They have to backfill the garage with compactable soil and will then pour the slab in the garage. They also have to fill the areas where we will have our front porch and back patio with the compactable soil but the rest of the stuff can be backfilled with regular soil. Here are some pictures of the progress.  You can't really tell from this picture above, but there is quite a slope down from the house into the back yard and I'm going to have to figure out how to landscape that... The weather was spring-y and crappy this last week so I thought the blue sky was a nice one to end on. The weather is supposed to change from 50's and rainy to the 70's and sunny come April so we are looking forward to that! This last picture is the most recent one from earlier today. 

  They poured the concrete into the forms early last week and took them off within a day. They then came back and cleaned up the job site and let the concrete cure for the rest of the week. I love the view here facing that sunset! While we were waiting for the concrete to cure we met with our builder and the distributor that they use for their windows and exterior doors. They had bid out the windows based on the plans and we were meeting to go over everything and clarify questions. Before the meeting I reviewed the plans and compared it to the bid and found that they had missed one of windows in a guest bathroom and the bid had mentioned that two windows shown on the elevation plans were not on the actual floor plans and so we had to be pretty thorough. They had the windows drawn in as casement windows but in my mind I had always imagined single hung windows. I didn't know what these were called but I visited the  Anderson Windows website  and as I looked around I found o...

 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...

The soil on our lot was not great for a foundation so we had to dig a deep hole and then back fill it with soil that can compact well enough to support the house. We had to put 3 feet of backfill in! We watched them bring load after load of dirt and then smooth it out and compact it and then do it all over again until the full 3 feet were filled in. Last night I took my daughter up there after soccer practice and we walked around on the final grade. Footings and forms should be going up next week!

 The builder heard back from the engineer a few weeks ago. We can get rid of the column in our garage. The beam shouldn't add much of a cost to the build so we've decided to go with the beam!

 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...

I'm writing this blog for two reasons. One, I want to be able to remember all of this. Two, I have so many questions about what is next, whats the timeline etc. that I can't find answers to and I am getting step by step stuff along the way from our builder and all that but I am a planner and they can't tell me anything too far out because they risk not being able to follow through due to unforeseen events and I get that but hopefully this could help someone else who is in a similar situation at some point in the future. My focus will be mostly on timelines as price can change from location to location and varies over time and as markets change.  My wife and I purchased a 1 acre plot of land in a new subdivision in June of 2019. We had hoped to save up some money and build a custom home on the lot at some point in the future, likely several years down the line. Well, the housing market took off in 2020 despite the pandemic and we had an opportunity to sell our home and make ...