We are now Roughed-In

A lot of work went in the first part of December!


First off, we moved that first week in December to our new apartment. Since it’s only one bedroom we’re still all piled into one room. It’s fun… like long term camping. Kids seem to enjoy it. :)

One tired crew after moving all day!

My in-laws once again showed up to help and we got the bare minimums moved in a couple of truckloads and vanloads. But in order to make room for all of the subs/materials that were coming in and out we had to empty out the garage and empty out the basement completely.

Most of our priceless possessions are out here!

So as to not have to pay for a storage unit since we now have to pay rent and another set of utility bills, we decided to just put our stuff outside on the concrete slab where the old house bedroom used to be.
We covered the whole thing with tarps, and I have my fingers crossed that things will be ok outdoors. (Shawn I think hopes a tornado comes in December and makes just “my junk” as he calls it disappear).

Street View from Google of our apartment. We're in the basement in this old house.

Here’s a picture of our new digs for the next couple of months.

Graduation weekend someone was having a good time and decided our vehicles parked out there didn’t look good enough, so they took it upon themselves to decorate them. Several vehicles got the treatment. Shawn covered it up with some fancy aluminum tape (all we had on hand since we were leaving for church when we discovered this Sunday am) so you can't read what's on the trunk now very well.

The joys of living in campustown

We tried a little buffing compound and we think it will come off ok. Since the repair is less than our deductible we'll take care of it ourselves. Still, we decided to not fix the car until we move back home in case they decide to get creative with our car again. Evan was excited when the police showed up to file a report, and asked the officer if he would put the bad guys in jail. I was hoping (even if not true) that he would tell our son that yes, he would. But he replied, “I would have to catch them first, and that’s not likely.” Great lesson there.

There’s definitely a different pace to construction when you have a contractor in charge! With us, it was one sub at a time and one project at a time for months at a time (since we only had money to pay one at a time), so not so much happened at once.  But the rough-in stage with a contractor is a whirlwind of subs coming and going. The nice thing is that progress happens fast too!

Early December brought the plumber and electrician in. The plumbing labor was now over budget because he had to redo his bid. (That’s what happens when you redo things) The electrical rough-ins had some new additions that were not part of the bid so needed to update and that went over budget too. Figures. But, plumbing and wiring are done!

Drill Rig and the pipes coming out of the wells that got buried below frost leves

During this time, the HVAC contractor sent in his well-drilling sub-contractor so we could have the geothermal wells dug before the ground froze. They arrived early in the am one day and they were still out there drilling when we went to bed. They dug 4 wells about 200’ deep and the only spot that seemed to work was near the house by the garage. The guy commented that after about 50ft he hit solid limestone for the rest of the way. They will come back later to drill a line to hook up the wells outside to get the pipes into the basement. They will use a directional boring machine to tunnel under the house and pop-into the basement. Since we have radiant heat tubing in the concrete all over the basement, there is only one room that had no pipes.  He said they can get that drill bit located so perfectly that they can pop right on the spot. So I’ll get to mark the spot and we’ll see how they do.

Roughing-in some data/cable/phone wires

One thing that was not included in the electrical bid was the technology/low voltage wiring for things like phone, cable, data. So we met with the folks at Easy Living Store to talk about these things and got their estimate back. We can’t afford to pay for them to run phone, cable, and data so we ended up doing that ourselves. I wanted to have intercoms at the door, upstairs and the basement, but the salesman talked us out of it since he said now with wireless baby monitors and cell phones the intercoms don’t end up being used as much. I had this grand vision of pushing a button and sweetly calling the children from wherever they were to come up for dinner, and they’d swiftly come marching up the stairs. Yeah… he said that never works, only in movies. He has intercoms in his house and never used them when the kids were little (they couldn’t reach to touch the button to respond) and now that they are teens he just texts his kids to get their attention. So no intercoms (plus not in the budget either, so there!).

Shawn's building boxes that will go in the ceiling to keep insulation from touching the in-ceiling speakers

Also, we wanted to someday have whole house stereo speakers, so we wired those too since we knew we could do that (we did it before in the basement) and we could save the labor to have them do it. The Easy Living Store had good deals on wire shelving for closets, so we will have them install those. They also prewired for security cameras and a monitor since because of our layout we can’t see out the front door or the house very well. And out in the country people just pull up to your property and when home alone I’d like to see if it’s the neighbor selling girl scout cookies or some stranger that I’d rather not open the door to.

The Beam Outlet

Here’s where it wasn’t a good idea for Shawn to let me talk to the salesman alone: I ended up falling in love with the idea of a built-in vacuum cleaner (totally not in the budget anywhere!) and I somehow convinced Shawn to let me have one.

(Shawn says I might have agreed to not get birthday, mother’s day, anniversary, Christmas presents for like 10 years while I was tripping on built-in vacuum euphoria… I thought I said for 1 year).

See that little white box with a pipe going down to the floor in the picture to the left? That’s one of the vacuum outlets.

One cool thing is we ended up getting some floor dustpan outlets too. So I can sweep the floors and push the dirt and junk to the dustpan to clean up. Neat!

Next thing that got installed were basement and main floor fireplaces. And guess what? These two actually came under budget. That was a nice surprise.

The main floor fireplace will be propane. Originally, when the house was framed 4 years ago, the upstairs fireplace was going to go in the corner of the room. But we ended up going with bigger windows in the Great Room, and forgot about that. So when the framer came to add the fireplace, now there wasn’t room for it.

So we moved it to the middle of the room. Rich, our contractor, said our room was a nice size that a big fireplace will look good here.

We’re very excited and can’t wait to see this all finished with a mantle and the stone installed as well as how it will look with our flooring.

The basement fireplace was also installed. This one is a wood burning fireplace, and the chimney for it went all the way through the main floor and up to the attic and through the roof.

Here in this picture you can see the pipe that now has been framed in.

The basement fireplace is huge. Not only is the wall massive, the unit too.
It really dominates this space, and we like how it's a big focal point.
Our vision for this room is cozy chairs with bookcases lining up the wall.

This is our wood burning fireplace.

Ahhh... I can just picture cold winter weekend afternoons snuggling up with a good book. Ok... maybe that's my vision, but sure sounds nice doesn't it?

Vent baffles in the attic.

To save some money here and there, we take care of some things. One of these was installing ventilation baffles up in the attic. This task wasn’t too hard. The purpose of a ventilation baffle is to allow the attic to ventilate. So what these things do is they keep the insulation from spilling out of the attic into the eaves, clogging up the vents. You install it so there is a free gap along the roof sheathing, and this allows air to get into the attic and vent out through the vents installed at the ridges of the roof. Ventilation will help to get hot air out of the attic in the summer, control humidity accumulation in there, and in the winter to help keep the attic cool so that the snow on the roof won’t melt because of a hot attic thus leading to ice dam problems. It’s a good thing to have ventilation, so we got these to help our attic have adequate ventilation.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that so much happened in two weeks. But that's a good thing.

So now that all utilities have been roughed in, we're ready for the next big step: Insulation! That will be the focus of my next post.