Summer Work -2014 III Exterior paint

The siders finished up in mid august.  In this part of the country that means you are only weeks from snow :-).  OK, not really, but the weather does turn fast, and getting a decent shot to paint the exterior means that I had to get on it pretty quickly.  There were a number of details to clean up first, like getting protective mesh over the air intakes to keep critters out (My HVAC guy already found 2 dead birds in the furnace...).  Also caulking various penetrations and getting a number of little details cleaned up.  Plus before I started spraying, I had to poly all the windows and doors.  I was ready to start painting near the end of august.  I took the week of labor day off, plus a couple days at the end of august - roughly 1.5 weeks for paint.  I spent a day covering all the windows I could reach from the ground or from a step ladder.  The next day I picked up the lift.  This was what made it possible to get the rest of this done in a reasonable time.


Here it is.  Small enough to fit on my 16' trailer and light enough that even a half ton truck can tow it, but it can reach over 50' up, and 30' out.

In fact, here I am 30'+ in the air and extended out 15-20' while painting the upper floor on the back side of the house. This is 3 stories on this side.  You can see some standing water as we were having some wet weather while I was trying to get this done, but the broad eaves helped keep things dry for a lot of it.

The rental time on the lift was limited to a week, so I did everything I could that needed the lift for in that time.  Here you see how I did the upper sections of the shop trim first.  Before any trim work was done, I had already sprayed 2 coats of the beige on the entire shop and house (with the lift too).  This was complicated by the fact that the lift blew a hydraulic hose on day 2 and the rental place "fixed" it with an idiot repair that lasted about 2-3 hours.  I lost time with that as it was over the weekend, but I kept going with ladders as best I could, and they extended the lift rental to compensate in the end.

 The house with first coat on trim mostly done.

 The back side of the house with trim complete.  That is where I was taking the photo from in the earlier pics from the lift.

 The north side also was much easier with the lift as all the windows make it hard to find a place to put a ladder.

Summer work 2104 -II Siding

I had intended to do the siding myself, with help, but I came to figure that the task would require 2 people for almost all of it, and that was too much to ask of my helpers, so we ended up subcontracting it.  As it was, it took the crew about 3 weeks to finish the job.  Most of the time it was only 2 guys working, but about the last week they brought more guys in so they had like 5 guys for the final 4-5 days.

I didn't take a lot of photos of this.  The system I did was to have everything set off on 1x strapping so there is an air space behind the siding for drainage and to avoid any potential water damage.  The siding rep loved what I was requesting as he said "you will never have a problem with rot, ever".

Here are a couple shots of the shop as they were doing the work to give you an idea what I mean.  The lower sections that were left with Tyvek will be covered in stone next year.

And the house in process...

Exterior paint was next, and the last of the really big outdoor projects for this year.

Summer Work - 2014

A lot of things have happened this year.  After wrapping up insulation and the initial stab at the landscaping (still ongoing, but at least stable for now), the tasks turned to siding, final electric, some finish work, and getting the driveway in better shape.

Still it feels miles away from completion (probably because it is...), but the progress when looking back one year is pretty nice to see.  It just isn't always easy to feel that way when everything is still swirling at a 100 mph around you.

After drywall fully wrapped up, and the subfloor was in, the next big item was interior paint.  That sucked up over a month total.  We started by spraying the interior walls and ceiling with a coat of primer.  That took something like 45 gal of primer, and was mostly knocked out in a day or two.  The next item was the walls.  Since this is a very open plan, the thought was to spray the walls with the final color (2 coats) since it covers a lot of area and then mask the walls and paint the ceilings.  The ceilings are a good item to spray as it goes fast and covers well on the textured surface.  We had the drywall guy do knock-down texture on the ceilings.  The walls were a little trickier as we found we really needed to back roll after spraying to make it more uniform.  This was not an issue on the ceilings due to the texture, but it cost time on the walls  Basically this means you spray the walls first, then come back with a paint-moistened paint roller and go over it again.  This helps even things out, and gives it a little texture.  It takes a little extra time, but not too much as you can lay a lot of paint with a sprayer and then just smoothing it out with the roller goes reasonably fast.

So here are some interior photos of the painting.  We covered all the windows first.

Main level:

 Lower level:

The lower level BR is getting a suspended ceiling for better access to the mechanicals above it, which you can partly see the framing for that going in here.

Lower level bathroom.  Still need tile in the shower.

 Great room after getting the color settled.  Our designer had told us to use a light green  for the ceiling as it would look great, but we really did not like it, so she ended up changing it to a cream color.  We like that a lot better, so that is what we have.  Would have been nice to save the time and only do it once, but it worked out in the end.  You can see the Big Beam has the plastic off it finally here, too.

The office is a medium green color that we really like, and you can barely see the powder room on the right which is a dark brown/maroon color, which we also really like. Our designer was  big help on this stuff as we are awful with picking colors.

 Upper level.

The garage is fully functional too, which is great for storage, staging, and a work area.

Siding next...

Subfloor over radiant tubing

Got a pallet and a half of subfloor sheets delivered to put on over the main level floor over the concrete.  It took 2-3 weeks to wrap that up, but it went down pretty good.  Had some help on a couple weekends, and did some myself during the week on evenings.  It was interesting as the sleepers we put in were so diced up by having to fit around the tubes, that it took time to mark each sheet as to where you could drive a screw before you placed it and secured it.  All in all it worked out decently, but like everything, it just took time to get done.  Fitting all the angles in the master bath was probably the most time-consuming single part of this.  The subfloor is glued and screwed down, and then end result is pretty impressive.  With the combination of the initial subfloor, 1.5" of concrete and the second subfloor over it, the main level floor is absolutely rock solid.  It doesn't bounce at all or make a bit of noise when you walk on it.  The reason for the second subfloor is to have something to attach the finish floor to.  Most of the main level is going to be wood floor, and this will work well for that, plus as a base to build up with backer board for tile.

I thought I had more pictures of this in process ( I swear I do..) but I cannot find many them so we will have to go with this for now.  You can see the subfloor in place in some of the upcoming interior shots, too.  We started in the great room, and here it is over half done.  This zipped along pretty decently, until we hit the master bathroom which had a lot of 45 degree angles in it.  That took a lot of time, as noted.

Mother nature hates me

The weather up here had been overall pretty mild the 2-3 years before we started building.  The moment I committed to starting this, all hell broke loose.  Last year, we had about the wettest spring on record.  I was fighting driveway and dirt washout problems constantly as the storms we were getting were dumping tons of rain in short periods, and they kept coming one after another.  It finally stopped in July and July/Aug were bone dry (and brutally hot and humid, but at least our foundation excavation did not get washed out...).  This slowed everything down and really killed progress.  And then came Fall.... Well, we didn't have a fall - it went straight into winter. And then not just any winter, but the worst winter in some 130+ yrs (also as previously noted).  And then the spring of 2014...Because 2013 wasn't wet enough - it happened AGAIN.  Storm after storm, and this year it was worse.  Now with all the extra site work that had been done, I was now having severe washout problems.  I was seriously worried that the neighbors were going to take up pitchforks and torches as there was so much silt washing off the property with these almost unprecedented rains.  We are starting at about mid May 2014 for this.

I knew I had to get the landscape under control fast.

I had been poking at the excavator for a while but he had kept putting me off.  After the last big storm I called him and said "it is now critical - you have to get out there".  He has too much going on, but finally he broke out some time and did it.  It wasn't perfect, but over the space of 2 weeks he got the landscape about 90% settled.  I was also able to use the tractor for a bunch of prep work when he wasn't there to help keep things moving along.  I took a few days off work to get this all moving.  What I found, not surprisingly, is that if I was not there, not much got done.  That was the other main reason I took the time off.  The excavator subbed out some of the wall work.  He does not like to build walls, and even though I could do it, it was one more thing I really didn't have time for -- especially since I was trying to get this all under control quickly to avoid angering the neighbors and the town with the washout problems.  So here are some photos of that process.  This gets us pretty much up to date with current progress.

First off, the main drainage culvert.  Discussion with the excavator and looking at how water flowed showed a really good place below the turnaround that could be used as a catch basin/collector to get water collected and shot out down a culvert into the woods down below so it wouldn't wash everything out like it had been.  So he created a ditch leading down to a catch basin, and dug a trench under the driveway down into the woods to run a big 8" culvert to catch the heaviest rains and shunt them down hill without blowing everything out.

Right in the middle of this photo, you can barely see the round outline of the catch basin, to the right of the road.

 Here is the culvert path going down into the woods.  If you look closely, you can see the black pipe headed straight down hill, right dead center in the photo, where the dirt ends.  The main goal here is to get the water downhill without taking all the dirt down with it.  This should do it!

Next up, the walls. We did 3 more walls.  2 of them were pretty small, and one more was a bit larger.

The garage wall.  This was mostly to clean things up at the house garage where the turnaround drops off.  Not real large, but helped the landscape flow a lot better.

 Another little one as an alcove for the service door on the shop.  Just trying to keep the hill up on the hill here...

The bigger one - the garden wall.  This thing was not supposed to be this big, but the dirt dictated it be pretty substantial.  It is 8-9' high at the house, and tapers down from there.  We had to do what made the most sense, so the guys kept building it and backfilling to see how it all laid out.  They stopped when it made sense.  This is the wall in the foreground.  The wall in the background was the massive one I did back before we started building.

So while all this was going on, I started seeding to get the ground stabilized.  This involved a few things: Grass seed, oats (they germinate and sprout a lot faster I am told, and as an annual won't keep coming back much), straw bales, and straw blankets.  The blankets are important for erosion control.  They are rolls of straw and a plastic netting that you roll out and staple down to help hold everything in place.  Plus the straw helps keep the soil moist longer, to help the grass and oats grow.

Here is the first day's work (this is just me doing all this, solo):

East side of driveway, and septic drain field mound:

West side of driveway.  My goal was to get everything that could be seen from the street settled first so there would be no question I was trying to get it under control. You can see my trailer in the cul de sac with a bunch of straw bales still on it.

 Day 2, the excavator was working on the turnaround up by the front door.  He leveled out the pad and placed the crushed limestone for the driving surfaces, and then started placing black dirt on the hillsides.  Here he is mostly done with that, and just needed to finish spreading and leveling the black dirt out.

 While he was doing that I worked on more of the driveway down slope areas for seeding.  I finished off a large chunk of this that day.  Lots of erosion control blankets on the left side, where the water tends to run faster and washout dirt and driveway.

Then I ran out of oats and it was memorial day.  I knew the feed store was not open, but the local Fleet Farm store was and they had oats.  Since I knew rain was coming, I wanted to get another critical section done. So I grabbed a couple bags and hit it.  I got that turnaround slope all settled in, which is another big washout area, so this helps a lot.

 Here is a look at the turnaround, not quite complete.  The bucket is sitting in the middle of the turnaround, where there will be some sort of garden and trees later.  The excavator placed some black dirt there the next day.

And that's about it for now.  I have been spending most of my time in the shop trying to get it more ready for work on finishing cabinets and doing doors.  Still a lot to go there, but I am making progress...


Update from last night (5/31/14):  We had yet another massive washout rain.  Something like 3-4" in the early morning hours.  And once again the driveway blew out.  The only good part is that most of the landscape work I did held up.  A couple small washouts, but nothing killer.  Next task is to figure out a way to move the water off the driveway before it causes problems.  But then they said more thunderstorms tonight.  Oh goody...

Drywall

Drywall is still underway.  As of this writing (5/31/14) all the rock has been hung and the taper is well into taping and mudding.  He has about a week left, he thinks.  He has been at it for 4 weeks already.  We had done some of the ceiling drywall ourselves, as previously noted.  Mostly where the insulators needed to foam and blow in ceilings.  Other than that, I let Den (the drywall guy) do the rest of it.  I am OK with hanging drywall, but I sure wouldn't do the mudding/taping.  I hung all the rock in the shop, so this wouldn't scare me off that much except I just don't have the time with all the other things that needed addressing.  Plus Den works at a very reasonable rate, so that helps make the call to sub it out easier.

So some sequential progress pics.  I haven't taken a lot of the mudding process as it just doesn't look like all that much in photos.  I'll get a couple final shots of that.

Day 1, he started with upstairs walls.  Ceilings were already done by us, as noted.

Library:

 Bella's BR:

 Day 2 he wrapped up most of the upstairs, except the stairwell:

 Plus he completed the office on the main floor:

 Day 3 he worked on the main level mostly.  Hallway in the master suite:

 Master BR:

 Day 4 continued in the master suite.  Laundry room into closet:

 And he did the Upper stairwell.  Not sure how he handled those sheets as that is a tough place to work:

 Day 5 he is wrapping up the master suite.  Master bath here.  The little room at the back of the photo is the shower which will get tiled, so no drywall in there:

 Master bath looking out:

 And he started on the Foyer ceiling in the main level:

 Day 6 - wrapped up the foyer:

 And the inside walls of the pantry:

 More foyer (Still with the temporary front door):

 And he started a bit on lower level ceilings:

 Day 7 - Garage ceilings were basically wrapped up in one day, except for the soffits enclosing the steel beams:

 Day 8, he moved back to the main level and did basically all of the great room ceiling:

I took a few more photos, but nothing real dramatic (drywall does not lend itself to drama...), but he finished off the rest over the next few days, and then started taping a little bit the Friday before Memorial Day (5/23/14).  He has been taping all week after Mem day, and will continue for all or most of next week.  I'll post another entry with the final pics of that.

After he wraps up taping, we still need to finish off the subfloor.  On top of the concrete on the main level, we need to put down another layer of subfloor so there is something to nail the wood floor to (or carpet, or tile...depending on the room). That will take a few days.  Then it is time to plastic off all the windows and then blast a coat of primer and some white paint on the ceilings with the sprayer.  We might do some finish painting then too, but that will depend on a lot of things (choosing colors, timing, etc).