Main SIPs Framing of House

The SIPs panels for the rest of the house finally arrived in the afternoon of Sept 17, 2013.  The crew was working on some other details like stair framing and so all they did was get them unloaded and stacked on Tues.

Pictures of all the panels stacked up:

Then on Wed Sept 18, the crew started raising the walls on the main level.  This goes amazingly fast.  Here is the result of 1 day of work with 4 guys.

 Also after day 1, the great room/kitchen area:

 Thurs was Day 2, and progress was limited due to heavy rain (much needed as it has been very dry for 2+ months, but bad timing for us...) Main floor walls are about 3/4 done here:

They finished the main level on Fri Sept 20 (day 3) and installed top plates and other details (no pic).  The roof trusses and The Big Beam showed up Fri also.  Roof trusses:

 The beam is wrapped to protect it:

Also on Fri, the gas company showed up to put in the main gas line to the meter location:

That Friday was an extremely busy day!  I was working on getting the interior of the shop ready to paint while all of this was going on.  I'll cover that in a future post.



Mon Sept 23 they did the second floor deck, which was a bit of a struggle due to a beam not fitting the way they expected, but they got the floor trusses in and the deck all framed up.

Today  (Sept 24) was Day 5 of the SIPs framing, and they made great progress.  The entire upper level is complete and they also got The Big Beam in place, along with the post for the upper balcony.

You can see the beam (still wrapped) in the great room to the left of the upper level:

 From the back side showing the balcony post:

 Another view of the post and a couple framing members holding it in place:

Another view of The Big Beam in the great room.

So in 5 days, they completed all the main level and upper level wall framing, plus the upper level floor deck and started on the roof beam structure.  Great progress in a short time.  That's all for now.

Trench warfare

The utilities (electric, gas, fiber optic) all come into the shop as that was the first building to go up.  We obviously have to get these run to the house.  The well is over by the house.  I also need water out to the shop.  So we needed a trench.  With a water pipe, we needed to make it deep enough to prevent freezing, so it was dug 6' deep to start, and the water line was laid in as we went.  That runs under the house footing, along with 2 electrical conduits we put in before backfilling the foundation.  So the water line is 6' down and the excavator rolled the pipe out (plastic) and then backfilled over it ~2 feet as he went.  Then the conduits for electrical and low voltage wires went in with a little backfill, followed by the gas pipe.

This was a brutal weekend.  The first point is the distance.  It is ~320' from end to end.  Then the electric service wire is huge and heavy and very inflexible.  It was a 2-man job to get the wire in the conduit, which was also massive 3" stuff (and also heavy).  This was exhausting work, but it is finally done and the trench filled back in.

Here is the trench with the water line already buried and ready for conduit.

Unrolling the massive electric service wire.  400 lbs worth on the spool! Tractor to the rescue.

 Unrolling it along the driveway

 Fully unspooled and ready to lift into the trench

Overview fro the shop with the conduit complete.  It's a looong way to the house! Power is the large one on the left, low voltage the smaller one on the right.

 Looking reversed towards the shop

 Where the conduits and water pipe go under the house foundation.  You can see the blue water pipe poking out at the bottom.

 Where they end at the shop.  I need to get them connected to the main meter panel soon.

Now it's all covered up and waiting for a more final grade.  No pics of that right now.  That's all for now, and brings everything up to date!

Drywalling the shop

It took a couple weeks to get Sheetrock up.  I did most of the ceiling solo, and had help from my friend Brook for the walls.  I used a drywall lift for the ceiling, and the newer "lightweight" drywall made this a lot easier to do.  I don't think I could lift 12' sheet of regular drywall onto the lift, but the lightweight stuff was manageable (but still heavy).  The ceiling took close to 2 weeks, but like I said it was mostly solo.  Thee walls we did in 2.5 days.  It was a lot of work, but we had a good system.  We ran seams vertical as the SIPs panels don't need the extra stiffness form running them horizontal like typical framed construction.  This made it a little challenging to get them into place, but we made a simple frame from 2x4s to support them as we tilted them up.  Would have been impossible solo, but worked well with 2 guys.

Here was putting up the plastic vapor barrier before Sheetrock.  My friend tom helped with this. He's tall.  That helped a lot :-)

Here's my highly skilled helper taping off electrical boxes to the vapor barrier

Not a ton of pics of the drywall job.  It's drywall, you know what it looks like... These are near the end.

 Then I hired out the taping and mudding.  Sometimes, I actually do know where my limits are, and this is one.  I am lousy at it, and it would have taken forever to do it, so I got a guy that Brook had used previously with great reviews on Angie's list to do it.  It took him about a week to wrap it up.  I can only imagine how long it would have taken me...  He wrapped up last weekend 9-14-13.

Now I'm wrapping up final interior details and masking to get ready to paint this weekend.  Then I can get lights up and FINALLY be able to use it without having to keep it all cleared out all the time to allow this work to proceed...

House framing - lower level

Lower level interior framing for bearing walls started late Aug as we were waiting for the wall SIPs panels to show up.  They have been running behind a lot, but they finally showed up just after Labor Day.  This was only a partial shipment that included the lower level panels, but that helped keep things moving.

The interior walls done and waiting for SIPs to show up...

What's that in the distance?  Looks like a SIPs panel!

It is!  That is the stairwell wall.  Due to the large windows in the stairwell, they wanted to frame it with continuous posts from ground to top, so the whole 28' tall section was raised in one piece.  The framer (Roger) said it was a lot of fun...  You can see the lower SIPs walls almost done here.

And the next day they were completed with the garage door wall, and they got the steel beams in place.

 Another view.

No pictures of the floor trusses going up, but that was next.  It was pretty quick.

Then, while waiting for the main level SIPs to show up, they framed up the screen porch/deck floor, and then laid the floor sheathing out.  This was Sept 12, 2013. 

They did a little more interior framing but were basically waiting for the upper level panels to show up at this point.  They finally arrived on Tues Sept 16, so main level framing is underway.  I'll post some updates on that in a few days. Next up is some work on the shop and the trench for utilities.