Shawn did get those two hip roof truss hangers in the garage installed. Then he went in the house to check on the other hip roof truss hangers of the same kind. Of course, the framer, who is a professional in his field, only put 4 nails out of 20 that are needed to meet the minimum load capacity of those things. So Shawn pounded in the rest of the nails and got things to their proper order.
It still makes us upset that you pay so much money to a guy to do a job, and you still end up fixing things like that. Also, if you look at our truss design documents, a lot of those trusses need a truss-to-top-plate-of-the-wall connectors because the standard toe-nails do not meet the minimum load. Of course, none of those were installed. Maybe because I'm an engineer I care about those things, but roof trusses are typically designed to meet a minimum snow, wind, up-lift, shear, and other loads based on your location. But I'll get off my soap box now. Those little connectors are on my "to-do" list before the main floor and ceiling get dry-walled. So we've got two or three years to get that done.
We've met with 2 contractors so far on the heating and cooling side of things. The first one pretty much didn't really want to listen to what options we wanted to look into, and all he could talk about was geothermal system, so that's the quote we got. And for that amount of money, we can finish the basement and move in, I think. A geothermal system uses the heat from the ground to do heating and cooling, so it is super efficient, and heating bills could be as low as $60/mo. But the initial cash investment is the issue.
I think in the future when we can, we will probably add a geothermal to our house, but right now we're not sure we can make that pan. Though there are some tax incentives that could make that cost competitive with a non-geothermals system. So we'll see once we get all of the quotes in.
The second contractor priced us a system using an air-to-air heat pump for forced air heating and cooling for the main floor, and there was a bit of a mis-communication since they didn't do anything for quoting the radiant part of the basement. He's working on it now, so I'm thinking by the 19th of January or so we'll get some final numbers from him.
The third guy said he'd have some numbers "early" this week. I'll give him 'till tomorrow before I call. The fourth one hasn't returned e-mails or phone calls, and he keeps this up, I won't bother to call again. The fifth one I didn't talk to him until last week, so I'll give him 'till next week before I start getting impatient with him. I wish this quoting process was faster, but according to the two guys we've met, the worse the weather is, the more furnaces and things go bad, and lots of emergency calls to deal with at this time of year.
The other big news is we bought a dishwasher! Yay! Now my hubby has to install it for me. I'm hoping that by Saturday that thing will be all hooked up and running. Unless, of course, the newest member of our family decides to come this week.
I've got 8 days to go, and they get longer and slower by the day. I'm sure there will not be a post next week, unless I'm feeling like blogging from the hospital.
Until next time!
This is our daughter, Bianca. She was born on January 13th, and needless to say, we've been spending our time with her, and not much has happened with the house.
