Got Water?

So its been a while sense I posted because I've been bussssy. In order to get an occupancy permit I need to have one bathroom working, the kitchen working and all my life safety devices installed (hand rails, smoke detectors, deck rails, etc). So last post I left you at the drywall being finished. Right after the texture dried I jumped in and sprayed a coat of primer over the whole interior. As soon as that was dry I put a coat of "builder beige" on all the walls. Of course halfway through the spraying the sprayer started giving me problems. I was able to finish but have some subtle "stripes" on the walls. In the kitchen/dining room I painted a darker color for a little variety. The red floor is to seal the gypcrete floor. Just a lovely color but much better than the pink that it goes on wet as (think Pepto pink).

While this was happening inside, outside my septic system was being installed. Ever wonder what a septic tank looks like flying through the air? No, well now you know anyway.

About this time my insurance company started to threaten to end my policy because I still had not moved in. My agent said to try to get the outside as done as possible so they could take pictures and forward them to the underwriter. So on all the nice days I spent time trying to finish the siding. I now have all but the back of the house sided, and have even installed the new front door. Anne Marie (sister) was visiting for a few days and helped me out with this.

Back inside I finished the master bedroom, installing all the outlets, light trims, switches and ceiling fan. I also have installed all the switches and outlets in the rest of the house.

Needing a working bathroom I decide to bypass the master bath for now and finish one of the upstairs bathrooms instead. They are much smaller and simpler than the master. Using some of the granite tile that I bought years ago I completed the tub surround and floor. I got a great deal on a couple of vanities cabinets (one for each upstairs bathroom) and got that installed. A nice granite sink top to finish it, all that is left now is to install the faucet, bath trim, and toilet and this bathroom is working.

Jumping back to the kitchen I got the balance of my kitchen cabinets. Some of you may remember that I bought a bunch at a bankruptcy auction. I brought those home from where I had them stored, figured out a plan to use them and then ordered the balance from a distributor. Those few cost me almost as much as all the ones I got at auction. In the kitchen/dining area I decide to go with slate tile for the floor and started to install that. Here you can see the upper cabinets install above the new floor. The white plastic is for the sweep pan on the central vac.

Last but not least. The last 4 days I spent installing my water line. I hired a guy with an excavator to dig the trench all the way down from the street (700 feet long). With the help of Mark C. I got the 300' long coils of 2" poly pipe unrolled. We jammed one end under my truck and then rolled it down the driveway. My arms were very tired at the end of the day (I haven't heard from Mark sense!) I also replace the water to my mom's house at the same time but due to some wrong parts and a broken excavator track I spent Monday with no water in the house. It took all of Tuesday and Wednesday to finish the trenching, and back filling. Yesterday I finished hooking the pipe up to the house. Monday I have an appointment to get the water turned on. Finally I should have some heat!

That's all for now. Should post some more soon.

Walled In

So the day after the drywall was delivered the hangers showed up. Just a 2 guy crew. They started with the basement and worked their way up through the house. Here are some pictures of the basement, kitchen and master bedroom.

It took them about 6 days for them to get it done. After they were done I spent one evening rolling paper over all the floors. Thanks to a company I deal with at work who gave me the ends of their paper rolls. The next day the 2 man mudding and taping crew showed up. It took them about a week and a half to do the entire house. Some more pics of the master bedroom and great room.

After they were done the priming and texture crew came in on Monday. They were able to do both in one day which was great. While all this was going on I've been working on staining and putting up more siding, rewiring the radiant heat pump with conduit, and cleaning up outside so the septic system can get installed. Now I get to jump back inside and start priming, painting and doing cabinets. Here is what it looks like now, kitchen, master bedroom and great room.

I also have been posting a bunch to facebook so if you're on there send me a friend request. Gotta get back to work now!

Mouse Traps

First of all, no, I don't have mice in the house. If you keep reading you'll learn what the title means.

Lots has been happening since the last post. Just a couple days after the floor was poured I went out and spent a bunch of money on insulation. And boy did I get a lot of insulation. Both the sales staff at the distributor as well as the delivery driver commented on how much I got. And this is after I had already bought some off Craigs List. This is because I decide to not just insulate the exterior part of the house but also put R30 between all the floors (to make the radiant heat work better) and also put sound insulation between the greatroom walls and the bedrooms. I started stuffing the great room ceiling first. This was a little tricky as its 24 feet high and the scaffolding wiggles a little when its that high. The second problem was how to do the entry side as the scaffolding will not fit into that area and the stairway is in the way. So I took a break from there and moved on to the upstairs bedrooms.

Of course this was about the same time as we got hit by the heat wave. So I started getting up at 6 AM and working for an hour before work. Then when I got home in the afternoon I would work on the main floor and basement where it was cooler. On one of the hot weekends I decide it was just too darn nice to be working inside so I moved back out to work on siding again. For a while now I've been trying to figure out how to do the peak on the front side of the house. Unlike the back there is a roof that cuts across below the upper windows. This kept me from just putting scaffolding up like I did on the back. After debating a bunch of option I came up with the following. I put up 2 levels of scaffolding along the side of the house and then put a big gluelam beam across it. This beam was level with base of the wall where it meets the roof. I then put two home made scaffold planks from the beam to the roof. On top of this I built another level of scaffold, which was just enough to get me up to the peak. See the picture. When a couple of friends dropped by I explained it and Tammy said, "you built a mouse trap". I thought that would make a great title so....

Once done with that I moved back to the insulation on the inside. Taking a lesson from the framing crew and what I had done outside I figured how to insulate the ceiling in the entry. I first nailed a couple of 2x6s across each side wall, down about 4 feet from the low edge of the ceiling. Then I nailed another 2x6 across the windows. In the middle of this I nailed a joist hanger. Opposite that hanger I mounted another one on the chimney framing. I then put a 14 foot 2x6 in those hangers and supported the middle with a 2x4 nailed to the side of the stairs.

A couple of 15 foot planks on top of all this gave me somewhere to stand. Sure it looks a little freaky but it worked great. Mouse trap #2. (well it would look freaky but I must have deleted the pictures, sorry!)

In the middle of all this was the annual trip to Seaside for the volleyball tournament. Once again the Handsome Shrek Sports Bar was set up, this year with the addition of a bar style dart board and beer pong to go with the black light pool table, foosball and air hockey. Once again we took over the entire campground a had a heck of a party. Volleyball on the beach, all you can eat seafood boil, Mexican food, deep fried turkey (just a little snack, see pic), rock band competition on a 16 foot screen, 15,000 watt DJ system (we got the first noise complaint at 4:00 in the afternoon), just way too much fun!

OK, back to work now. I finished the insulation last week and called for my inspection on Friday. Unfortunately the inspector did not get my message to give me a call so I could be there to unlock the place. After getting a return call he said he scheduled me in for Tuesday.

On Monday the drywall was delivered. 2 guys unloaded the truck, part through the garage door and part through the dining room deck. Amazing how quick they moved, of course it helps when you have right carts and a really cool crane to help out. For the upstairs bedrooms they had 2 more guys show up and the 5 of us manhandled the sheet up to the balcony.

On Tuesday I was waiting for the inspector. About 10:00 I decided to make sure I was on his schedule. Jumping on line I found out that I was not. To verify I called the building department and check, nope no inspection scheduled. I was a little irritated to say the lease, especially since I was up till 3:00 AM rebuilding the stairs so they were right (this goes back to the framers not framing the floor for the 1-1/2" gypcrete). So I rescheduled again for today Wednesday. Thankfully today the inspector called me and I met him at the house. He walked in, looked around for about 5 minutes and signed me off. 30 minutes later the drywaller's showed up. In about a week I should have walls. YES!!!!

Wired Up

Lots happening the last couple of weeks. First of all the power company finally made it out to the house and hooked up my power meter. I then wired up the basement lights and the outlets for the basement freezer and main floor refrigerator. Its a little strange after all this time to have to run power cords from inside the house to the outside after doing the reverse for so long. Last time I'll ever see the power meter read this.

I spent the last weekend in June getting all of my plumbing systems under pressure test. The supply system was easy buy I had a little fun with the DWV. In my previous blog I mentioned the plug coming out of the floor drain when I filled the system with water. Yep, happened again, not once but twice. One time was the outside plug (no big deal) the other was after the system was filled to the roof the toilet plug blew out. Thank God for wet dry vacuums. I finally decided to stop with the water and just pressurized it with air. After losing 1 plug off the roof I finally got the system up to pressure and holding. The following Tuesday the inspector came out. He spent most of the time looking at the framing. The good news is that I passed the inspection. The only thing I missed was some fire blocking around some of the plumbing. That will be rechecked on the following inspection. What this all means is that I can start insulating, yea!

Yesterday I had the main floor gypcrete floor poured over the radiant tubes. The sand was delivered at 7:30 AM, the crew was there at 8, pouring by 8:20, and cleaned up and gone by 10. They happened to notice the old cement mixer that Dad used to pour the sidewalks and bridge years ago and spent some time looking at it. The thought it was pretty cool. The gypcrete comes out of the hose about the consistency of a soft milkshake and pretty much self levels itself. I came home at lunch and was able to walk on it. It make the house much more quite, and its really nice not to be stepping over sill plates.

Feeling the power

Wow, long time no post. Sorry about that but I have been busy, busy, busy. So let me see if i can bring you all up to date. I've been finishing lots of little things trying to get inspections done. This means there is not a lot of visible changes unless you know what to look for.

First off the mechanical room is pretty much done assuming I pass my inspection. The boiler is now installed and all hooked up to the distribution system, which in turn is plumbed out to the manifolds for each floor. I then finished off all the supply plumbing so I could fill the system with water and test it for leaks. I was a little surprised to find that even after running 200 feet of hose from the other house that I was still getting almost 85 psi of water pressure. Of course as soon as the water is turned on it drops dramatically. The problem is that recommended pressure at your house should be around 50 to 60 psi. Those of you that have been to my house understand we have a bit of a drop down from the main road (74 feet vertical). This increases the water pressure but the old houses line is corroded inside so much that the flow is cut way down. This means that when I install my monster 2" supply line that I'll have 85 psi or more all the time. What am I trying to say is that I had to do more work. I cut into the supply line and installed a pressure reducing valve to lower the pressure to friendly levels. Then it was fill the system up again and retest. I only had a couple of leaks to fix, all in threaded joints, all my soldered joints were good. Back to pluming in a bit.

As the days got nicer I started working outside again. For my next building inspection I needed to have all the windows installed. I had left one of the upstairs bathroom windows out to make it easy to climb out on the roof and do the siding. So I spent a week finishing off the siding around the upper part of the house. OK its not really finished I still have to put the sofits up and the last couple of rows of siding but that is the easy part and can be done after the inspection.

I also finished off the electrical, both the line voltage and low voltage systems. Last week I called in for an inspection and passed! The electrical inspector was even impressed with my word. He thought I had done a "really great job". There were a couple issues I have to fix but he can check them when I call in for the final. One is just a ground wire that needs to be heavier the other is going to be a little more work. When my radiant distribution panel was built they did not put the wiring in conduit to all the pumps and controllers. He didn't like that so I have to install all that. Shouldn't be too hard just time consuming. The nice thing is they are suppose to come out and put the meter up on the house so I can start using outlets right inside the house and take down the temporary power pole.

Back to plumbing. I have now finished off the DWV (drain waste vent) piping. Last week started to put one side under pressure test. This is done by filling the piping up with water right up to the top of the roof vent. I had it filled up about half way to the second floor when I noticed that water was leaking around the test plug in the basement floor drain. I touched it and oops! It popped out and a I had a 2 foot geyser in my house. I ran out and quickly pulled the cap off the outside plug to let the water out that way. Once the water flowed out of the pipes the floor drain worked really well at getting the water out of the basement!

A couple of weeks ago I went to another auction. (everybody roll your eyes here) Yea, I know what else is new. This time it was a very large door and cabinet distributor in Fife that went bankrupt. There was over 1900 lots. You didn't buy one door, you had to buy a stack, 30+; no I didn't buy any doors (already got those at another auction a couple years ago). I did buy 5 pallets of cabinets though. That equals out to 24 cabinets. After doing a little calculating I figure I can use about 70 percent of them in my kitchen, saving me at least $6000. I also bought some nice vertical grain fir trim and door jamb material. I also got small lot of cabinet knobs and drawer pulls. Ok maybe not so small, there is at least 1000, maybe 2000 pieces. Lets just say I was channeling my father when I bought that lot. The great news for you readers is that if you would like to update you cabinets with new hardware let me know. Below you can see some of what I got (yes there are others). Most of these I will be willing to sell for $1.00 a piece to you. If your interested let me know and I'll get you better pictures and dimensions.

Last but not least, the last week I have been laying out the radiant tubes for the main floor. I finished doing this last night, now I just have to hook them all up and pressure test them. If all goes as planned I will be having my rough-in inspection next week and getting the floor poured soon after. Then it will be time for insulation and drywall. This is the floor of the greatroom.

Slacking

So what's happening? What's new? Do you blog anymore? Are you mad at me? Are you still alive?? Just some of the exciting questions people have been asking me lately so I figure I better update my blog (OK, and my blogging sisters have made me feel like I'm slacking). First of all, to answer the questions above; lots, not a lot, occasionally, most likely no, got a pulse so pretty sure yes. I've just been a little busy and have a lot on my mind lately.

Now that's out of the way let me try to bring you up to date with the house building. I've continued to put up siding working mainly on the 2nd level. I'm about 3/4 done now. I find it fun to work off the roof and nailing siding is pretty easy to do, at least for the shorter pieces. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to do the peak on the front side of the house. The roof cutting across makes it impossible to use a ladder or the scaffolding easily. I might rent a boom lift for a weekend just to make life simple. That would also allow me to trim some trees along the driveway that need to come down.

On the inside I finished with the master bath shower. The picture is looking up at the ceiling, the 4 galvanized caps are for the shower head, and the other object is a light can. I lowered the ceiling 6" so I could install a Kohler Water Tile rainfall shower head. This still will give me over an 8' ceiling in the shower (most of the main floor is 9'+ ceilings). The shower head has four separate inlets and takes a little creative piping to make it work right.

I also finished hooking up the fireplace fresh air inlet. Its just some 5" ducting that runs around the garage wall at the ceiling level. It then goes up through the floor and hooks into the fireplace. This allows the fireplace to use air from outside of the house rather than taking all the nice warm air from inside the house. Once the insulation is in I'll be building a sofit around the garage so the ducting won't be visible.

Also down in the garage I built a wall and doorway for the mechanical room. The main reason was to give me a place to hang the main floor radiant manifold and hide the drain stacks coming down from the upper floors.

The power rough-in is now 99% done. I spent the last week or so wiring the breaker panel up. Out of 42 spaces I only have 10 left. Actually 2 of those are gone as I've decide to pre-install all the wiring for a hot tub. Yes, its kind of overkill. Every room has its own power circuit, and the master bath has two 20 amp circuits all its own (I'm not sure what I'll be using them for but at least I have the option of running 2 hair dryers, a curling iron, toothbrush, shaver, TV, radio, microwave, circular saw, DJ system, etc all at the same time in the bathroom! Please note, didn't say I would, just that I could!) The only other thing I have to wire is the boiler and radiant system, more about that in a minute. The rest of the wiring I have to do is the communications, TV and thermostat wiring. These should both go fairly quickly as they all are just going to run from the room to a box in the mechanical room.

Back to the boiler; it arrived. I'm using a high efficiency modulating condensing boiler, everybody understand? Well if you don't here's a quick explanation. It tries to suck every bit of energy out of the fuel it burns and only puts out the amount heat it needs to. The end result is that the exhaust gases are cool enough to vent out through PVC (plastic) pipe. The other nice thing is that its small (16" wide x 24" tall). Of course the first thing I did to my new $3000.00 boiler once it was unpacked was to take it apart. Yes, I think I'm crazy too. Unfortunately to make it run on propane I had to install an smaller venturi in it (speaking Greek to some of you again or, in reality Italian). So after studying the instructions for an hour I unscrewed 5 bolts pulled a few things apart, put the venturi in, and screwed it all back together. Now all I have to do is hang it on the wall, install the piping, wire the low water cutoff switch to the boiler, the boiler to the pump, the pump and boiler to the controller and the controller to the thermostats.

Now you know what's been on my mind! Any questions???

Blown Away

So, lots done in the past month. First, I've continued to work on siding the wall above the garage. In order to do this I had to install part of the stove vent system. While most homes have the standard over the range vent hood with built in fan I went a slightly different route. I'm using a exterior mounted blower. This puts the fan outside the house so the only noise to be heard is the actual air movement. Here is a picture of the attractive aluminum housing mounted to the outside of the house. Yes, I plan on building a box to cover it so it doesn't stand out quite so much.

Of course like most of the stuff I do its "industrial sized". The blower is rated at 900 cfm and hooks up using a 10" duct. For you non-engineering types out there here is a little comparison. Most bathroom fans are 50 to 100 cfm (that's cubic feet per minute), and most peoples vent hoods are in the 250 cfm range with a 6" duct attached to it. So, yep, this sucker (ha ha) could pull you right up the exhaust duct if you get too close. Here I demonstrate what that might look like.

Now you probably wondering what the heck I need fan like that for. Well, I've always loved the range top that Mom and Dad built into their house with 4 burners and the griddle in the middle. In fact I had even thought about taking it out and using it. But I figured sense I am putting a propane tank in for the heating system I might as well use it for cooking as well. So I started looking for a good deal on a range top and finally found an awesome deal on Craig's list for a Viking 36" top like this. Mine has a flat griddle not the grill.

Of course this means I had to have a hood to match. I found the best way was to use an exterior blower like above ducted down into a nice hood. So I bought the blower so I could finish the siding. Then just over the weekend I found a matching stainless hood to go over it. Thanks again Craig's list. Yep, should be a nice looking kitchen.

After finishing the siding I pulled all the scaffolding down so now the house is looking like this. Some of you observant people might also notice the big pile of scrap lumber is missing. My neighbor Ken has been needing firewood so I told him if wanted to load the bucket on the tractor I would dump it in his yard. 5 trips up and down the driveway and no more pile of scrap.

Last but not least I went to an auction. Those of you who know my family well can stop rolling your eyes now. The auction was a design and decor company that went bankrupt. Of course I came back with a full pickup truck (those of you that know my family history are now saying "Of course you did!!"). So what did I buy? Besides a few tools, tile, lots of tile. Travertine, ceramic, slate, tumbled marble, pebble stone,accents, etc. I really did not realize how much I got until the truck was loaded. Towards the end I was almost chucking the stuff in the back so I could get out of there before they closed the doors (I didn't want to go back as the auction 100 miles north in Burlington). When I finished the back of the truck looked like a low rider sitting 3 to 4 inches lower than normal. I figure I had about 3000+ pounds of tile in the back. Here is what it looked like before I unloaded it.

And here is what 2 of the 5 pallets looked like after I unloaded it (with help from Steve). There are some odds and ends but also a lot of usable square footage. I should be able to do all of my bathrooms and kitchen with a lot left over. We figured I ended up with $15,000+ of tile for about $300. Pretty good deal, huh! If I had spent twice as much money I could have come home with 4 times more tile but I didn't want make that many trips and have to load and unload it.

Well, that gets you up to date for now.

PS: hi to Karen B and all my New York fans.