Trusses are flying, timeline update.

   Winter is continuing to rear it's ugly head, but it has only slowed down house progress, not stopped it.  We took a mid-week trip to the build site to have a meeting with our builder Ken and GM Matt to discuss building forecasts and timelines.  As it stands right now, we can expect the roof to be completed  mid-April.  After that, interior wall studs will go up, then we can get HVAC, plumbing, and electrical in, in that order.  Estimates is to have drywall completed by June.  Move in will be however long it takes for all the finishing work (floors, cabinets, trim, paint, fixtures).  I guess that will also depend on how fancy we get.  Things like crown molding in every room with coffered ceilings will add more time.  We're probably looking at October occupancy.  WAY later than we wanted but at least it's some kind of deadline.  Then again, deadlines have always been shifting on this project....

  Other things that were discussed at this meeting was the timing of external house business.  Since the roof was on the agenda, we decided it was time to get the roof ordered so we could minimize delays with the construction.  I guess good crews are difficult to find right now.  The housing slump cause a lot of them to move out of the state and now that the housing market is going back up, there aren't enough workers to go around.  We discussed two other houses that Matt and Ken are working on right now, and since they're on hold, we have the crew exclusively for some time; hopefully enough time to get the trusses up.  Once they're done, then Matt said he's looking for another crew that can put up the interior walls.  We'll probably approach Pro Brothers about installing the windows since Matt and his crew is so thin right now.  As for roofing materials, here's a picture of the materials we submitted to the HOA board for approval.  

   We're going with the Inspire Classic Slate in four colorways; a 30/30/30/10 split.  Ideally, the turret will have a copper roof, and we'll get copper flashing and drip edges.  Since porch roof surrounds the entire house, and the porch itself extends 8 feet out, there's really no need for gutter on the house proper.  There might be a need for gutters on the garage, but that could be determined and added at a later date.  Since we have the roof figured out, construction of the trusses are also dependent upon the fascia intent.  If we wanted to go with an aluminum or vinyl wrapped fascia, then the builders would install a pressure treated fascia board to later be sheathed.  We've decided that we would like to use Azek as all our trim and fascia boards.  It's a full PVC product with color throughout so we don't have to worry about painting or fading.  

   Also discussed was the timing for the driveway.  The water and sewer would need to be trenched before the driveway goes in, but the driveway permit from the city has already been extended once.  It seems like we'll have to reapply for the driveway unless we can get the utilities trenched in and lay down base stone, later to be improved with the asphalt.  Hopefully the base stone could qualify for the driveway and we wouldn't need to pull another permit to apply the asphalt.  If it doesn't, it's not a huge deal to reapply for the driveway permit, just more time and money.

Here's a shot of the trusses that are up.  On the left is one of the gable ends that was being constructed on the ground.  I confirmed that the other gable end is for the roof over the laundry room.  I was also told that we have about half of all the required trusses on site since there's not enough room to store everything.  Even though we have eight acres on paper, two of them are in the water and five are wooded, so open space is still at a premium.

   Here's a view of the trusses from inside the garage.  The crane wasn't on site yet and I think they only need it to get the second floor trusses up.  Right now, they're just using the sky trac to get these pieces up.  Matt estimated that the garage roof and deck will be completed by this week so I should have pictures of a completely roofed (minus the shingles) garage in my next post.  There are some laminated beams that are required to carry the weight of some of the trusses and that still needs to be installed.  I asked about the clearance of the trusses with respect to the Lite Deck pad that was poured for the master closet.  He said that most of the pad will be covered by the porch roof and the rest will be covered by the garage trusses.  Since it's just a corner of the closet, there isn't much worry about clearing the walls.

   Here's a shot of the garage trusses from the end of the garage, down at grade.  You can see the insulated gable end and the interesting and complex way the trusses need to go around the corners the bump out creates.  I asked Matt about the insulation of the gable end since it's not a common thing.  As far as I've seen, standard procedure is to just tack the house wrap on the plywood sheathing and apply the exterior building materials over that.  Matt said that this is something that Ken likes to do on his houses.  It provides a little bit of sound resistance and air tightness to the attic space.  It's nice, but I'm not sure how effective it is for anything since the attic space breaths through the soffits.  A quick google search says that sometimes foam is added to the gable ends so that the exterior will align with the ICF for the exterior building material.  That makes sense.

   Last shot for this update.  I'm standing on the low side of the retaining wall.  The amount that is built so far just right before the roof lengthens to cover the wider part of the garage.  There are a few places like this on the house, where there's a transition from one roof plane to another, so it will be nice to see how this is managed from a truss perspective.  Like I said before, the garage is the only roof that doesn't have an eight foot extention on it, so we could consider using gutters here.  There's no basement or foundation to worry about getting wet, so it might be a non-issue if water falls too close to the house.  The front of the garage will have water falling on the driveway so we don't have to worry about splatter there. The back of the house has some plantings, so we might want to redirect the water to avoid splash up onto the house.  If we did get a gutter, I could imagine a nice half-round copper number that runs nicely off the end.

   So there we are, trusses are finally going up and the materials should be supplied on a constant pace until the roof is done.  We're more or less stable on the labor force for the roof completion so there should be some nice movement on the house for the next four or five post updates.  I still have to get around to posting information about the interior design we've hammered out so far so if I can get off my butt, I'll share that.