We're FINALLY under Construction!

Sometimes it's still hard to believe that we finally got started on the final build of the house! It's been a few weeks and a lot happened.
The framers got started on Monday, Veteran’s day. They finished some of the framing that we didn't do in the beginning, like the corner tub, since we weren't sure what we were doing there. And of course, the good think about building for four years is that you have time to change your mind. The bad thing about having 4 years to build something is that you have time to change your mind. So I changed my mind on a couple of things and Shawn changed his mind of a couple of things. Add to that the things that needed fixing or changed because they didn't turn out quite like they should have the first place (like garage utility doors that didn't close! Or a door framed in the wrong spot!).

That day framing started was a holiday for us so we were here during the day. It felt really weird to have construction going on and we weren't doing any of it. The other part that felt weird was that we're not in charge, but if you know me, you probably can't believe that I will have my nose out of it. I still geek people out with my engineering technicalities. But hey, if I wasn't picky about measurements being to the inch, we would have found out too late that the fridge wouldn't fit in the space they framed last week. And I do probably find it hard to let the contractor do his job (he's probably tired of me already asking questions all the time) :)

But yay! Finally… all of the bidding, and pricing, and fretting, and chasing of our tails… it finally all paid off and came to fruition! It's all in God's timing.

Like an attic.

So first things first… remember what our main floor looked like? All of this insulation had to go. Shawn wanted to dump it or burn it, but being the hoarder in denial that I am, I convinced him to save it. We could use it someday, like in his future shop out there. So here’s the pile of insulation making its way to our barn loft. The easiest way to get it out was to dump it out the upstairs slider onto the trailer and make several trips.

Wish there had been an easier way (besides burning!) to take care of this.

You can see here how high it piled in front of our barn! Being the super itchy stuff, this job called for tyvek suits and masks. Shawn and I took turns climbing up the ladder to haul this up. Took us most of the afternoon to do it, but we got it done. I think Shawn still hates me for wanting to save it, but it will come in handy. (I’m sure.)

Proper PPE

Then we vacuumed the main floor and got whatever junk we might have lying around out of the way.

The other thing we did to get ready was to move everything out of the house that was not essential and moved all of our furniture to the garage. We also packed everything away, moved both the kids and our beds into one bedroom. All we have left is two mattresses, a folding table and green lazy boy chair, a coffe table and the tv, some clothes and toiletries. 90% of the kitchen got packed and we’ll make do with paper plates and cups. Funny how you can actually live with just about nothing.

Evan thought it was fun to suck all the dead flies!

Now it was time for construction.

The framing crew tackled several things on the to-do list of changes:

1.       Finish the framing in the master bath to frame the tub and the walk-in shower

The corner tub will go on the left, the walk-in shower is to the right

2.       Rearrange mudroom so we could open up the wall to the stairwell and have railing there

The wall to the left used to go all the way to the end of the stairwell opening

3.       Open up the wall in the stairwell into the basement

It definitely got cold in the basement with no insulation and open to the upstairs! We are notorious for building in winter (just check past posts in winter!)

4.       Add an arched art niche in the wall in the entrance foyer

5.       Redo the main door to go from a standard door with a transom window on top to a tall 8 ft door.

Opening up that wall now lets us see the door from the kitchen! Really helped to open it up a bit more.

6.       Frame the basement bar

It was becoming very difficult to stay out of the way of work.

7.       Add a closet in basement hobby room

(Mmmmh. I thought I had taken a picture, but looks like I didn't) Where the washer and dryer were in the basement, we decided to turn it into a proper closet, but left the W/D hook-ups. Eventually when kids do their own laundry, they won't have to haul it upstairs.

8.       Frame in the new fireplace upstairs

That was supposed to be a corner fireplace, but it wouldn't fit!

9. Redo the exterior front entrance

Next will be to add some columns!

10. Moved the garage door over

Door used to be to the left, and it was too close to the parked cars when it opened

11. Add a landing inside the garage from the new door location to the house door and some steps.

12. And other miscellaneous things here in there, like bulkheads, access panels, and others. Everything turned out great, but one of the things that pleased us a lot was having the 3 doors in the garage re-hung. They now close right without catching!

I can already envision how things will look when finished. And thanks to Houzz I got tons of pictures for ideas.

So we're a couple of weeks into construction and we were already tired, but not of construction! No… we’re tired of all the decisions. Eventually we will have to pick out everything from light fixtures, to paint colors, to even the color of the outlets! There seems to be a decision that needs to be made for everything. But obviously that’s life under construction!

The other thing that became very obvious to us was that there’s no way we can stay in the house while it is under construction. Initially the work was supposed to go main floor first, we move up, then they finish the basement. But as soon as we signed the contract things changed. Apparently we're not saving much to do it this way, and it will mess up the schedule trying to get subs to come back for the basement. So scratch that plan. New plan is that both the main floor and basement will be worked on at once!

We quickly had to find a place to live, and we’ll actually be moving out this weekend. Not very many places rent by the month, so our choices were very limited (like only 2 places!). And guess where we’re going? Back to campus town!We’re moving to a basement apartment in an old house 3 blocks from campus. So here’s to hoping we don’t have neighbors that party more than they study.

We’re hoping we will only have to be there December and January and that we’ll be able to move back in February. We’ll see how things go!

To save money, one of the duties we are responsible for is cleaning. So we will be going back to the house a lot to sweep and clean. In the basement, the carpet that we installed two years ago will be pulled up and reused in a different room. So I bought some of this handy carpet cover protector and covered the carpet to help keep it from getting too dirty while under construction. Rich wants us to pull it up and roll it out, but our foam pad underneath is glued to the concrete, and we think that carpet will protect it better, so we’re leaving it for now.

Also, since the basement will get finished as well, we will get ceiling drywall (finally) and texture. So this meant that we needed to take off all of the cover plates in the basement outlets and switches. Another thing that needs to go completely is our temporary kitchen! So now that we are moving out, we took that apart and moved it out. The appliances we moved to the bedrooms so they have room to work in the bar/lounge area.

Things are pretty chaotic, but progress is going along well!

Next month: Rough Ins will start!

Phase V - The Final Build

Now to update you on what's happened with this whole finish construction deal. In my last blog post I shared how dissappointing it was to hear that we had to somehow cut so much from the budget to make it work.
We had it narrowed down to 4 contractors. One never got back to us, another one told us that they were too busy to give us the attention we needed. But that didn't really make us feel discouraged since our top 2 picks were the ones that came back with their proposals and ideas on how to cut the budget without cutting the quality of what we wanted.

I think either contractor would have done an awesome job, but in the end it came down to the contractor fee between the two of them, since both had similar ideas of what to cut, and how to make it work. In the end, we ended up choosing Tasteful Homes to finish building our home.

We met with Rich, the owner, several times to go over the budget, and we went back and re-priced a lot of things, like cabinets, flooring, etc. etc. In reality it was impossible to cut enough out of the budget to fit the construction loan amount. So one thing we did was to finance the new geothermal heating and cooling systems separate through the vendor. We did this for two reasons: 1 - It will allow us to have the construction loan so we don't have to cut so much on the things we want, and 2 - because we will get about 40% of the cost back in tax rebates from both the feds and the state, as well as rebates from our electric company. This will allow us to pay-off this loan within a year.

So we went back to the bank with our new proposed budget, a copy of our contract and the specs to finish the house. And they agreed that the cuts we've made will not affect the value of the finished property so we got our loan approved! So after getting the title search on our property, we closed on our construction loan and signed the contract with Tasteful Homes.

It is hard to believe, but we're actually going to finish our house! Yay!

I have always felt that it is all in God timing and for his purpose, so we have tried to be very patient during these long months of going around in circles.So in the end I began to feel that maybe it is for the best that the appraisal came back the way it did, because believe me, if the appraisal had cone higher and we would have gotten a bigger loan amount, we would have spent every penny of it.
This setback really forced us to look at how we're going to spend every penny and to make it count. But we feel very happy and very confident that Rich and his team will help us make our home the way we want it.

So Phase V will be the last phase of this major project. Construction is scheduled to start on Veteran's Day! We can't wait!

Phase IV - Two huge things.

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.

Worth waiting 4 years to see!

Since we had all of the siding tools out, we also decided to finish the last two rows of siding in the front of the garage.

So now all that is left to finish on this wall is to install some stone veneer at the bottom where you can see the exposed Tyvek.

Until next time!

Scratch that...

So after months and months of bidding, meetings, phone calls, e-mails... blah blah... we narrowed down our options between 4 different contractors vs. building ourselves. And finally we got to appraisal time, ordered it and waited 6 weeks to get it back.

Hardly worth all of that wait!. Apparently in our County similar houses that have sold in the last 4-6 months aren't worth what it will cost to build ours! Even the bank's own cost-to-build method of appraisal came back that to build our house today from scratch would cost $60 grand more than what it actually appraises for. So off to a bad start for us, because it means that the max bank can lend us is about two thirds of what the original budget was if we went with a contractor.

So we're very discouraged. How can you cut a third off the budget WITHOUT cutting so much that you now hurt the appraisal value of the house? In the end it has to appraise for the same or more when finished. So if the appraisal was based on tile, hardwoods, granites, etc. etc. we can't now switch to linoleum and laminate to make the budget work because now we're downgrading the level of finish we used to appraise it to begin with. *sigh*

We told our final 4 what the appraised value came at and how much we need to trim our budget by to make it work. Let's say none of them sounded overly optimistic that this will happen by cutting so much. So we've sent a list of possible ways to cut and they'll work some suggestions and we'll see if we can make it work.

Until then, we wait and we pray for guidance on how to move forward.

June to February Part V

This was supposed to be the last post that brought it all together and kicked us off onto 2012's journey of house construction. But on initial investigation it appeared that after Shawn finished with siding most of the garage front, we stopped.


We did have our first Thanksgiving hosting family at our place. Big news there was that we fried a Turkey for the first time and we didn't burn the house down either (though it did cross our minds to try frying it in the old house in case it accidentally caught fire). Then we liked it so much we fried another turkey for our own Christmas... and ended up frying a third one during Shawn's side of the family Christmas!

After discussing on what to do next, we decided to focus on dumping as much debt as we could. So we went through Financial Peace University in late fall. If you're not familiar with this, it is Dave Ramsey's course that teaches financial wisdom through his baby steps http://www.daveramsey.com/new/baby-steps/. So we re-did our monthly budget and had been working on baby step 2 - pay off all debts (not including mortgage). We sold out 07 SUV and had to use some of our savings to sell it, since we owed more than it was worth. Then used the rest of our savings to buy an older used minivan. This meant that we got rid of over $7K in debt, since the minivan cost that much less than what we used to owe on the SUV. That felt great to cashflow the minivan and dump some debt.

While we worked on our financial outlook, we also began to think about the next year and how we'd proceed with house building. One thing was clear, we needed to clear the old house of everything we were still storing in there. So Shawn built some shelves for the garage and everything that we were keeping came from the old house straight to the washer if it could be washed, or thoroughly cleaned before it set foot in the new house. Then we stuffed it wherever, mostly in the storm room and took some more things to goodwill.

Then new year came and the non-existent snow melted, and it was time to really think about house construction and what project to do this year. One thing we knew for sure is that this year the siding must be finished, and the window wells/retaining walls must be done. That of course made us wonder how to pay for all this work.
So rather than keep on our debt snowball, we decided to push the pause button on debt reduction and pile our extra cash while we decided what we were going to do for sure.

With interest rates so low, we thought we might as well look into getting a construction loan and see if we can finish the whole house at once! So time to start talking to subs and see how much all of that business will cost. And that's what we've been doing since February  (on the new house side of things).

Of course, it started with hunting for a bank. (Try explaining our not so simple project to these banks that don't want to lend money to anyone since the economy crashed!) Income wise we're good, even debt wise we're good... but they are not comfortable with this or that... and after shopping around a bit for cheaper closing costs, finally we find a local small bank to work with.

Now the next big question? Are we our own general or do we hire a general contractor to finish off? We decided to compare both options, so let's collect bids from subs, most of which we've worked with before (drywall, electical, hvac, carpenter, etc.) and start meeting with generals.

And guess what? We're still on that! So between February and now we've met with quite a few contractors, subs, and we've asked for tons of bids, but most don't get back to us. We did get enough info to have a final idea of what type of budget we're talking about, so we submitted a budget to the bank and ordered the appraisal. That was 5 weeks ago... still no appraisal. Sounds like the appraiser is having trouble finding comps.In reality, until we get what this house will appraise for when finished, we really won't finalize the budget and details. So we continue to wait for the appraisal and the magic number.

I do have faith that God does things for a reason, all to his purpose and glory. I also firmly believe that our house will be finished, but it may not be in our timing, but His. So we keep praying and waiting. I know that when the time is right, things will fall into place. We've done a lot of legwork to get to this point, and soon we'll know how to proceed.

So that's pretty much the update on the new house. But we have not been idle. On the old house side of things, we switched to destruction rather than construction. But nothing is ever easy around here.

We figured that we can't burn the old house down (it will kill the big trees and I won't let Shawn do that.) We find that getting permits through EPA/DNR for the fire department to burn our house down is cumbersome (plus it will still kill the trees). Bid to hire the bulldozer and excavator to tear it down and bury it was super high because they can't just push the house down and burn it (again, the trees). So what they would need to is to shove the house aside, dig super big hole and bury it all, so twice the cost of normal houses (I've never claimed we do normal things around here).   That of course led to me balking and insisting that we're not burying the asbestos siding on our property (even though it is perfectly legal in our state and the EPA won't get you as a homeowner for burying your own asbestos). So I convince the husband that there's no choice but to at least tear asbestos out ourselves (since to hire a pro to mitigate would be expensive).

But the details and pictures will have to wait until I can do that topic justice.

June to February part IV

I am still posting the overdue information from last fall, and trying to catch up. I think with this one I should be all caught up on what we were up to last year. 

Ooops.

The next big project after the siding was installed in the back and the garage was poured, was to purchase and install new garage doors!

So you can imagine how excited we were since it only took 3 years to get to this point. :)

But before we could have the doors installed, we needed to prepare the wall to receive them. So the first part of September, Shawn spent evenings and weekends framing a wall inside of the garage.

Back in July of 2010, I blogged about the fact that our garage footings ended up short of where the exterior wall actually needed to be framed. The good news was (and still is) that the trusses only need 1.5" of bearing to transfer the load from the roof to the footings. We still didn't like to leave the load bearing right at the edge of the concrete footing (like you see in the pictures), so we added an additional load bearing wall right next to the exterior wall to help transfer the roof load onto the footing directly. 

But fixable.

On normal houses the exterior wall pretty much lines up with the concrete, so framing for the wall to receive a garage door is not difficult. Our house because of the fact that the wall cantilevers, and the fact that the ICF forms add an addinal 2.5" of foam, we needed to add another framed wall inside the garage so that the new garage doors could actually close against it. You can see in the picture above the brand new 2x4 wall that Shawn built right next to the foam on the inside of the garage.

On this picture you can also see that the footing on this wall was not out of alignment as bad as in the first picture which is the other side of the garage. We measured from the exterior face of the sheathing of the garage wall to make sure both walls ended up the same distance in from the exterior. Remember that the exterior walls was framed right, so the garage is square. It's the footings that are askew. You can notice on the second picture that the framed 2x4 walls is not butted against the foam. On the other hand, the exterior face of this wall actually matches the same of the exterior of the footing foam. You can see in the first picture that the wall cantilever outs on the exterior of the garage. We will have to build this up when the time comes for siding/stone facing to be installed here.

What a great helper.

Work seemed to go better with a little extra tiny set of  hands for help. Bianca had a great time collecting wood  and keeping mummy busy while she climbed on  anything that looked climbable. She got the hang of the  ladder very quickly!

 You can see the finished wall on the picture to the left. This is what it looks like from inside of the garage. 

Because the garage wall ended being extra wide with the addition of the new wall, we felt it would be a shame to waste that space between garage doors if we were to just cover it with drywall.

And you can also see the nice set of built-in shelves that Shawn built between the two garage doors. They are deep enough that a gallon jug of antifreeze fits well. It will be handy to store auto care products within easy reach.

After Shawn got the wall all built, he covered the gap with cement board siding sheets that were cut to fit as you can see in the next picture.

After the inside of the garage door openings were covered, Shawn painted the top, and top halves of the sides with our siding paint color.

The bottom sections will at some point in the future (hopefully this year) get covered with stone facing.

Here's another angle showing the wall, and the new shelves. You can also see in this picture how high the stone veneer will come up on the wall. It's about 3 ft from the floor.

I really like the fact that because the footing and wall didn't line up, we had to do this little extra fix. (Shawn probably would not agree about "liking" extra labor... and don't get us started on contractor screw ups!) But now our garage wall is a lot deeper than it otherwise would have been. I think in the end when the exterior siding and stone veneer are finished, this will be a neat and unique little feature to our home that is not common. I like not common. :)

Structurally, the wall is sound with the extra load bearing directly onto the footing. The addition of the interior wall was mostly to make the garage doors work. Once drywall and siding are on, it will look great.

Not long after Shawn finished the interior wall, the contractor we selected came and installed the garage doors. We opted to go with a little bit better doors that had a little more insulation than standard doors. We also decided to go with belt drive garage door openers and we really like it that they are not very noisy when the doors open and close. 

Here is a shot of our new garage doors right after they were installed. And if you notice such things, In this picture you can see only two of the window inserts had come with the doors. Rest were on back order. Regardless, we were very excited to finally have garage doors! We were also very much looking forward to not having to scrape snow off car windshileds when winter came! And keeping the cats from coming in and marking everything in here. The list is endless of why we like our new garage doors.

After the garage doors were installed, Shawn returned to the job of siding the exterior of the garage. If you will notice, you can see in this picture that we redid the Tyvek paper. Here Shawn has already installed the trim. Notice the trim that went inside of the garage door opening. This is the little "extra" detail that will be on our doors. I like it a lot.

Shawn is now starting the first row of siding, and on the picture below you can see the progress

. 

It's hard to see in the picture, but the trim above the garage doors has a keystone detail in the middle that turned out nice and matches the same detail of the front bedroom window. This picture shows where we stopped the siding job last fall. Shawn didn't finish the last two rows because over on the porch side, the soffit and fascia has not been finished yet (one more thing we hope gets done this year!)

So once the garage was enclosed, we looked for the next project. We decided it was time that we probably got to the chimney on the roof and covered it with some siding. So early October, Shawn and I climbed up onto the roof. 

The chimney is basically a framed box that was literally just nailed to the roof. We were surprised that in the three years it had been up there it hadn't been ripped up by some of the strong winds we've seen out here. So to beef it up, Shawn installed some bracing an used threaded rod to anchor this sucker down.

Here you can see inside the chimney and the anchoring job on one of the corners.

I won't take too much time to go over the steps for siding the chimney. In summary: We basically re-tyveked the chimney, then bought and cut to shape sheets of cement board siding and picked the windiest day in October to haul sheet goods up on the roof. It was a miracle Shawn didn't fly off, but luckily the work went without incident.

After the siding was installed, Shawn installed the trim, and put a temporary cover on the top. So here are some shots of the chimney siding work.

 

Looks great!

And to end this post, here is a shot of the old house as seen from the roof of the new one. You can see that the leaves are starting to fall from the trees, and temps had started to drop as well.

I am now caught up to about mid-October of last year. I can't remember that there was much more work that we did in the fall, so I'll have to rely on pictures we took to remember. So next post should be a smaller one to update through the winter, or I may even be able to get caught up on whatever has happened the first six months of this year! Which up until a couple of weeks ago, there wasn't much to really update on. But I'll save details for the next post. Good night.

June to February 2012 Part III

Here's the April post a month late.

Simple tools accomplish the job

Regardless, this is still a recap of what happened last summer and fall. So this post is going to showcase getting our garage floor poured!

The first thing we did was to get a bid for the work. We decided to go once again with the same flatwork contractor that poured our basement slab and porch cap back in 2008/2009.

Also at this same time we thought that if we wanted to have a drain in the garage, the time to decide that was now. The first thing Shawn did was to dig a hole in the center of the garage where the drain would go.
You can see Shawn here is using a 4x4 to compact the bottom of the hole to make sure the drain would not settle.

And the drain we chose is that black square box you see in the picture. The top grate comes off so we're able to vacuum out whatever debris will go into the catch basin.
 
The problem with deciding to add a drain to the plans is that there was no way of getting out of having to dig the trench for the pipe.












 


Also, Shawn had to drill through the concrete footing so that the pipe could daylight outside. He used a hammer drill to drill a series of holes in a circle, then chipped away the concrete in the middle until he poked through to the outside.

It's hard to see in the picture, but he is wearing a respirator since it was quite a bit of dusty work.

It was also hot. This was around the same time that we installed our A/C that I previously mentioned in the last post.

Ah, yes... no lack of digging on this project

After he finally poked through the wall, Shawn went outside and dug the trench for the exterior pipe.

Then it was time to set the drain and to install the pipe. We needed the drain to be installed 2" lower than the outside edge of the slab so that when they poured the concrete, the floor would slope towards the drain.

Gluing pipe, and Evan with his flowers

After getting the drain set, Shawn glued the drain pipe, and in the next picture you can see him working on gluing the pipe on the outside, while Evan showcases the lovely bouquet of flowers he found. I don't know their name, but it's a nice weed that we seem to have in abundance around our yard.


After the drain work was done, it was time to level the ground and to run a compactor to get the floor nice and compacted so it won't settle. Evan got to run some of the power equipment and had fun helping.

So strong!

You can also see in the next picture how big of a helper he was. He helped stack the pink boards of insulation that we decided to put under the garage slab.

The insulation under the concrete will help keep the concrete from sweating in the summer and  water pressure from the ground from wicking up into the inside of the garage. Also, in the winter time it should help once the garage is all finished and insulated to help regulate the temp. inside the garage.

And, if Shawn needs to run some heat in the garage so he can tinker with something or other (or if I ever get to have wood shop started and projects running!) we can work comfortably in the garage and help keep whatever little heat we may use.

The next step was to get the insulation down, seams taped and we were ready for concrete!
I wish I could say that it was easy as that. Unfortunately because of adding the 2 inches of foam that we had not originally planned for, and switching from a 4" slab to a 6" slab when the contractor came to shoot elevations, we realized that there would not be enough room at the new elevation to make the steps onto the porch on the outside work quite right. We could have gone with a 4" slab and made it fit, but we wanted to have the stronger, thicker slab for extra factor of safety.

Here you can see what the floor looked like before the concrete was poured. You can also see the rebar installed to help when the slab does crack (and it will! It's concrete!) the pieces don't pull apart. We did have control joints (saw cuts) into the concrete to tell the inevitable cracks where to go, rather than let them crack randomly where they will.

This was just after they poured.

Nothing like a concrete truck to fascinate kids!

Who could resist running on a fresh slab?

Evan loved all the construction

The kids had a good time watching the crew work. Evan was excited to see the concrete truck come in and do its thing.

Here Evan poses after the concrete was just poured and one of the workers is left smoothing out the surface. You can see the bullfloat behind Evan.

And after we came home from work, the new concrete was irresistible. You can see Bianca running around testing the new concrete floor.

The contractor came back later to do the outside slab. You can see in the next picture where the forms are set, and the steel reinforcement is already installed. That night, Shawn and I worked on getting the catch basins for the eave spouts installed.


He also installed a bronze cap to the sewer clean out that is right under the porch.

Here you can see Shawn working on gluing the clean out.

 

Here he is working on hooking up the black drain pipe we installed for draining the eavespouts. We're using a catch basin so that leaves will get trapped here, and only water will go in.

Here's a view of the slab after it was poured.

After the slab was dry, the contractor came back to form the front step, and then it took a couple of weeks for him to finally come back and pour the step.

But here you can see the step. Because of adding the 2" of foam and switching from 4" slab to 6" slab for the garage and driveway, we only ended up needing 1 step.

 

I found this picture where Bandit was showcasing last year's early birthday present for me from my in-laws. On one of their trips to come down and help us while siding the back peak, my in-laws stopped by Menards and bought some pavers. You can see the small patio right off the back slider door. It's great to not have to step into mud anymore! 

That's it for this post. I probably have one more posts to get caught up. Then I can update on what's happened this year!