Saturday, February 27, 2016

Winter finally slows down construction

   Winter is finally deciding to say hello this year and it's perfect timing to mess up our progress.  We've finally started truss assembly and got ten inches of snow dumped on the site.  Even though the snow was deep, the crew managed to get a little work done at the house.  I was hoping for faster progress, but if the weather doesn't cooperate, work will go even slower than before (if possible).


   Here's the truss stack at the front of the property.  It looks like they moved some of the trusses to the house site since there were more trusses here last time.  I didn't see any new trusses delivered, but there was other truss related material on site.
   So here's some of the work that was done over the last week.  We actually got hit with snow on Wednesday, so they had a few days last week to get some work accomplished.  Judging by the tire tracks in the snow and the amount plowed out of the way, it looks like they were actually here later in the week.  This doesn't look like a pre-built truss since I don't see any nail plates or truss construction/ID tags.  It looks like a gable end, but I'm not sure where they'll go.  I think the only place they could go are on the front of the house above the laundry room.  The great room doesn't have a gable end and if I recall correctly, the only other place that has a gable is the end of the garage.  

    Here's the current state of the motor coach.  You can see the two gable ends being constructed with some of the pre-constructed trusses in on the right of the frame.  Looking at the scale of these two gables, I think the one on the left is for the laundry room and the one in the middle is for the garage end.  You can see stacks of foam that were delivered last week.  I'm surprised to see this much foam board.  Usually, the "attic" space is unconditioned and no insulation is needed since all the insulation is on top of the ceiling.  Some of this foam will probably be used for the turret, but it looks like there's more here than needed for that.

   You can see how they're constructing this gable end.  Plywood sheathing is used as per usual but the foam board id applied to this on the exterior of the house.  Over that, house wrap is applied, so I know this is on the exterior face of the house.  I didn't take a tape measure to the wood, but you can see this offers a generous overhang.  It's nice because this will allow for a nice gable end detail that will match the architecture of the house.

    Here's a shot of the material that was delivered last week.  You can see the stack of foam board with the stacks of plywood.  I don't think there's enough here for the whole roof decking, but I could be underestimating the amount needed.  Maybe they'll deliver more later when the trusses are all up, but they should have calculations on how much will be needed.  They plowed out an area to work on.  It's was in the 40's today and will be in the 50's tomorrow so hopefully some of this snow will melt away.

   Here are the trusses that were moved from other locations on the property to the house.  Still have no idea how they're going to be assembled, but I'm excited to see them go up.  We'll be meeting with Ken and Matt on Wednesday this week to get coordinated on timing for all the pre-order items were working on.  Things that need to be considered at this stage in the build is cabinets and hard surfaces inside the house.  I think we should also start considering what we want for roofing.  Actually, we know what we want for roofing, but we need to touch base with Matt on when we can order it.

    They also delivered some of the steel studs that will be used for interior walls.  We requested that the kitchen walls be assembled so we can get close to final measurements for the kitchen cabinets.  It will be nice to see these walls up and finally get some sense of scale to the rooms.  This is possible on the first floor since we already have all the second floor structure up.  We can't build any second floor walls until we have the trusses up.

    Here's the start of walls in the house.  It's too bad that I can see they're already incorrect though!  I called Matt when we were here and he said that he cut the sole plates to length but had some issue interpreting the blueprints.  I could see that corners weren't lining up properly and measured some key locations.  I found that the wall measurements were off in many places that would account for the error.  When I talked to Matt on the phone, he said that he knew that it was off, but felt it wasn't by much more than a few fractions of an inch here and there.  I'm not sure where he was measuring but I found discrepancies of 6" in some places.  I'll review with him on Wednesday when we meet, but it just goes to show you that you should always double check everything, even if you have a general contractor and builder looking at it.  These sole plates were already shot into the floor, but they can be pulled up and correctly placed.

   We had a meeting mid week with Margaret and hammered out some more decision for tile and counter tops.  I'll update midweek after the site meeting and provide more details on our interior decisions.

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