Catching up.....Amos' First Blog Entry (ever)

In the last few weeks the house has really begun to take shape. The kids had a good time running through the maze of concrete blocks and getting muddy under their fort, but progress must continue.

We had some really nice snow days in late January and early February that cost us a few days. I spent much of that time deciding on windows, doors and siding. On 2/15 the floor trusses were delivered and our excellent framing crew got back to work. I dropped by on my lunch hour and stood for a while, scratching my head.



There was a conspicuous elevation difference between the garage and the kitchen floor that really made the mind boggle. I discussed it with Rick, our foreman, and he decided that the safest thing to do was to quit for the day and regroup after I discussed our options with Larry. The root of the problem was this: the kitchen, mudroom and study were originally planned to be built on a slab but were decided on the fly one day to be trussed the same as the rest of the downstairs. This made good sense to all of us, but unfortunately this game change did not get relayed to all the players. So the masons happily laid the blocks where they had been originally instructed instead of allowing for the 18" of floor truss. I tried my darndest to figure out a way to make this snafu work without taking it back apart, but it just wasn't to be. So our framers returned that Tuesday and cheerfully removed the trusses and proceeded to knock down the extra blocks. Rick said that, in all his years, he had never removed a set of floor trusses to rework the elevation but that there was always a first for everything and if that's what needed to be done then they were up to the task. Indeed they were. We were back on track by Thursday, chalking lines on the fresh floor decking.





I spent the better part of an hour with Rick scrutinizing the wall outlines and tweaking a few. Always easier to visualize what a room will really look like when it's laid out to 1:1 scale. Even the fanciest computer model can't give you that perspective. I made another trip by on Friday morning to tweak a few last things while it still cost nothing to make changes, and by Friday afternoon the downstairs walls were up.





It rained over an inch the following Sunday night and turned the site back into a mud pit. No one worked until Thursday and Friday when they braced all the downstairs walls and put on some of the sheathing in preparation for the upstairs floor trusses. On Saturday, Rick worked alone and built the garage steps completely and the main steps up to the landing. The kids had a ball playing around the site on Saturday afternoon while Jerry Bradford and I got started hanging the electrical boxes. Since I'm wiring the house with the help of some buddies, I'm not wasting any time getting started. Nash helped me clean up.





Rick and company were back at it today and got the second story floor trusses set by lunch with the help of a boom truck. They also finished the second set of stairs, decked the floor of the game room, and put on more exterior sheathing.