Brian Christopher Reeve

Yesterday the framing of the house was inspected.

At this point, the framing is complete. Roof, siding, doors, and exterior trim pieces are all on.

Mechanicals have kinda fit in in parallel with other work once rough framing was finished. Plumbing roughing is complete. Electrical and heating and air are wrapping up over the next few days.

Since I’ve neglected updating this, I hope to get a chance to back date some entries with more specific highlights of the work.

This is a big update. Been busy so here it goes…

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

Until next time…

Due to the Christmas holiday, there was about a 6 day hiatus in framing. In the interim our builder was working on the siding and roofing estimates.

After another day of framing, all the first floor joists are up and about half the sub floor is in place.

From Rebuilding – Framing

I think we’re starting to get an idea of the scale of this thing! Because we were so adamant about getting a full basement in the new house, the first floor is quite a bit above grade. Some of the added height will be masked by raising the grade of the lawn about 8″ and adding a front porch and rear deck, but looking at it like this really makes it look a little awkward.

From Rebuilding – Framing

I climbed up on the first floor and could start to get a mental picture of the size and placement of the rooms. I can already start to see how we’re going to get the nice and open atmosphere we were really pushing for.

From Rebuilding – Framing

A day and a half of framing work yields the basement walls and the first floor beams, as seen in these photos. By the end of the day about a third of the floor joists were up and another bunch were cut to length.

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

From Rebuilding – Framing

After some calculations and a bunch of phone calls, I was finally able to get some reasonably priced gravel delivered on Monday.

From Rebuilding – Framing

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it brought in on a truck with a stone slinger to get the gravel channeled right into the addition, so it was dumped as close as possible. Since there was some urgency to keeping the new footer protected from frost and ice, I had to shovel a bunch in by hand. It took an hour or so to put a couple cubic yards in around the footer…

From Rebuilding – Framing

…but then my brother-in-law, Brian, did the rest in 20 minutes.

From Rebuilding – Framing

Cold morning… almost 0 degrees F when I got up with a high of 13. Sun, no percip. Took longer than I expected to cut and affix the insulation to the block… mainly due to the difficulty keeping the foam in place while the construction adhesive started to cure. Some makeshift braces and a couple clamps worked pretty well and the foam ended up sticking well. It really only needs to hold until it’s back filled with gravel, which will hopefully be tomorrow.

From Rebuilding – Foundation

From Rebuilding – Foundation

From Rebuilding – Foundation

What was should have been a couple hour job to obtain and lay some straw to help insulate the foundation took all day.  Friday, I arranged to buy a used utility trailer early Saturday morning.  I was supposed to pick it up, register it with the DMV, grab a load of straw, and lay it in the foundation.  The guy that was going to sell me the trailer didn’t respond, so dad suggested a UHaul.  Anyway, problems with the hitch and electronics delayed us a bit, but we finally got underway early afternoon.  We ended up having to take a couple trips from the valley to Cicero since we coulnd’t fit nearly the amount of straw we intended.

From Rebuilding – Foundation

From Rebuilding – Foundation

We didn’t get over to the house yet today, but I received a preliminary set of construction documents from the architect.  If Nicholas goes down well tonight, we might head over to check it out… and do some snow shoveling.

The documents are enough to get the engineered trusses ordered and for our contractor to start getting a true sense of the scope of work.  We should have the final, stamped set of drawings mid next week.

Snow today. Enough to delay most of the area schools for 2 hours, but not nearly as bad as what’s to come. After all, we’ve got a few more months of this.

The final course of blocks was laid today. It feels so good to see the nice straight lines of the foundation, rather than the uneven mess of blocks back on day 5.

From Rebuilding – Foundation

From Rebuilding – Foundation

From Rebuilding – Foundation

Woke up to some snow, and were pleasantly surprised to see the amount of progress when we visited the house in the afternoon.

From Rebuilding – Foundation

From Rebuilding – Foundation

From Rebuilding – Foundation