This weekend

This weekend proved to be fairly productive..when you consider we only worked for a few hours one afternoon.

As I said in the last post, we’re hung up waiting on my electrical contractor at the moment. Until he comes back, we can’t have our City inspection which means we can’t insulate..or drywall, or sand the floors, or lay the tile, or bring in the bathroom fixtures..you get the idea. Though – as you can see – once we get that inspection out of the way, we’re really going to make noticeable progress. Like..start FINISHING stuff J

For now, though, we’re working on the outside. This weekend, we worked on wrapping the garage. This should keep the weather out, and further help with energy costs down the road. And because we used plastic cap nails, it should stay put longer than if we had just used staples – this is handy because it might be a while before we can really get moving on the siding.

As you can see, we tore off more siding under the new roofline outside the kitchen. We did this so we’ll have a solid spot to attach the F-channel to. F-channel – which receives the soffit – fastens to the wall in a straight line even with the bottom edge of the fascia board. From there, you can cut your soffit (vented in this case) to fit the gap between the F-channel and the fascia board. And because we’re not really all that professional, that’s as far as we got. The next step, in theory, is to snap the new fascia in place under the existing drip edge while overlapping the edge of the soffit underneath. Whew.

When I say “in theory” with regard to the next step, it’s because there’s a small complication. You see, when we ripped the steel siding off the side of the house, we found another issue: because the house had been added onto over time, the walls don’t line up exactly from one addition to another. When you’re working with steel, it’s not as big a deal because the material is more forgiving; however, now that I’ve (finally) decided on the cement board, we’ll have to do a little more preparation before we can start hanging. The cement board material isn’t as forgiving because it needs to be secured directly to the wall every few inches. Steel siding – or aluminum or vinyl – actually kind of floats in a channel.. that, and the physical makeup of the material make it easier to hide imperfections in the walls. There might be an easy fix for this – I’ll keep you posted.



See the difference in (old) siding colors around the windows?



Once we have our exterior walls squared away, we’ll be able to hang the rest of the new soffit and finish closing off the house to the outdoors. Once our electrical inspection gets a passing grade, we’ll be able to close the inside walls and it will start to look – and feel – like a home rather than an elaborate outbuilding.

Electrician: Tuesday. Celebration: Tuesday night? Too soon to call!

Playing Catch Up

Hello again!

In the time I’ve taken between updates, we’ve hit a stall in our progress. At the moment, we’re waiting on a coordinated effort among the cement contractor, the electrician, and the electric company. Getting everyone’s schedule to align (even without including my own schedule) is proving to be a slight challenge.

What we need is this: the current electrical meter is attached to the side of the house right outside my side entrance – when we built the garage addition, we thought it would be awfully nice to move the meter to the alley side of the addition and bury the line through the backyard so it’s both out of sight and out of the way. This is a matter of aesthetic preference and practicality – we need the overhead lines out of the way if we’re going to re-roof the back of the house, let alone reconfigure the pitch of the roof.

Once we have our trench dug (32” deep – which seems excessive to everyone but the City code), we can bury the connection from the existing breaker box in the basement to the new breaker box/meter in the garage. The new breaker will connect directly to the incoming power source and will run the circuits on the back half of the house. Running the circuits in the back of the house from the breaker box in the garage will save a small amount of wire/money, but will save more with regard to time and energy involved in installation.

At any point during this process, the electric company is supposed to be coming to remove the power from the house, trench through the alley and backyard and reconnect the power to the new meter box at garage’s new meter socket. (I learned that a meter socket is a fancy word for high priced metal box. It’s the housing for the dial that records how much power you’re consuming.) In speaking with the territory manager, I found that the power company we have locally will provide 25’ of trench and 25’ of cable free of charge. Anything past 25’ is charged to me as the homeowner, but the charge is pretty minimal when you consider I won’t have an overhead wire getting in the way of the goings-on at the jobsite.

Once the power shenanigans have been resolved, we can get to work on the roof.

I’m in the process of finding a new roofing contractor. The one I had contacted and verbally committed to has more or less flaked on me…which is unfortunate because I received a great bid from him. So meeting contractors starts again. It’s not my favorite part – they’re pretty quick to tell me I should’ve just built a new house. It’s unprofessional to stick out your tongue at someone, otherwise I might.

At any rate, we got a pretty good deal on the materials for the roofing project. Trusses conveniently went on sale and there was an 11% rebate on most other building materials – including sheathing, shingles, building wrap and all the other odds and ends we will need. So, in an effort to save money and a little time down the road, we bought most of what we’ll need in the near future and then some. I likened spending all that money to ripping off a Band-Aid…do it quickly and it won’t hurt as much..