Siding and Electrical

A lot has been done in the house since the last post. Two weekends ago, my in-laws came down on Saturday for a day and they brought extra help. Shawn's younger brother Brian and his wife, Cari, came along.

While Cari and I hung around inside with the kids and my mum, Derald, Pam, Shawn and Brian got to work. Pam did us a huge favor and cleaned up the mess we had in the garage, and got things organized and tidy. She also tidied up and cleaned up some more in the basement while the guys worked on siding the back wall of the garage.

Derald's task was to cut boards to size while Brian and Shawn installed them. At least there was a breeze, so they had to set up the cutting station to take advantage of the breeze so that it would help to blow away the dust from cutting the fiber cement board. The bad thing is that it was in the sun all day.

To escape from the sun a bit, Derald had to plunk his chair among the weeds during breaks.

Bianca came out to inspect the work and hung around with grandma for a bit while she took a break. She seems a bit concerned about what she is seeing. But in the end the wall turned out nice, and best of all IT'S SIDED! So for one day of work, they accomplished quite a lot in getting that wall all done. I thought I took a picture of the finished wall, but I guess I never got around to doing it. If I remember, I'll put it up next time.

Since the last post, we had our meeting with the electrician. He's going to let us hang boxes and cut holes in the studs for the wires to help us save a bit on labor. So we headed down to Menards to get some supplies, and we had to go back to change to a heavier duty electrical box after the electrician said he prefers a certain kind.
So sometime during the week Shawn began to put up some blue boxes, as you can see here. It is sort of surreal to see the boxes in the studs, since it feels like we might just pull it off and move in by winter time.

Last Friday, my in-laws came back again to help us work on some more siding. This time Pam was given a crash course on installing the siding, and she was Shawn's help, while Derald cut boards and painted more siding as well. By the end of the day Saturday, the NW wall of the garage was done!

Looks beautiful. Sunday after Church the guys worked on fixing the garage wall since it rained all day, so it was nice to work inside. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, or not, but the wall footing ended up out of alignment when the wall was poured, so the framer placed the garage wall cantelevered off the footing.

You can see here how bad it is on this side of the garage. The other end is not as bad. And even though the roof trusses only need 1.5" of bearing surface, and technically we should be ok, we still didn't like the idea of just leaving it like that.

So the solution was to frame extra support inside the garage to help transfer the roof load more onto the footing.
So you can see the new studs framing around the garage door openings and supporting the extra LVL Beams that are adding support directly under the trusses above the opening. The guys did a wonderful job, and my FIL with his woodworking skills used our table saw to cut out grooves on that bottom 2x6 to fit over the j-bolts that bolt the wall to the footing. Pam and I helped a bit to hold up the vertical 2x4's while Shawn and Derald lifted the LVL beams up into position. Then Shawn shot some nails to attach the framing to the existing wall.

While the guys worked on the garage wall, Pam and I were inside the basement hanging up more electrical boxes. I went around with the plan and a tape measure marking the location of boxes, and Pam followed hammering in the blue boxes that go on wood framing.

Since our exterior basement walls are insulated concrete forms, the boxes to use there are a little different. We need to cut out the foam to insert a box, and these boxes have a side tab that gets screwed to the plastic "stud" embedded within the foam.

We bought an electric knife to cut the holes, but it gets too hot and melts the foam too fast and makes the hole too big, and looks terrible to boot. So Shawn has to use the sawzall with a very short blade, and looks much better. I made a template of the box size and gave that to pam with a marker. Then after I located the box and marked the height, she followed behind marking the box outline for the outlet. We got most of the boxes marked out, except for one bedroom where we needed to move some things from the wall. Shawn and I will try to get to those this week.

Shawn's parents stayed until Monday since we all had the day off work because of the 4th of July holiday. Monday morning they worked on the SW side of the house, which everyone keeps calling South for some reason.

They finished putting up the last three rows of siding up to the soffit on the Master bath wall as you can see in this picture. I think the window and trim still need to be caulked, but we're going to have to go around the whole hosue finishing the caulking one of these days.

The crew worked the rest of the morning on finishing off the soffit on the rest of the eaves. Derald manned the saw, while Shawn installed the soffit. Pam helped the guys on this project as well. They got the soffit installed almost all the way to the front.
Last night, Shawn worked siding the wall up to the soffit, and installed the fascia boards. There's one more piece of fascia that needs to go up, but Shawn needs to finish building the cornice at the front before he can do that. I thought I took a better picture, so I'll have to do that next time.
But you can see Shawn finished the siding up to the soffit, and he actually got the fascia covered. that you see exposed on this picture. He did a really good job on the interior corner. Looks very professional.

Maybe next siding project will be to start on the front gable! The Tyvek is not doing so good, so we're going to have to put another layer of Tyvek to fix a nice tear the wind put in it a couple of weeks ago. But what can you expect when you leave it exposed for so long.

The front gable gets a different style of siding. Intead of lap siding, we'll be using shingles, so that will be a bit trickier to install I think. We also want to have some stone veneer to spruce up the front a bit, but at $100-$150 per sq. ft. on materials, it will probably wait until next year.

Here are the pictures of the refrigerant line for the heat pump. This is before:














This is After:

Much, much better. You can just barely see the line come out through the bottom piece of trim.

We still need to fix the hole through the band board, but nothing a little foam can't fix. It is sandable and paintable, so when the exterior gets the second coat of paint, then it will be fine.

Here's the view from the inside. Shawn cut the foam off and drilled the hole through the concrete, so the contractor re-did the line, and once done, Shawn filled it back up with foam and cut it flush. They still have not fixed the HRV hood, but they are supposed to come out this week to do it.

Shawn and I will work on getting more electrical boxes installed, and next will be to get the light boxes for ceiling lights and get those up. Then the electrician will come out to mark the route for wires, and we'll drill the holes and channels in the foam for the wires to run to the boxes. We'll also run any coax cables and some telephone/cat5 cables for computer networking.

Then the electrician will come back to run electrical wires. I do believe there's an inspection that needs to be done of the rough-in, and if we get the ok, we should be good to drywall over the electrical. But before drywall, we have to finish installing the thermostats and low-voltage wiring for the radiant heat. As soon as we have electricity for that, we'll fill up the system and test it out.
If that goes ok, then we'll move onto installing the water lines to the kitchen, bath, and laundry and finally we'll be ready for drywall!
Seems close enough to grasp!

Until next time.