Happy Thanksgiving! We took advantage of the break to spend some more time down at the house pitching in. The week before Thanksgiving we were struggling to get crews to show up as it is deer season here in the Ozarks, and not much got accomplished. Things stepped up a bit last week despite the holiday, and we had progress on several fronts.
Malissa finished all of her work on the retaining walls and the flue - she is fairly petite, but definitely has no problem slinging around the heavy masonry blocks. The walls are ridiculously reinforced by now - we have poured quite a bit of liquid concrete behind each one, and filled the majority of the cells with concrete and steel rebar. In addition, Doug sealed the back of each wall with some liquid silicon (added bonus - it is an anti-grafittiant!) to keep the moisture from getting into the porous blocks.
The flue blocks are large squares with a cavity in the middle sized for a clay flue tile. This structure originates in the basement where our wood stove will be, and is stacked all the way up through the roof. Doug and Tim from Summit bent some roofing metal to flash around the exit point, and the exposed part of the flue got some of the liquid silicon as well. Our stove is on backorder, but when it arrives it should be a fairly simple matter to get it hooked up.
Speaking of heating, Tommy got back from his Elk hunt and spent some time at the site last week preparing his ductwork. We got some concrete on Wednesday, and in addition to extending the driveway another 25 feet or so and providing some of the aforementioned reinforcement to the retaining walls, Doug constructed a 4′ x 5′ pad for the outside heat pump to sit on. Not a lot of other visible signs of progress on that front, but he should be able to finish up tying in the ducts and setting the units next week.
The plumbers also spent a few days on site doing the rough in plumbing inside. They have the majority of the vents plumbed in, and in order to keep them moving we got all the tubs and fixtures for the bathrooms. I would have liked to support Buy Nothing Day but we succumbed and made trips to both Lowe’s and Home Depot on Friday to peruse their shockingly sparse selection. I knew there was a reason I bought nearly everything online. But I digress…the plumbers are planning to return tomorrow as well and should have all their rough in finished next week as well. They will make one more trip back after the drywall is hung to complete their work.
The electricians are following a schedule very similar to the plumbers - they are going to finish roughing in next week. The one big step forward was Webster Electric came and dug the trench to hook up the power to the house. We now have two hot outlets! It may not sound like much but after the rats nest of extension cords we’ve been using for the past several months it is a welcome addition.
We were also very glad to see Tim return from Summit last week following their temporary metal shortage. It sounds like in addition to metal they have been running short on love, and dealing with some internal strife. We didn’t get all the details but our salesman Jeff has reportedly moved on to greener pastures following a dispute of some sort. Tim and his helpers have pretty much all of the metal on now with the exception of the ridge caps. There isn’t any pressure for them to finish now but it would be great to be able to close that chapter and clean up some of the metal debris.
One area that we’ve been spending a great deal of mental energy is the application of the siding. I realize that Jill and I are both in hyper-critical mode right now given how new everything is, but there were several aspects of the siding that were just not up to snuff. We all knew that the application was going to be challenging going in, but I think it turned out to be more difficult than expected. The two main issues are that any variance in the width of the horizontal joints is HIGHLY visible given the dark siding color in contrast to the white Tyvek underneath. There are caulkable joints and there are joints that can’t be caulked, and there are enough of the latter that a few sheets will have to be re-hung. The second issue is the fact that despite being made of cement the siding is fairly brittle when you put pressure localized on a single point. This has represented itself with screws punching all the way through the siding in certain spots. This is a little more difficult to rectify, but Gene and his foreman Aaron have been willing to talk openly and address the issues that we’ve seen so far. The primary drawback is that we ran out of material, so they are ordering enough to fix the issues. The lead time on the siding is fairly long - six weeks or more. The silver lining is that I had to order some custom color caulk to caulk the joints and around the window, and that has a very long lead time as well. With any luck we’ll be spending a nice day in late January getting everything wrapped up.
You can obviously judge for yourself on the siding, but I’ve really enjoyed some of the comments we’ve had so far. Considering the part of the country we are in, you don’t see too many houses with dark siding, let alone exposed metal fasteners and all the trimmings. I love watching the look on people’s faces when they try to decide how to react, and we’ve had several people pause for a minute and say ‘Is that the siding?’ When I tell them it is, in fact, the siding, they say ‘Is that the color?’
I’m growing a bit long winded here, but the other thing we have been consumed with over the past few days is finding cabinets for the kitchen and the bathrooms. We found great options at IKEA but the procurement process is proving to be a nightmare. We resigned ourselves to making a trip and bringing them back in a U-Haul, but even that is proving to be harder than we thought. When we check stock of the individual pieces at the stores we are thinking of going to, invariably we are at about a 50% success rate. We’ll see how that turns out.
Our neighbor Eric was remodeling his pond and was kind enough to offer us some of the leftover dirt. For about a week we had huge piles of black dirt that were hauled from his house up to ours with a dump truck, and yesterday Doug went to town on them with Special K, and it finally looks like we have a yard. Amazing how the site went from looking like the surface of the moon to quite normal in just a few hours.
Happy Holidays!
