Day 108: Activity All Around

It felt like a zoo at the house today. Besides the normal framing crew, we still have the stair guy working on the staircase between the main floor and second floor (featured in today’s picture). The promising low-voltage wiring guy I’ve been talking to also came by to scout out some locations to make an accurate bid. A garage door guy came by with some catalogs as well (please tell me why the current trend is to make your garage doors look like stable doors from a hundred years ago! It’s ridiculous). Besides all of that, we need to decide exactly how far down the rafters over the garage will hang down. Two different views in the plans conflict–I think they date from a version of the plans with a 7:12 roof pitch, whereas we now have a 6:12 roof pitch. Melissa stopped by later to make the final call, which was a compromise between the two drawings.

 

Day 107: Climbing Around

We had a little time this morning so all four of us went to visit the new house. It’s been hard to bring the kids the for the last few weeks when the framing crew is working because they’ve up on the second floor and roof, tossing stuff down haphazardly and that’s not very safe with kids around. So, a Sunday morning with no one else there was a perfect time to run around. Adam likes to find a bolt and bang it on nearly everything he can find. Alison prefers to set up a “store” where she sells various construction materials. She’s also starting to learn where some of the rooms are, and she’s actually excited to move there when the house is done (hopefully in the summer).

The house is actually getting a little bit safer for kids, as the first staircase is in! Within a few days the other staircase will also be in place. Everyone, including the framing crew, is looking forward to using the stairs. Here’s what the basement staircase looks like:

Also, you can now view all of this week’s pictures.

 

Day 105: Rain Returns

We’ve had a nice run of dry weather but today it had to end. The framing crew was able to get in just a half day of work before the rain hit. They were working on a few projects, including covering more of the roof with plywood and starting to apply the fascia to the ends of the second floor rafters.

The other big news starting yesterday is that a new carpenter is on the job for the next week or so to build the staircases. Unfortunately the plans did not include having a door to block off the stairs to the basement, so we had a few minutes of panic trying to figure out how to add one while following code and not blocking off the main floor too much. Everything appears to be worked out now. Staircases seem like something that should be very easy, but very small details can make them a challenge to do well. For example, one of our staircases is 119 3/8″ tall, whereas the other one is 120 3/4″ tall, so the risers of one of them will need to be about 1/8″ taller. Also, the basement staircase has to be slightly narrower because it’s bordered by concrete walls on two sides and those need to be furred out because you can’t attach wallboard directly to the concrete. In any case, it’s hard to make it all look good together when you have these slight variations, so the stair guy was pretty happy about adding the door because then you won’t see both staircases at the same time!

Here is where the platform half-way up/down the basement stairs will be mounted:

 

Day 104: Trusses Complete

The trusses are all in place! No one would call it a boxy house any more. The framing crew was putting the plywood on the roof today, though I think that will be more than a one day project. They’ve done a really good job so far getting almost all the details right, such as making sure the trusses on gable ends are a fraction of an inch towards the inside of the house to leave room for the plywood on the sides. They also left a wider gap between the trusses where we will have a ladder to climb up into the attic (the access to this will be in a closet).

I’ve been trading a lot of emails with the low-voltage guy that I mentioned a week or two ago, and I think he’s going to work out. The RG6 and twisted pair wiring is pretty straightforward and relatively inexpensive, but I’m having him run conduits for these runs to make it pretty easy to add or change wiring in the future. That makes it more expensive but I really like the idea of being able to add cat-7 or fiber optic cabling in 10+ years without having to rip apart the walls.

Whole-house audio is something that I’m also very interested in but I don’t know too much about. There are so many options that it’s very hard to decide what to do. At the moment I’m leaning towards the Grand Concerto system from Nuvo Technologies which is essentially an amplifier system for 12 zones from up to 6 sources in the house. It also has really cool control pads that also can display information. The hard part is getting this (or any) system to work with the audio sources, because you want the buttons on the control pad to be able to change the music, and you want the control pad to display the music being played. You can use their own system for it, but it is expensive, inflexible, and proprietary. If you have problems with it, you have no other options.

On the positive side, I’ve found documentation of the serial port on the concerto which lets you (well, usually home audio installers) to control the display on each control pad and also know about all button presses. Combined with the Squeezebox system that I love, I think I have the makings of a great setup. I plan to have my linux server which runs the software for the Squeezebox also connect to the Grand Concerto, and I will write some software which will interface the two of them together. This sounds like an extremely fun project; the only risk is that I need it to work reliably so that Melissa and Alison can use it without a problem.

 

Day 103: Trusses Part 1

After about a half day of work, most of the trusses are on! It’s amazing how much time the pre-manufactured trusses save. They also include a board along the bottom which serves as the ceiling joists, saving much more time. It also has the effect of making the upstairs rooms feel quite a bit smaller, since they are no longer open to the sky.

 

Day 102: Start Of The Porch

The first of the trusses are up, and they form most of the roof of the porch. The porch went from looking like a weird area sticking out from the house into a really nice spot overnight! The front of the house goes down behind some of the trusses, so it’s going to be a little tricky to squeeze the siding against the walls in those spots.

 

Day 101: First Floor Roof

The roof over the first floor is really starting to take shape now. As I’ve mentioned quite a few times, it’s a complicated roof, but I hadn’t fully realized that it’s complicated on top of the second floor and on top of the first floor. The rafters are in place over almost all of the first floor places that need them, but there is still a lot of non-trivial joisting required as well as a lot of non-rectangular plywood to cut. There are also some serious metal straps (with large nails) that join the first floor to the second floor–you can see a few of them in today’s picture:

 

Day 100: Pictures

This week’s pictures are now available.

 

Day 98: Complicated Roof

There’s a ton of different things all around the house to finish up framing-wise, so the general contractor suggested we bring in another carpenter for one or two weeks to help speed things along. There’s enough different projects (terraces, soffits, roof trusses, basement staircase, garage roof, etc) that they can all work in parallel and not get in each other’s way. Today they were working on the rafters over the kitchen (as shown below) and the roof over the garage.

 

Day 97: The Box Phase

Almost all of the plywood has been put on the second floor, which means that the entire house looks like a bunch of boxes tossed on top of each other without quite lining up. I’ve always thought houses look really ugly in this phase, even if the inside makes perfect sense. Fortunately it won’t last too long–after a little more joisting around the ceiling of the first floor (in spots where there is no second floor) the framing crew will be putting up all the trusses, and then it will look like a real house from the outside as well as inside.