Building our own house: Phase IV

What I call Phase IV I have yet to blog about. It's basically what we did this year on the old house and the new one while we were in the middle of the 9-month process of bidding and talking back and forth with banks and contractors for the final build of this house.
One big part of Phase IV was the old house demolition. As I said before, that one will have to wait since I want to take my time with that one and not rush through it.

The other big part of Phase IV was our window wells. So let me remind you of what this area looked like when it was first backfilled.

Back in summer of 2009

Back in 2008, we had made the window wells out of treated plywood since they were going to be temporary and we'd be re-doing them the next year. :)

Then, in 2010 we decided that the elevation of the dirt was too high and you couldn't really see out of the windows, so we decided to lower the grade, to this:

And this is how they've looked since!

You can see the dirt is lower towards the middle. You can alse see how much of an eye sore they've been these past 4 years, but without the money to do them right, they had to do. (Also notice off to the side above the garage doors that there's siding still missing there too).

Finally this year we had the cash saved up for this project, and we had saved enough money to pay someone else to do it! So while we worked on the side figuring out how to finish this house, we decided to hire our friends at Impressions Landscape to install a couple of retaining walls around the window wells and some steps into the wells.

You can see now very well out of those windows! No ugly wood to look at anymore.

Scott started the work by using his skid loader to rip out the old treated wood wells and shape the dirt around so it was ready for new retaining walls, as you can see above.

We love our new retaining walls!

The stone that we picked was Anchor stone, Highland style in the sandstone color. Scott did a nice job with the retaining wall. We love the way the stone looks, and the color seems to go well with our siding color as well as our shingle colors.

And so does Bianca!

And of course, the new walls became instant magnets for kids to climb up and down. So now that the window wells were done, it was time to finish the siding on this wall. First step was to rip out the old faded Tyvek, and to redo the waterproofind around the windows. Both of these products are meant to be protected from the elements behind siding, so you can't blame the product for not lasting 4 years out in the sun, wind, rain and snow.

Since our walls on the basement are covered with foam, and foam exposed to the sun begins to degrade, we had to brush off the coat of powder on the surface so that the new peel n stick flashing would adhered. Also, because our basement walls have this foam, you can't just use any asphalt based flashing. We needed a butyl based product that would not eat the foam. Luckily, we were able to find some Protecto Wrap at our local Home Depot.

Peel n Stick window flashing

Here you can see Shawn sticking the flashing on the top of the window.

So here is a close up of the windows after being properly flashed. Some people may think it's a little overkill to flash almost 18" on either side, and if this was a normal house, I would agree. (But I never claim we do normal things around here). The way we built our windows is with window bucks. If you scroll up and look at the third picture in this post, you can see two different colors of foam.

White - which is the wall foam, and blue - which is the foam over the window bucks. So in addition to the joint between window and buck (which is normally flashed with 4-6" flashing tape), we also have a joint between wood buck and concrete (where blue foam meets white foam). Thus, a 16" piece of flashing actually covers both joints.

After the peel an stick flashing went up, Shawn installed some metal flashing around the stone. Because the siding is not really supposed to be touching dirt or rock we need to leave a small gap. Also, it would be a tedious task if we shaped each piece of siding to fit around the stepping stone. So when the siding is installed, you'll see this galvanized flashing peeking through the gap. You can see the silver metal next to the stone in the two pictures above.

The next step was to re-install the Tyvek. Even though it's not really needed on the foam exterior on the concrete walls, we still decided to add the Tyvek housewrap as part of our strategy to help keep water from getting to those joints in the windows.

So here is what our new window well area looked like after new Tyvek was installed. You can also see the new planter boxes in between the two windows. Someday we'll add some tall grasses to help hide the two electrical panels. We also want to paint those panels the same color as the siding so they blend better as well.

The next tasks were to install trim around windows and install the siding. So here are our finished window wells.