More trim, more paint, more better :)

Kind of a low-key night on the homestead.

I walked through the farmer’s market, bought some eggs, and picked up my farm box after work and went home to see what I was getting into this week. Looks like a good mix – and things I’ve had before! Sometimes the familiar can be good, too J

Lovin' my farmer's market brown eggs!

Contents of my farm box: green onions, mixed lettuce, herbs, misc. tomatoes, chard, little yellow things I have to research, purple peppers. Healthy, healthy!

 My only real project last night was taking the door down between the laundry room and the garage and painting everything. It has been cool enough (FINALLY!) the last two or three days that I felt comfortable enough opening the house to the elements.

Pretty easy process..I unscrewed the hinges from the jamb and set the door up in the garage for painting. I would alternate between painting the jamb and painting the door, giving each time to dry between coats while I worked on the other. Pretty efficient, I’d say!

Garage door all painted up!
My wire rack is looking a bit crowded these days. Another coat of paint on the inside of the kitchen cabinets and I'll clear this out a little better.

I also took a minute to snap a picture of the work we did the night before. In addition to the quarter round from the previous post, we hung the ‘headers,’ as we’re calling them over the doors to the garage and the driveway. It looks so much more finished now! A little caulk, a little paint, and it will look crisp and clean..and, most importantly, DONE!

Trim: in place.

All painted..and glowing :)

IIIIIIII'm Movin' Out!

I'm almost ready for company!

The vanity - the container on the right is full of extra towels. The container on the left is for all of my bathroom junk. 

I went a little crazy on the tiny plants last night.. I've been looking forward to turning the entryway into my mini greenhouse, though. No time like the present!

Looking through the kitchen into the dining room and living room at the piles of moving.

A nice sturdy metal shelving unit for extra storage in the laundry room.

The bookshelves and my borrowed recliner :) Dad/Roommate and I built the shelves a few years ago...it's strange how well they fit here! Also, no laughing at the recliner..it's the best nap chair ever.

The finished hardwood. Initially, I wanted to stain it dark..then I saw how awesome the wood was all by itself.

Pretty big day. We moved enough stuff that I could actually use my garage! :)

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!

Burnout..

I don’t know if it’s waiting on my electrical contractor, haggling with my roofer, or arguing with my “roommates,” but I’m getting burnt out..

As for updates: As you could see in the last post, the garage is enclosed and being used pretty extensively. The dormers I wrote about didn’t pan out for a number of reasons, the most important being that I can’t stand it when some aspect of a house stands out in a bad way. You know that house you drive by and think, “Wow, that little window on that BIG wall?” Or, “That _______ looks really out of place with the style of the rest of the house.”

I still really think a couple dormers would look good with the house. The problems we ran into pertain more to the pitch of the new roof than to the dormers themselves. As we ‘mocked up’ our dormer project, we found that in order to make the “face” of the dormers as big as I wanted them, pretty much everything else would have to look really bad. One of my trusty volunteers described the effect you see sometimes where the dormers jut out so far that there ends up being mini-hallways protruding from the roofline. Not only that, but then I’d have to buy windows to go in the dormers, and that decision was not one I wanted to make in a hurry. The whole thing could have been smoother had I bought the steeper 7-pitch trusses vs. the 6-pitch that I bought. Price difference: $200 per truss x 21 trusses. No thanks.

Long story short: shingles went on the garage without dormers. I can always add them later, though it will take a little more effort.

Which brings me to the issue of the shingles. I’m happy with the actual shingle I picked – it’s a good mix of black, grey, brown, and blue (if that makes sense) so it will hopefully go with anything. It’s the work that I am not happy with.. in retrospect.

Initially, I was in what you could call a honeymoon period with my new roof. I was just so dang happy to have it! Once the rose-colored glasses came off, I started adding things up. Not only was the end cost noticeably higher than the bid (with extra charges for nails and other materials that one might assume would be included), but the yard was a mess as was the house itself. Then, to top it all off, I have to pay for the dumpster they filled with the scraps. Again, you might assume this would have been included..

This is another reason I feel like absolute crap for hiring people I don’t know from out of town – there’s no accountability.. I traded that for a big, fancy crew that could slap a roof on in a short amount of time for less money than a local. Both of which turned out to be untrue. I’m disgusted with them, and with myself for going against my gut instinct.

As for new updates, I had soffit and fascia delivered the other day. That will finally close the gap between the top of the walls and the edge of the roof. I’ve decided on a siding material – I’m going to spring for the slightly more expensive cement board in exchange for spreading the siding project out over this year and next. That way I’ll get the new construction and a good portion of the back of the house covered in new siding, and I’ll take care of the front half – which is more labor-intensive – next year when I have the money to do so.

Oh, joy!

Garage Roof Update

Just a quick note to show our progress from last night - sheathing on the garage!

Notice the East gable end toward the left, here. The pitch of the dormers should match the pitch of that peak.

As I said last time, the roofers should be here (and gone) before the end of the week. We'll actually be shingling the garage ourselves since the dormers won't be in place before the roofing crew gets here to do it.

We're going to mock up different shapes and sizes for the dormers - the idea at this point is to match the pitch of the dormer with the pitch of the East gable end seen in the picture above. The hope is that the addition will look more cohesive that way instead of 'tacked on.'

Fun, fun! Come back often - lots of updating to see!

Cats on a Hot, Steep Roof

It’s been a busy couple of days!

Late last week we started the process of removing the layers of old shingles from the back side of the highest ridge. From the beginning, the plan has been to reconfigure the pitch of the roof to make it not only more attractive, but more viable in the long-term. Parts of the roof back there had rotted over time as water seeped where it should not have - this should help with that!

So, with the help of friends and family, we started tearing into the house. Gray, light-gray, darker gray, green, and Cedar shake waited there to be pried off, thrown down, and hauled away. Once the steeply pitched sheathing had been removed, we concentrated on the flat/shed roof segments over the bathroom and the kitchen. Remember, the kitchen and bath were added on after the original construction of the house and several years apart from one another, so those sections were at different heights and used slightly different materials in their construction. Either way, we tore into them J

Layers of Shingles: REMOVED!

Busy place..

While on the roof, we decided that only the bathroom roof would actually need to be completely removed to make way for the new trusses. After working in the sun ripping, tearing, lifting and prying, I don’t blame the guys at all for making the decision to leave the kitchen roof in place.

Looking up through my bathroom "skylight"

Half tempted to leave the bedroom like this..

With the work nearly done removing the existing roof, our master carpenter (I refer to him as a “Goddamn Genius” at least twice a day) set out building up the walls that would support the new roof. With those sections level and square, we were free to drag the new trusses into place! Once this part started, things actually progressed really quickly.

Building the short walls for the new trusses.

Walls in place.

We carried the trusses from their spot in the front yard all the way around back to the north wall of the garage. They rested there until needed. We then lifted them up to the Genius who drug them along the top of the garage walls, onto the new house walls, and nailed them into place with help from Dad and another friend. Like I said in an earlier post: this is how we know we have great friends!

The overhang is technically called the rake, and it matches the depth of the original house.

Everything was moving along nicely until people started talking about the weather. Pesky weather. The driveway side of the roof was completely covered in plywood and partially covered with tar paper. The west side of the house, however, was only a third of the way covered with plywood…and that’s when the rain came.

We ran around grabbing tarps, hammers and nails and secured the tarps as best we could to keep the inside as dry as possible – though, I’m not sure you could hurt anything in there at this point.

Bedroom view from the laundry.

We decided to call it quits and reconvene the next day.

…And that’s when the rain stopped. Out of nowhere, a storm the size of West Virginia disappeared. Of course, we took what time we had to nap and recharge our batteries a little. My mom – the Goalsetter, as we’re calling her – rallied the troops and we were able to finish sheathing and tar papering the remainder of the roof and closing the holes we made when building the wall.

Good progress, right?! There's more!

Last night we met up after work and set the garage trusses in place, too. The consensus is: my house now looks gigantic.

Dormers still to come!

We’ll have more work ahead of us in the coming days. The roofers are coming soon, and we’ll be building a pair of dormers on the driveway side of the garage. Things really are shaping up!

It’s raining again today – check back in a few, and I’ll have more details!

Off to the Races!

The title of this post means a couple of different things for me this month. First – and most importantly for the purpose of this blog – is that the electric company came and trenched the backyard! This means there is power connected to the new meter on the new garage – yahoo!

The downside was: there was a miscommunication somewhere along the line and the overhead line was not removed from the house. (Not to be overly critical, but when you tell someone you need the overhead line removed so you can put a new roof on the house, where is the miscommunication?)

Oh well, they came back and completed their work and now we’re off to the races on the new roof!

Part Two of ‘Off to the Races’ has to do with the fact that our little town happens to be the Sprint Car Capital of the World. In short this means that once a year, drivers and fans from all over the world converge on our town of 8,000 residents. For ten days at the end of each summer, we play host to nearly 70,000 people – many from Canada, Australia, and every state in the US. It’s a lot of fun!

I’m not one to brag about (or even pay attention to) racing in most cases, but our particular brand is really exciting! Unlike some others (NASCAR, Indy, etc.) sprint car races are short, and to the point. You can spend an evening at the track and literally see ten or more events with the overall winner determined at the end of the last race.

It’s also kind of fun because you know that the sprint car racers of today will be the big shot, famous drivers of the future – Tony Stewart comes to town fairly regularly, as does Kasey Kahne and many others. There is also a racing video game with the Knoxville Raceway as the final level. Pretty cool, eh?

Anyway, enough bragging for one day. Now that the overhead line is out of the way, it’s nose back to the grindstone for this guy. Weather permitting, we’ll be back to the house the remainder of this week with (fingers crossed) a roof in place by Sunday evening.

Cheers!

http://www.knoxvilleraceway.com/

http://sprintcarhof.com/Pages/Home

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..

Update: Floored!

Well gang, the heat subsided long enough to allow my cement contractor the ability to pour a swanky new slab for the garage floor. I can’t tell you how excited things like this make me. We talked about it last night: the work inside - while fantastic and equally as necessary - goes by a little at a time. With projects like building a garage, you can have something hugely new and different at the end of every day! It’s exhilarating….and expensive.. But mostly exhilarating!

Speaking of budgeting.. I think we’re still in good shape. The major expenses were always assumed to be rebuilding the garage and hiring somebody to roof the house. Not only am I hiring the roof done because it’s going to suuuuuuuck to tear all those shingles off, but I also really want that to be done correctly. There is a pretty steep pitch on the front half of the house and there are a lot of intricate angles to deal with there as well. Better left to the professionals!

There is a strong possibility that I may get walls on this new garage this weekend – we’ll see! J