We left our camera in KC this weekend so I’m light on images, but here is a quick summary of the long weekend.
Friday the 4th we didn’t do much work on the house, just caught up with Doug and checked in on our various plantings. A few weeks back we planted a cherry tree, a four in one apple tree, a raspberry bush and a few blueberry bushes. All looked fairly well except for two pecan trees that were delivered as bare roots and don’t look like they are going to make it.
On Saturday we headed in to Summit Roofing to meet with Jeff, one of their chief estimators. He was a bit rough around the edges but seemed pretty competent and confident in his answers. Our primary question to get figured out is how their bid could have been so much lower (1/3 of the total cost) than the other metal roofing bids that we got. We went through all the materials and part of is was that their original bid was 26 gauge metal vs. 24 gauge included in the bids of the other companies. This ultimately made a few $k difference in price, but a lot of it he attributed to the fact that a lot of metal roofers are fairly ’boutiquey’ at this point given that most metal roofs are installed on commercial buildings or country-club homes.
We got a better level of comfort from him and assuming that some of the references pan out (they had some fairly high profile jobs in the works) we will probably go with a 1 1/2″ seam 24 gauge roof. The third set of images (”Hopkins”) in the link above is a building nearby that we went and took a look at and it seemed to be well done to me and my voluminous metal roof experience.
They threw out a few other interesting options, including their ability to custom form square downspouts (rather than traditional home-depot downspouts) for the same price, the use of the standing seam metal as the soffit instead of the traditional wood or aluminum, and the availability of solar panels that can be laid out in an array right in between the seams. He thought that you could get completely off the grid for $40k which seemed a little dubious given some of the information I looked at a few months prior, but it is good to know there is a system designed specifically for those roofs.
After that we headed out to the site and jumped in the massive pit beneath our master bed / bath / closet. The walls were probably eight feet high at the highest point inside, and there were only two access points that Doug could drop in fill material. This resulted in two big piles with steep slopes and and a big empty spot in one corner. Our job was to flatten everything out through brute force using shovels, rakes, and picks. The fill material was all the old scrap concrete brought over by Citywide, and most of it was the consistency of coarse sand with a lot of medium to huge size boulders included. Our primary task aside from flattening it all out was to carefully place the big boulders in the hole in such a way that they wouldn’t roll down and smash into the foam covering on the walls and damage it.
Most of the time Doug was on his tractor dropping in new loads for us to spread out, and after about eight hours we had it up to an acceptable level. The next step is for that area to get a little bit of gravel poured on top of it, the plumber will do his thing, and then the sub floor and concrete will go on that portion. That will be slab on grade vs the rest of the house which is over the basement so the radiant heat tubes will actually be poured in the concrete slab rather than attached to the underside of the sub floor.
Still fairly beat up from that task, my ‘computer hands’ are definitely not accustomed to that kind of laboring.
Nothing else too terribly exciting took place other than our realization that we added a window while talking to the window supply company in the garage, but neglected to tell Doug about it. His eagle eye caught it and we got it worked out in time for his block-stacking activities. We also had some initial discussion about making the wall separating the master closet from the office (and thus that whole wing of the house) as a Nudura wall with poured concrete. The primary reason was ‘because we can’ and I thought it would be nice to have the master wing somewhat soundproofed from the rest of the house (as if there will be a lot of wild parties in the main part of the house that we are trying to sleep through). Rationality prevailed as the thickness of the wall and the need to place it over the foundation wall would have required us to cut a few feet out of the master suite.