Done!

Alright, that's a wrap. We just passed our final inspection. I will post up some final interior shots in the next couple of weeks. I will also be tracking the utility bills closely and I will report back when I have a decent amount of data collected. Beyond that I will be shifting my terrible writing to my other blog at onesojourner.org. I will be focusing on the happenings around the house, mostly cool little projects like charcoal making, wood gasification, electricity generation, small scale animal husbandry, gardening, permaculture and "stuff".

Almost done (1)

Alright I finally feel like we are in the almost done stage. There are really no "big" projects left. We finished spreading out the dirt piles and ran a harley rake over the yard and got it in pretty good shape. We spread some grass seed and it has rained a good amount so the seed has been wet for 3 days straight now. If we have any chance of getting the grass growing in July it is this week. We got the front door hung and it fit just perfect. We bought the hand rails for the garage and basement. Those should go up in a day or two once the stain dries. We have a bit or trim to finish but that should go pretty quick. The concrete counter tops are coming along.

Trim, doors, well, tile, ect.

We are down to lots of small jobs at this point. The well is in and the pressure tank is set. Unfortunately the plumber didn't stub out a place for us to tie in at. I finished up the shower pan for the master bathroom and Calee got the tile laid on the floor of the shower. We finished up the heated floor in the master bath and laid the tile in both bathrooms. Now we just have to finish up the shower walls.

The cabinet guys got most of the cabinets set. The counter top guy came and got the kitchen measured. I am going to do concreted for both the bathrooms.

After 2 weekends with a paint sprayer we finally got all the trim painted. We finished trimming a couple windows yesterday. We also finished up the stairs.

Siding is done, drywall done in a day or 2

Our siding got finished up yesterday. I am pretty happy with how it turned out. For any one who is wondering my installer Eric Davis (http://www.ericdavisconstruction.com/) used a ring shank nails and I would guess they were about 2 inches long to attach the siding.

 

Our drywall should finally be finished by tomorrow so we will be spending the weekend painting. Weather has been terrible so we have not been able to work on the stone because of the temperatures but hopefully we can finish that up next week.

Drywall is hung, stone vaneer is started

The hangers finished up the drywall now we just have to wait for the finishers. The inside of our house is a dusty mess. Hopefully they will get done this week. They were worried about it not being warm enough but I think they play to bring some heat in.

 

We got started on the stone vaneer this weekend. We are using a drystack so it takes a while to piece all this together and that means we are behind schedule again.  The weather is well below average this week for this time of year and that makes doing mason work suck. Our night time lows are hovering around the freezing mark so I will cover our work with plastic. The siding and soffit guys started on Friday and they expect it to take about a week or so to finish up so we have to have this rapped up by next weekend. 

Drywall progress

The drywall is nearly hung now. The finisher was going to start today or tomorrow. The end is near now.

 

In other news I got my hole at the bottom of the drive way dug. It was nearly 10ft deep when I quit digging. I didn't find any rocks which is extremely rare for this area. I burried most of the concrete after lunch on Saturday. I can fit more in the hole but we may use some of it for other projects. I finished up just as it started to rain. We got nearly 2 inches and my hole turned into a flooded mess.

The next project is to get the stone veneer installed on the front of the house. Unfortanatly it looks like half our weekend is going to be rained out. We ordered it from a company out of Springfield called Palisades Stone. They should be delivering it tomorrow.

 

More Wiring

We are still working on getting the house wired. After our first weekend I thought we might be a 3rd of the way done, but man was I wrong. We did have a good chunk of the wiring done in the house, mostly just lacking some of the lighting. What I didn't realize was how long it takes to get the home runs back to the panel done. It seems to be taking about 30 minutes per run back to the panel. We have about 30 more runs to get done... Our garage ceiling came out very tall. I am going to guess it's somewhere in the 12-13 ft range, so crawling around on the rafters is a bit unnerving. I have laid some boards up there to crawl on but its still a little freaky. Our power pole is right at the limit on this house (150ft) so we had to mount the panel on the far end of the garage according to our power company. So we have some pretty long runs to get inside the house. According to The electrician we are working with it is not to code to "bundle" the wires. That means we have to tack each one up. Once we get through the garage I have put in 1 3" inch pvc pipe and 1 4" pvc pipe through to the main part of the house. The foam guys sprayed around these pipes so we have a nice easy path to get the runs into the house.

The metal roof is on

Well it only took 2 days and we have a roof. It was completed just in the nick of time. Less than 24 hours later it was raining and then snowing on the new roof. We ran out there after day one with just enough daylight to see it. It looks pretty good in my opinion.

75,000 pounds of blocks... and we have a retaining wall

It was a busy weekend. Our redi-blocks got delivered on friday. We were responsible to unload them... They are impressively heavy. The old back hoe cried a bit but it got the job done. We are still waiting on the end peices but the walls are done for the most part. We also used an auger to drill through the fill for the front porch. We went down about 5 ft. Hopefully that will prevent it from settling to much.