I could never pass biology, but I can apparently pass a plumbing inspection. We recently completed all the rough-in for plumbing drains, vents, and supply lines. Below is a gallery of various parts of the plumbing system. The supply lines are various diameters of PEX color-coded red and blue for the hot and cold lines. In one of these new systems its common to have a single manifold with “home runs” to each fixture in the house. It makes for…
A house is made up of many components, with many overlapping and at times even conflicting goals. Its most essential purpose is as a shelter from the elements. That means making it shed water and retain warmth (or cool) and in the modern day that means a properly functioning HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system. The HVAC system may well be the most complicated mechanical system in most modern houses. In our climate the HVAC system must heat the…
Its safe to say that I don’t normally engage in quite this much physical activity. I don’t have a fitbit or any other kind of tracking device, but if I did I think many of my normal work days it would count my steps in the hundreds, not the thousands. Not so when building a house. Thanks to the MLK holiday, I’ve gotten to spend 5 of the last 7 days working on the job site. The house is making…
This weekend we had maybe 10 items lined up as work we could do on the house project. Some of them were fairly pressing as there are other paid workmen waiting on some actions we need to take. Then Friday night into Saturday it snowed a good 6 inches. We woke up and it was 31 degrees, the world was buried in white and still falling. I debated clearing the driveway and trying to navigate over to the job site….
Going way back, the initial parts of this project are just homeowners dreaming about what they want in a home. Then it became more like architecture and design, thinking through the space in multiple dimensions, form and daily function. Then by early this year it became an engineering project, designing foundations, insulation, HVAC, and plumbing systems that work in harmony. And in Summer it became general contracting season: working with the city authorities, hiring and scheduling contractors, material logistics, and…
If you’ve been following along then you know we fell quite a bit behind schedule over the summer as we were stuck in permitting for 10 weeks. We gained back about half of that through very quick foundation and framing work, leaving us maybe 5-6 weeks behind where we expected. Unfortunately, we expected to be able to have September to put on the roof and exterior insulation. Instead we were finally able to get started in mid-October. We made good…
Over the summer we lost 10 weeks to the metaphorical red tape, but now we’re dealing with the more tangible stuff. Lately we’ve been installing the exterior insulation panels, and flashing the windows. So there’s red flashing tape on the housewrap, and then on every insulation seam, and a bit on every window to boot. Just how much red tape you ask? Almost half a mile of it by my calculations. First we had to install EPDM rubber roofing…
I thought I had posted about the overall budget on this project way back in the beginning, but in reviewing our posts it seems I never did. As I just filed the second loan draw and we’re now more than halfway through the total spending, it seems high time I rectified that. When we started looking at this project years ago we had a proposal put together by the same GC who built my mom’s house. He’s a design-build guy…
This week they put up the joists and the first floor sheathing so we now have a kind of underground cave. If all goes well this coming week then this will be the last post before real walls are up and frantic work begins. So I figured I’d loop back to an old topic and explain the main reason we fell so far behind schedule over the summer. As I mentioned in the post about our long trials in getting…
Other than losing our minds over the financial impacts, just what have we been up to? The foundation walls went up several weeks back and we’ve been waiting to get on our framer’s calendar. During that time we have had various required odds and ends to complete. We ran the main water supply line under the footings and the sewer line through the foundation. We also connected up a pipe to carry any radon gas (common in our area) up…