Lots more stuph.

Lots of little stuff has been done over the last few months. Three people live in the house now. One of us is very tiny, noisy, and stinky, and demands much attention... so the house has received a proportionately non-existent amount of work lately.

A few months ago, I finally finished wrapping the downstairs windows with sheetrock, after which Pete installed the new sills. Still need final paint... but that'll have to wait.

The last major construction for the summer was the front entry deck/stairs. We got the piers dug and poured, after deciding to change the entire arrangement of the stairs (to avoid impacting the parking situation... the stairs originally were intended to go down towards the back of my truck in the 2nd photo below). We also had to avoid a quite large root from the big pine there... and had to hack through an even larger bundle of roots from the stump to the left.

Then, since I was running out of time, I more or less took a stab in the dark and held the 6' level in one hand and a tape in the other and proceeded to use a highly sophisticated system of pebbles and nails strategically pushed around with my foot and ultimately just said to hell with it and formed up a simple little footing for the bottom of the stringers and tossed some concrete in and called it good. I ended up only being off by an eighth of an inch. Luck or skills, either pays the bills, so they say. They is stupid though.

And here's the stringers in place. They ended up being way more difficult than intended, what with all the compounderin' angles n' such. But it worked.

So that's it for photos now. The entry stairs are done, but the railing and deck surface are just temporary for this winter. The interior of the house is 99% done. Some final touchup paint is needed here and there, and the stairs need handrails. I finally removed the old copper water lines to the old washer/dryer location in the kitchen last weekend, so the kitchen is getting closer to being wrapped up (for now). Put a couple more pieces of base in around the stairs in the dining area, finished the corner trim on the risers, put an exterior light above the front door, planted bunch of cheap end-of-summer-sale plants around the yard (including a massively reduced white(?) spruce in the conservancy lot next door- it's quite homely), removed the temp. power pole from the front yard and hauled it back over to Truckee (along with pumpjacks and a walk-plank), noticed that our nice but loud-dog-owning neighbor in back had moved out only to be replaced by a two-super-loud-dog-hellbent-on-keeping-the-munchkin-awake-owning new neighbor, crawled under the house with spray foam and tried to seal up the swiss-cheesiness of the existing house, sealed (sort of) the attic access door and added a nifty push-release magnetic latch, put door stops upstairs so the nice new walls don't get all gouged, put a new door bottom on the side door to again try to plug one more hole in the cheese, made another dump run and got rid of most of the rest of the scrap lumber which had been carefully arranged in an attractive junk pile in the front yard, put an ad on Craigslist and got rid of some other junk (orange fencing, old stove vent pipe and peripherals) within a half day of the ad posting, blah blah blah and finally, bringing us up to last weekend, thoroughly enjoyed shoveling the close to 3' of mid-November snow here in the good ol' KB banana belt of Tahoe... and also made it out to Squaw for opening weekend where both Renee and I had the pleasure of submarining into nipple-deep powder (to use the descriptive term-du-jour) while alternating watching the mini-man. More snow tonight, then time to give Thanks, then onwards and upwards we go. See you later.

Lots of pictures...

I obviously haven't posted for a while. A lot has happened (surprise). So let's get this started: after the drywall was mostly done, we moved on to painting. Thanks to Jay and Noelle for lots of help with that- here they are painting the east front bedroom wall green:


We rented a sprayer for some of the larger areas, but a lot still had to be done by hand. I have pretty much come to hate painting. It took a lot longer than expected... way too much masking, the walls sucked up a lot more paint than expected so we kept having to buy more, way too much cleaning of painting tools, etc, etc, etc. But, I can only imagine how many thousands of dollars we saved by doing it ourselves. Here's a photo of the front bedroom showing the accent wall, the main wall color, and the main ceiling color (50% lighter than the wall, but kinda hard to tell):

After the painting was finished, it was time for finish/trim work to start. So, I made one of the most useful purchases of the whole project. I bought a well-used but well-cared-for dual-bevel sliding compound miter saw from a contractor in Truckee. It came with a stand, and I also got a finish nailer and a pin nailer as part of the deal. Not bad for $280. Here's Wheeler enjoying the new saw:

We also got an amazing deal on some laminate flooring that was being closed out. It's called Dream Home Nirvana Allegheny something or other. It took some time to get accustomed to the installation procedure, but we eventually figured it out. Here are the first few rows of flooring starting in the back bedroom (note the ever-present drywall dust... that crap got everywhere):

We decided to add some difficulty to the flooring situation by running it continuous throughout the upstairs (i.e., no transitions at doorways). It took a bit more mental effort to do it that way, but I think the end result is a much cleaner and professional looking installation. Once we got the flooring installed through the laundry room, Pete started working on the baseboard and door casing. At this time, it was still somewhat of a wet Spring here in Tahoe so we had the miter saw upstairs the whole time. Luckily, we were able to rig up the shop-vac to the saw so it could suck up a lot of the dust while cutting... but still, things were pretty dusty up there (and pretty much everywhere else too). Here's a photo of the first pieces of base installed in the laundry room:

We then decided that it would be really nice to finally get the washer/dryer out of the kitchen, so the only thing we needed for that to be possible was to wire up the 220V outlet in the laundry closet. All things considered, it was pretty simple, even though I had never actually added a circuit to a panel before. I also had to swap out the power cord on the dryer to newer, safer, 4-prong cord rather than the olde 3-prong cord. Here's a photo of the dryer being moved out of the kitchen (the washer has already been pulled out from under it). Peanut can be seen scrounging for eats:
And here's the momentous occasion of Pete and me moving the dryer upstairs:
By now, it was getting pretty old having to lug the work lights all around upstairs, so we finally decided to tackle wiring up all of the finished electrical items (outlets, switches, fixtures, etc.). Again, Jay's help was vital, and we were able to get most of the circuits successfully wired into the new meter panel. It is absolutely awesome to actually have light and power everywhere upstairs now (especially in the attic). Also, I needed to make progress on the upstairs shower. I hadn't completely finished all the waterproofing, so in between working the flooring, and while Pete was doing lots of trim work, I installed the rest of the Kerdi around the niche and the window:

I had planned to do the tile installation myself all along, but time came to be in short supply, so Renée found a local tile guy to install the tile. He only does Kerdi showers, so it was nice that he was familiar with the system. Overall, the shower came out really nice. There were a few things that I would have done differently, but I also probably would've done a few things wrong too. Anyway, here's the shower, before the final wipe-down:

Here's Pete in the process of installing a window sill in the back room (note the functional ceiling light, and the flooring and base all installed):

While trim work was going on upstairs, we also were working on flooring on the stairs themselves. We peeled off the underlayment, and glued all the stair flooring down, alternating stairs so that one set could dry before being walked on, then doing the next set the next day:

Here's the front bedroom with everything pretty much finished:

And just after that photo was taken, we took a trip down to Ikea in Sacramento (I think it was Memorial Day weekend, if it matters) to pick up some new furniture. Here's a photo of Renée assembling dresser drawers:

And here's a photo of Renée on the almost-finished lower section of stairs, with the old crappy vinyl all cut out of the dining room. In the dining room, we had to tear out two layers of vinyl/linoleum, each with a 3/8" layer of plywood, and then another final 5/8" layer of plywood under that. After that, we discovered why past owners had installed all the extra wood: the existing subfloor was quite spongy. So, Pete and I added in another 2x6 floor joist in between each of the original floor joists, effectively taking it from a 24" OC framing situation to now being 12" OC. Needless to say, it's much better now.

Here's a photo of the upper stairs all finished and trimmed out:

Oh yeah, and one final little video of a very very important accomplishment upstairs:

More and more like a real house every day...

As of the last post, we were pretty much ready for drywall. Well, due to some miscommunication between the drywallers and me, it took a little longer than expected for them to get in here and start hanging the rock. But, that turned out to be a minor bit of good luck, as I happened to be upstairs staring at the spray-foamed portion of the ceiling one night and noticed what appeared to be a void in the foam. So I poked at it a bit and opened the hole a little bigger, and sure enough, there was a big cavity in there large enough to fit a good-sized cantaloupe, or maybe a small pumpkin if you prefer. After a bunch of poking and prodding around the rest of the area, I found a dozen more voids/cavities, none of which were as bad as the first one, but they all shouldn't have been there. The next day I picked up some cans of expanding foam and filled all the cavities as best I could. All in all, it wasn't that big of a deal, but I'm definitely happy knowing that the critical ceiling insulation is actually complete now. Here's a photo shwoing (sort of) one of the voids in the foam (it opens up much more once inside the initial hole):

In addition to fixing the ceiling insulation, I also decided to run a strip of adhesive weatherstrip-type foam around all of the wall bottom plates. There's a technique implemented to make houses more energy efficient known as the Airtight Drywall Approach (ADA), which is basically intended to limit as much airflow from the inside of the house to the outside. Drywall itself, especially when taped, textured, and painted, is virutally airtight. But, all around the edges of the drywall, such as at windows or floors, there are many gaps which aren't normally sealed. You would think the drywall would be screwed and nailed flush to the studs, but due to minor differences in the lumber, all of the resulting small gaps can add up to a surprising amount of airflow getting through. In our climate, especially in the winter, this means lots of expensive hot air can flow out unabated, which is a waste of money... but on top of that, when the warm and moist interior air comes in contact with the cool exterior walls and cool underside of the roof sheeting, the moisture condenses and can rot the structure of the house over time. So anyway, since we're having all of the walls and ceilings covered with drywall, as well as having the window boxes and closet doors drywall wrapped, we only need the foam strip around the bottom plates. I also previously spray-foamed all of the electrical boxes for outlets/switches/etc., and once the drywall is on, I'll caulk all of the seams around the electrical boxes as well. All of this should result in a much tighter house in the long run. We'll find out next winter, I hope, as we're already past the cold part of this winter and rapidly approaching Spring. Anyway, here's a photo of the toilet room, with the foam strip installed all around the bottom plates... note also the spray foam sealing the plumbing penetrations and the bottom of the bottom plates at the exterior wall:

The drywall hangers did finally come... here's a photo of the stairs and dining area freshly wrapped with sheetrock- it was really exciting to finally see the walls getting all closed up:

And here's the front entry area, with Peanut illuminating the room:

Here's the spray-foamed portion of the upstairs ceiling after the first day of drywall hanging:

After all the drywall was installed, there was quite a mess of scrap left over... I hauled a truckload to the dump, only to find out the next day that the drywall guys were planning to do that themselves. Of course, that should be expected, but the house was so ridiculously dusty from all the scrap around that I just wanted to get it cleaned up as soon as possible.

Once all the drywall was hung, Pete and I did some final touch up work here and there, and added in a few more metal corner beads at a couple of the closet wraps that I forgot to request when the drywall co. originally gave us the bid. After a total of about two weeks of work, with the taping/texturing guys coming every other day to add another coat then wait for it to dry, all of the drywall and texture was finished. Again, there is still some touch up stuff to do, like the window boxes in the original portion of the house downstairs, but all of the new stuff is done. Now we gotta start thinking about paint. Here's a shot of some test areas where we tried out different colors in the kitchen:

Here's the kitchen and entry area all textured and ready for paint:

Master bedroom ready for paint:

The next photo shows one of the touch-up areas downstairs that still needs to be finished. This is where the plumbing comes down from upstairs through the wall between the downstairs bedroom and the living room. This last weekend, I finally finished up the drain pipe plumbing under the house, as I had never actually connected the main stack into the existing waste/sewer pipes. As always, the plumbing was a bit of a pain in the ass, especially having to cut into the existing shit tube... but it's finally done, and it amazingly does not leak. After I took this photo, I covered it all with drywall, and now it just needs to be taped and textured. It's really nice not having a gaping hole in our current bedroom wall anymore... (in case anyone is wondering, the middle stud in the photo below is non-load-bearing, which is a good thing because it's obviously way out of plumb... but I decided to just leave it as-is since it has a couple electrical outlets mounted to it, and it really has no effect on anything else. It kinda looks like it was added in at some point purely as a mounting point for the outlets, which seems odd... but hey, this house has seen lots of odd things slapped onto it over the years):

And finally, here's some current shots of the exterior of the house with the siding all installed. Of course, the siding is just primered right now, but even so, we're pretty happy with how it turned out. It definitely looks like a real house from the outside (despite the lack of real stairs to the front door):


That's pretty much it for now. We'll probably get some interior painting done this weekend, then move on to ordering/installing interior doors, then tile in the bathroom, then flooring, etc.

Time to Rock

Good news: we passed the Rough Framing, Rough Electrical, Shower Pan, and Insulation inspections today... which means we're all clear to proceed with drywall! It's been a long time coming, seeing as how I thought back in mid-December we'd have drywall installed within a week or two. We ended up subcontracting out the siding installation- something about working outside right now, with a material with which we have little experience (Hardie board) didn't seem too appetizing. But more on that later.

Since we decided to pay someone to install the siding, that means we have to cut out expenses elsewhere. We had been toying with the idea of having a professional do the shower tile, but that pretty much went out the window. I did a bunch of edumacatin' of myself on the subject of tiling and waterproofing showers, then got to work. The first thing to do was build the little diagonal footrest in the corner, and the shelf/niche next to the valve:


With the framing taken care of, it was time to drywall the enclosure. And nope, this isn't green board, or Durock, or anything like that... just regular drywall:


After the drywall, I glued in the floor drain (the drain plumbing was already under the floor from months ago), then mixed up a batch of deck mud and formed the sloping pan to the drain. Yep, that is a wheelbarrow there... I didn't have anything else to mix the mud in, so I hauled it upstairs:


After the mud pan was dry, I installed this funny-lookin' waterproof membrane called Kerdi over the pan and sheetrocked walls. The tile will later be set directly over the Kerdi- no backer board or mudding of the walls is needed. It's better than the old-school shower method because the entire shower is waterproof, and the mud pan doesn't get saturated with water... which means in traditional construction, the mud pan never really dries out, leading to more issues with mildew. So anyway, here is the Kerdi installed and with the pan partway filled with water for the flood test:


In the midst of all this, there was a little bit more framing-type stuff to do- one of the stuffs was to install the pocket door kit for the bathroom. It went in pretty easy, and I'm hopeful the door will work well once it's in place:


I also built the attic access door, and the doors for the under-stair access down next to the dining area (note also the insulation in this photo... it's been great with how much warmer the house stays now... should be even better once the drywall is up) :


So there was a long list of additional things to do prior to drywall, which are all pretty much done now; such as finishing installing the kitchen lighting, insulating the kitchen ceiling, finishing some framing in my closet upstairs, installing furring strips here and there to make sure the drywall comes out looking nice and flat, etc., etc. Pete's been over the last few nights to make sure we're ready for drywall this Thursday (still waiting for confirmation from the drywall folks though). One other thing I did was install a few runs of electrical conduit, both from under the house up to the second floor in a couple spots, and also from the attic down to an outlet box in the back bedroom- that way, wheneve the Cat 5E ethernet cable becomes obsolete (debatable whether is already is) we can just pull new cables through in an hour or two, rather than spending a whole weekend cutting out drywall and drilling through floors and other such crappy activities. Or, we could just use the wireless connection...

Oh yeah, and the siding... we're quite happy with it. Sure, you never quite get the attention to detail from a subcontractor as when you do it yourself, but it's just fine for the price we paid, and the best part is that it's done. It would've taken Pete and me probably two months to get this done, so it is very nice to know that it's one big thing we don't have to worry about. Here's a photo with the board and batten installed around the deck:


And here's a photo of the board and batten around the bottom of the house, with the lap siding almost complete on the east wall upper half:


I don't have any photos yet of the siding completely done, but I'll get some up soon.

One of the last few things left before drywall is to make sure all the studs plane evenly so that the drywall won't bulge out anywhere. Over the next couple nights we'll get all that done, again with the intent that the drywall guys will be in here this Thursday. I hadn't made any videos for a while, so here's a short little video of Pete planing one of the wall studs:




And that's basically it for now... I hope the next time I write it's to announce that the walls are finally closed up, and the upstairs is more like a real house. Then it'll be on to painting, then installing the doors, then tile and fixtures in the bathroom, then trim, then maybe flooring, followed by installing the electrical fixtures/switches/etc.... the list goes one, but we're chipping away at it at least.

A small victory...

It's not much, but a victory nonetheless: the power company swapped the feed to the house from the temporary pole over to the new meter panel on the front of the house today. Our electrician made sure to come by and make sure we had power, and he hooked up an outlet upstairs so we have actual hard-wired power up there now. So, no more running extension cords to the temporary pole! It's one step closer to a real house...

Not done yet.

Okay.... so.... I've taken the post-slacking to a new level. Anyway, last time I wrote we were putting in the new windows. Well, we decided at some point to re-side the rest of the original house, rather than leaving it as-is (which was the original plan, for $ reasons). We also decided, if we were going to tear off the rest of the old T-111 and barnboards, we prolly oughta just get rid of the old single-pane windows as well- there were only four left anyway, one of which was broken during demolition of the siding. In the photo below showing the rear of the house, we added in a few studs, replaced a bunch of the insulation, and prepped for new shear plywood and a new rear window.


Here's the east side of the house, showing the old fake-brick asphalt siding which was under the T-111, and the barnboards under that. It was all in pretty poor shape, so it's a good thing we decided to just bite the bullet and get rid of it. Obviously, we went a bit out of order here... ordinarily you'd wrap the house with Tyvek from bottom to top, but of course we changed plans part way through. You can see that the Tyvek is loose at the bottom so the new row can be tucked under.


Here's the old bathroom window removed, with the opening ready to be re-framed (once the big house-rat gets out of the way of course). We chose to make the bottom of the new window a foot or so higher, so it clears the sink and toilet better.


And this next shot shows the east living room window, still to be removed. The existing studs didn't line up with the new layout perfectly, so new studs were added in, and the insulation was refreshed as needed. Now we have extra bearing strength in the east wall, and we also chose to leave the existing diagonal shear braces in place (and, the window framing was improved as well once the window was popped out). Yay.


So now, the next few photos show the house completely wrapped with Tyvek, all the windows are in place, and for practical purposes, the house is ~99% weather-proof (the temporary front door is still there in these photos).




By this point, we had already gotten some snow, although it melted off pretty quick. The old T-111 is leaned againsthe bottom of the house to protect from snowmelt dripping off the roof and splashing from the ground onto the lower side of the house. We'll leave those boards in place until the final siding is installed.


So with the exterior mostly buttoned up, we moved back to the interior. First order of business: finally finish the stairs! Here's a photo of the stringers in place, which as you can see go right through the old front window opening.


The stairs are finally complete! Wheeler admires them, Peanut scrounges for crap to eat, and Renée looks thrilled (she was actually in the middle of tearing out more of the old front wall, until someone interrupted to take a photo). Predictably, the stairs have already become mundane... but it sure was exciting for the first day or so.


Now for some interior framing. In this photo, the back bedroom is framed in, the laundry room is on the right, and the bathroom framing is just starting on the left. It's nice to be inside, as the weather has started getting pretty cold.


Also, we finally built the stairs to the master bedroom mini-closet (or the man-cave, as it's affectionately (derisively?) known). In this photo, the east wall of the master bedroom is in progress as well.


Once most of the interior framing was complete, it was time to get back to some other unfinished business. Pete's weekends are no longer coincident with mine, so he's been doing things here and there on his days off- drywall backing, interior attic wall framing, closet framing, etc. I spent a whole day a few weekends ago digging a new interior pier footing completely by hand, with a trowel, and carting the dirt outside with a bucket. It was time consuming, to say the least. I also had to put a jog in the existing sewer pipe because as luck would have it, it went precisely exactly perfectly directly through the middle of where the new post needed to be. This photo shows the rebar in place (although not quite plumb at the moment), and the sonotube as well (again, not in final position yet), almost ready for concrete. The concrete was super-fun: since it was snowing outside, I had to mix it all in a bucket while underneath the house, a few gallons at a time. The fluffy concrete dust was also fun. It was all fun. You shoulda been there.


In the meantime, the electrician was working away, and I also finished up the rough plumbing, both upstairs and under the house. None of the water lines leak, so that's a good thing (or so I'm told). We had the rough inspection (framing, electrical, plumbing) on the 23rd of December. No major issues, other than the fact that apparently WE HAVE TO HAVE THE HOUSE COMPLETELY COVERED WITH THE FINISHED SIDING BEFORE THE ROUGH FRAMING CAN BE SIGNED OFF! It's not the end of the world though- we were given the go-ahead to install all the insulation, which will be awesome considering the whole winter-time, freezing-temperatures thing that happens up here (a few weeks back when it was getting to around 0 F at night, we could only get the house up to 59 degrees- it was kinda cold). Anyway, we're trying to decide what to do about the siding right now... we thought we could worry about that come springtime, but it was not to be.

Which pretty much brings us to the present day. I got the temporary front door removed this weekend, and put the new front door in. We're going to install a neato window kit into the front door soon, but for now, it's plain white. Here's the opening all prepped for the new door (and some of the electrical wiring can be seen, with spray-foam insulation everywhere to hopefully cut down on heat loss later):

And here's the new door installed. Since the old door didn't fit the opening exactly (it was 6" too small each way), the new door has already reduced the heat-sucking cold air through the addition. Slowly but surely, the whole thing's coming along...