Sweeeet :)

Appreciation from the neighbor I helped roof a few weekends back.
He saw me admiring his knife and knew I liked using it, so he bought me one! What a guy!

Productive (FAST) weekend!

In between helping the neighbor roof his house, hauling rock with my parents, and all of the other fun stuff going on, I decided I needed to make 'fall' happen. It's been way too hot lately, and I needed fall weather and fall food. So, on a recent trip to Trader Joe's, I bought a BUNCH of arborio rice, a packet of pancetta, and a little wedge of Parmesan to make risotto. Roasted carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower along with onions, white wine, and homemade chicken stock.
Tastes like fall, AND the cooler weather rolled in almost immediately! :)

Yesterday afternoon was spent at my sister's house in Ankeny. She is expecting a baby girl midway through January and is crafting and decorating enough for twins! :)
She and I had talked about a mural of some kind for the nursery - she found an artsy little tree online and decided that's what she would like for me to do. So, my lady friend and I made the trip to Ankeny, mapped out a tree over most of the wall, and painted it for her while she made little flowers out of felt and pretty fabrics downstairs away from the paint smell. We hung all sorts of embellishments on the wall even after this picture, but this gives you the best view.
Didn't turn out too bad, did it? :)

Shingles, garage doors, and other cool stuff

Since the last installment, we’ve made some pretty noticeable progress, I’d say!

First, the roofers are nearly done! In fact, they should be finishing as I write this..

Before..

That process proved to take a bit longer than anticipated – not only were there several layers to tear off the steep roof in the front of the house, but one of the crew members had a family emergency and the entire crew was unable to work for a couple days. I can’t complain about that..because I have a soul. Luckily for us, the weather has been absolutely terrific and I’m not the slightest bit worried. My mother, on the other hand, seems to think that I will be the coziest little bat hotel in the tri-county area. I had no idea how deathly afraid of bats the women around me are until we started this project, but we’re working through it.

Working away..

Nearly done!

Snazzy recycled garage door.

With the roof nearly complete – and a snazzy new/recycled-from-the-old-garage-garage door in place – our work on the house will really fly from here. We can use the garage space to its fullest potential now – storage, workshop, shelter, etc. My dad is already planning for the workshop he’s putting together out there. The joke is that once the house is finished, I won’t actually be able to park in my own garage because he’ll have it so filled with table saws and planers that I’ll end up in the street. We all make sacrifices. J

Inside the house, we’re building walls! Not only are we stiffening and restructuring some of the existing walls, we’re also tweaking things slightly, making spaces more workable, and improving the wiring, plumbing, and insulation along the way. It shouldn’t be too long before there’s new drywall hanging back here – who knows..maybe one day I’ll get to live here?

Removing the old windows between the laundry and the garage.

...and installing a door!

First batch of carpet coming up. Stay tuned for more!

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!

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