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…
I was talking about how the house project reaches a certain level and it’s almost like leveling up when playing a game. That analogy really stuck with me and I got the idea to mark each month with what we have accomplished and maybe what we hope to get done the next month. The hope is to add to this throughout each month and then post it either at the end of the month or right at the beginning of…
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…
We would love everyone to help us with one tiny thing and you can do it with no construction or DIY experience. We would like for our friends and family to put a little graffiti on our new house. Yes, you read that correctly. We are ASKING you to write on our future home. You can write anything you want (PG please) on the walls before they get filled with insulation and covered with drywall. We’re hoping this serves as…
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….
I think we thought we’d have time to blog on our break between Christmas and New Year’s. Instead we got sick, worked ourselves to nubs, and didn’t blog a stitch. Too busy working on the house all day (which days are very short this time of year) and then too exhausted to do anything beyond the very basics of keeping us and the kids alive. So what DID we do with 6 days of manual labor? Well, we started with…
Just a quick update on the house. Masonry is moving forward after some delays due to very cold weather. But they’ve been hauling butt- like they hope to finish before Xmas (but clearly cannot). They finished our chimney this week, which is the only thing holding back the roof from being finished. We’ve slowed down our house work for the holidays- shopping, wrapping, decorating, extra activities, etc has taken the place of insulating, plumbing, and roofing. We hope to make…
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…
Whenever we go over to the job site I’m fanatical about telling the kids to be safe and watch out for nails, broken glass, loose lumber scraps, etc. I’ve also started warning various neighbors as we had quite a number of drop-ins, pop overs, and drive-bys. There’s been a lot of interest in the project and very positive comments from neighbors and other local townsfolk. Which is both super encouraging and a tiny bit terrifying that someone is going to…