House Building Update October 2018

Well a lot has happened since I last reported on our house building progress. For one thing, there is actually a HOUSE sitting on a SLAB! The house is in the process of being framed. Its fun to watch. Every couple of days I go by the lot and see what has transpired. Yesterday they put in the stairway to the bonus room above the garage. I was having trouble envisioning it but as soon as they created it I was like "of course, now I get it!".

The slab was kind of a nightmare but now it done and its fine. I won't name names, but the company that did the slab really screwed up. We think maybe because subs are so busy, or maybe because they thought "hey its just a slab no biggie" they sent us their "B" crew and they made a lot of mistakes, like not getting the slab square! Some of it they corrected, and some of it WILL be corrected. We're getting a concrete driveway out of it at cost so there was a little bit of something positive that came out of it, I guess.

Once the slab was done the framers went to work. They have been great. They are very accomplished and seem to really know their stuff. One thing that's very different about building a house now as opposed to back in the 90's is that a lot of it is done with trusses. All the floors, the roof, its all truss work. Again, the framers found some errors in the trusses too. If a truss is wrong they have to send a different one since they are all prebuilt. Too bad for them!

Trusses that Make Up the Ceiling in the Greatroom

While the slab was being created and the house was being framed, Lee built his garden shed. Its adorable; a miniature house. It was good practice for him, too, figuring out the best way to do the trim work. He's got a lot of trim to put on the actual house when the time comes. We used a couple of windows from the old farmhouse in the shed as well. It looks great.

The excavation guy has come, dumped a bunch of dirt around the house, dug the ditches for the in-ground gutter system. Once the dirt came we realized that we had a problem. The house sits pretty high above the surrounding ground on the north and west sides. The slab has to be mostly covered by dirt, to keep it insulated. There really isn't room to allow the dirt to gently slope away from the house on those sides, so we're ending up with a retaining wall. Lee is out there today with some guys he hired to do the heavy lifting. Its going to look pretty good, I think, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do about plantings in those areas.