Sunday, December 30, 2012

More plumbing and some snow

Putting the Pex intake lines throughout the house was fairly straightforward. We minimized elbows and joins to minimize leaks and water pressure drops. And we purchased the Pex Manibloc to act as our starting point. It's basically a fuse box for your water system. The cold and hot source lines haven't been added yet in the photo below, but we got those installed yesterday. Other highlights were hammering in the strike plates, stapling up the proper vents, planning the shower stall design, outlining the hall closet design, and freezing our patooties off because it was 26 degrees inside. When I poured water to make coffee, the water instantly froze to slush (it's so cool when that happens - but frustrating that we had to thaw the water before we could make coffee).

Pex manifold - very cool
We also started running the black pipe for the propane lines. Made a good start and identified some parts that were missing. We'll grab those and head back up Monday to finish the lines.

We had quite a bit of snow too. On top of the 8 inches we'd received last week, we had another 3 by the time we left at 3PM. Looks like this year is going to be quite different from last year's snow accumulation. Last year we never even had to clear the road or use our snowshoes. Gotta start breaking some trails!

Officially starting to look like winter

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Not much to report

Oddly, we don't have much to report. Chris has been working diligently on getting the intake plumbing done. He's also been working on the hot water heater and the radiant floor system. We think we're going to need to hook it up after all. Hard to tell for sure as the house is still fairly open and the woodstove doesn't really stand a chance at this point, but we figure why not be ready if needed, right?

We're commuting for now - heading home each night and back in the mornings. Made that decision after the third straight day of waking up to 40 degrees in the Nest, under 20 outside. The whole point of getting the house weather tight was to be able to take a break if needed. I figure a good nights sleep followed by hot showers and room temps that don't make your toes curl qualify as needs. We're hoping that by the time we get the place insulated we'll be back to sleeping up there, but will cross that ice bridge when it comes.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all!

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Silliness

With construction power in place we've set up a temporary kitchen in the house. Oddly, it's in the living room, but hey, it's at least inside now. 

Making lunch in the "kitchen"
After stacking all the wood we decided to take a break and do something fun - we hung our door bell. Matt bought us an old fashion dinner bell a few years ago and it's now got a place of honor on the front porch. Feel free to ring it if you drop by.


Do you want it here?
Later that day we cut down a Christmas tree. From our own property. Now, our property is not Christmas tree friendly. Most of our trees are hardwoods and they're old enough that small trees have mostly choked out. But we did manage to find a tree. And a Charlie Brown tree it is!

It's got a few gaps...
 It's got enough gaps that you could throw a cat through it and not knock off any needles. But we think it's perfect for the house this year. Next year we'll have a full, beautiful tree. This year, we have a construction stage tree.
Improvisation
We improvised a tree stand. It's freezing inside so we're not worried about watering it. We just needed it  to stand upright. So we cut a section from a log that had bug damage (we killed the bugs, don't worry) and used wedges to get it to fit.

We put on some lights, added some very light-weight ornaments, and plugged it in.

Perfect


Monday, December 17, 2012

Tin

We hired a crew to install the roof tin rather than doing it ourselves. We did the tin on the tractor shed as well as on the Nest, but with it being so darn cold it felt smarter to hire someone else to suffer, I mean, to professionally install the roofing tin.

But first we needed to get some soffits up on the second level roof. So we bought 1x6 trim and some semi-transparent stain, and thanked our lucky stars that it was actually warm enough to get it done.

Warmer than it looks - it was 50* in there
 Chris put a second coat on the boards and then wore his hands out cutting the venting and installing it all. 64 feet times two!
Soffit and trim boards on the second level
The roofers were happy that it was warmer than expected too. They got the drip edge, ice guard, and felt installed day one.
 We had a little trouble with the sheathing on the second level. They'd shorted it just a bit and there wasn't enough sheathing to nail on the drip edge. Chris borrowed Dad's table saw and ripped some boards to make up the difference.
Oops - too short
 And here it is - black tin with the flashing installed and the chimney properly flashed and sealed. We've had rain and sleet since and not a single drip inside. Whew!

Love the contrast between black and board
The exterior is going to be board and batten and we intend to stain it natural. The rest of the trim will be that same semi-transparent black. I really like the contrast and it will support the whole barn look.

We also got a bunch of firewood stacked on the porch. Not sure if we'll continue to do this for future winters or if we'll build a wood shed near the house, but this will work for now.

Cell reception

One of the big unknowns was what we were going to do about telephone up there. I am spectacularly unimpressed with our local phone company and therefore extremely reluctant to pay them $50 a month for limited phone service. But we had zero cell reception. Well, we had zero when we purchased the land. Lately, we've been getting intermittent service and it's been improving (slightly) over time. So we bit the bullet, did some research, and bought a cell booster.

We chose the whole house (ha!) booster from Wilson Electronics. Installed it this week and, lo and behold, we have cell service. Four bars!!!! On Chris's phone (Net-10). On my phone (Verizon), I get one bar, if I'm lucky. Dad's phone (AT&T) gets two bars at our place. We took the unit to his house and he gets four bars there. Now to explain that ha...you have to be within 5 feet of the antenna. However, you get cell reception in a place where you were basically cut off from civilization, so it's just a little ha and well worth the $250. Especially as that means we don't have to pay for a land line now. This is extremely exciting news for us.

It hasn't answered our internet quandary, but it gives us more focused questions to ask and I'm confident we'll get that licked soon too.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

More thankfulness

My brother has been an enormous help on this project. He gave us his time during the framing. He also gave us all of his framing knowledge and experience. In return we fed him lunches and agreed to help him when he builds his place. Given that his building schedule is not set yet, this basically means he gave us six weeks of his very busy life in return for a solid promise of help at some vague future date. And he did it with humor and good will.

As mentioned, we ran into rough plumbing issues this past weekend. Just couldn't quite see how to properly vent the system and run the waste pipes. Matt again rearranged his schedule and came up yesterday to help Chris through it. They swapped ideas, figured out a plan, got it approved by the inspector, and expect to be done by end of day Wednesday.

This type of help is not available to everyone. They either don't have family that can spare the time or don't have family that has the knowledge. We do. And we are so very thankful.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Look! Photos!

I may have fixed the photo issue. Not positive yet. But in the meantime, here are some pics from the Thanksgiving update!

A window beautifully installed, leveled, plumbed, and sealed

Enjoying the new wood stove. Love that thing.

Chris putting in the electric pedestal
I know this thing looks crooked as all get out - it's not quite set yet. It was straight and tall by the time we got done.

Installing the double entry doors.
Installing the double patio doors was a bit tricky. Only because we'd never done it before and the directions were a bit confusing. Actually, they were clear, you just often didn't believe them. But we got 'er done! And full props to Andersen doors for the awesome leveling hinges. Very nice feature.


After beautiful and semi-warm weather over the holiday, we woke up to a light snow Saturday morning. Pretty - but not what we wanted to see when we still didn't have tin on the roof. Oh well, it all worked out.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Not quite there yet

Okay, apparently I'm picasaweb challenged because I haven't fixed this sassafrassin upload issue yet. I'm bringing in the big guns though - I plan to ask my friend Steve to fix the darn thing.

In the meantime, here's what we accomplished this weekend:

1. Sprayed Great Stuff in all the window and door gaps - without spilling any on the floor! Huge success given how sticky that stuff is.
2. Learned how to burn coal in the Fatso stove and therefore have heat past midnight
3. Learned how to manage the new Progress Hybrid wood stove (love that thing)
4. Started our waste and vent plumbing (and realized that we needed help)
5. Watched the roofers install most of the tin
6. Ran to Troy to pick up needed tools and forgot to get the jigsaw. Argh. Took the time to let Hubby soak up some radiator heat and eat a meal that requires more cooking appliances than a grill.
7. Stocked the new refrigerator then read the installation manual and learned you can damage the compressor if you run it in room temps below 55*. Stuck a frozen water jug in it and verified that it's an awesome upright cooler and maintains a safe temp when the room temp is around 35* anyway.
8. Put up some drywall to separate the garage from the house in the hopes of keeping a bit more heat inside an insulated structure.

Frankly, even if I could upload photos, there wasn't anything particularly interesting to take pictures of. We're in the middle phase - waiting for the electrician to finish, waiting for the roofers to finish, figuring out discharge plumbing - rather than the more exciting, hey we just framed a house phase. They all have to get done though.

Some things I learned this weekend:

1. I love working with my husband even when we don't quite agree on the approach to a solution.
2. My cat is insane and is well on her way to driving us crazy too. None of us can wait until we're out of the 11x11 camp and into the big house.
3. "I'm sorry" and "I messed that up" are key phrases and should be uttered by the guilty party immediately after realizing the error. Please note that Hubby and I both uttered these phrases this weekend, depending on who was at fault at what moment. Both felt better after saying it - or hearing it.
4. A self-feeding drywall screw gun is an awesome and amazing tool that has a wee bit of a learning curve.
5. Don't ask for loading help at Home Depot. Damage will ensue (took two different trips for this tidbit to sink in).
6. Electricity is a wonderful and civilizing influence and should never be taken for granted.
7. Flexibility in a building process is incredibly important. Almost as important as being willing to slow down and talk all the way through an issue.

Chris is installing the DHW heater and stacking more firewood this week. Roofing should be done Tuesday. We'll make more progress on the plumbing this coming weekend and hope that we spend more time doing and less time going "huh, that's not gonna work, is it?". Fingers crossed!



Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Solutions and an update

I am frequently amazed at how kind and helpful the blogging community is. I reached out to two of the bloggers that I follow - one of whom was not a follower of mine nor had I ever commented on her site - and asked them about the photo storage. I received helpful answers that I'm working on implementing. Not their fault that I haven't managed to do so yet.

So! Another text heavy update.

We have power!!!!!! National Grid came by Friday afternoon and hooked us up to the pole. Our electrician (Greg) had activated two outlets in the house and we have another at the meter, so we can run equipment instead of using the generator. In fact, the generator has been returned to my dad (a fact that he is quite happy about as we're entering likely outage season).

The rough electrical is done and we only had a couple more changes to make to the layout. I had drawn up two schematics - one for outlets and one for lights and associated switches - for Greg to use and they carried those things around with them constantly. Greg loved it and said he wished all his customers would do them. Please note that I was flexible with it as they had to move some switches to better wall positions and I wasn't upset at all. Detailed oriented? Yes. Fanatically committed to a plan? Not so much.

We were blessed with warm weather Sunday and realized that we'd never have a better time to get the soffits up on the second story roof edge. We ran out and bought the 1x8s and stain Sunday morning and I had the first coat on before 2PM. Chris had to put on a second coat to get the depth of shade right (semi transparent stain in Slate) but he says they look great. The house will be natural board and batten, the windows are Sandtone, and the wood trim and supports will all be black. Well, semi transparent Slate apparently because they don't seem to carry a true black. See, still flexible.

Lowe's delivered the range and refrigerator Monday. Extremely exciting news as that means Chris will actually have refrigeration now. Neither of us are missing the irony of this arriving when temperatures are rarely above freezing and the ice in the cooler never actually melts anymore. Sigh.

That's about it. The roof tin is on site and the installers arrive Thursday. We're working on rough plumbing next. Should be fairly straight-forward as we purchased this nifty Pex manifold thingie and will be able to do straight runs of Pex with minimal joins. Excellent.