The last big item I tried to wrap up in 2015 was the exterior stone. I made decent progress, but started too late due to many other circumstances so I did not finish before it started getting too cold. Since this really needs 28 days to cure before a real freeze, I had to quit early enough to avoid that. Fortunately it was a very mild fall, so I ran until late October. This was later than I thought I would go, but the weather held out, so I got a bit lucky. As for completion, I got the small area on the shop done first (my test section). I got a decent start on the front of the house, and then finished off the chimney, as I was most worried about that going another winter unprotected. The chimney had a lot of corners, of course, and all the ladder time and hauling everything up there cost more time, so that was slow, but it is done. Next spring/early summer it is priority #1 to get the house exterior wrapped up. That entails finishing off the front of the house, then the garage side. It will probably take a couple months, but at least I will have daylight to work with. Working into the late fall, I was racing to get much done after work before it got too dark.
You saw this already, but it shows the prep for the stone work. This is 2 layers of tar paper over the Tyvek barrier base. There is also a vented cladding over the top of this to help any water that gets behind the stone to run down and out.
And here is the stone work on the shop completed, and then completed with the cap blocks in place. Propped up with 2x4s at the time to make sure they stay put as they cure, but you get the idea...
I started on the scratch coat on the house front. The gray stuff on the right is mortar for the scratch coat. The blue stuff towards the left is the vented cladding, not yet covered by scratch coat (over the tar paper that you can no longer see). This is where I ran out of that batch of mortar.
Finished up the scratch coat and got a good start on the stone.
This was towards the end. I think it was the 2nd or 3rd last night I did stone work.
This was as far as I got for the year:
And the very last thing was the cap blocks in this area:
But I am mixing the order. In the middle of this, I started on the chimney to get that wrapped up before it turned cold. I had done some of the front wall, when I shifted to the chimney.
Got the base all prepped (tar paper, vented cladding, metal lath), and the scratch coat on the lower section here. The adjustable ladder was key for getting any of this done on the angled roof:
Laying out stones on the roof to pick from. No particular order, just enough room to reach stuff. I hauled stones up in a pair of 5 gal buckets at a time. Yes they are heavy.
A good start for the first day or two. (I forget)
More progress.
Moving into the upper section. This whole thing had tons of corners, of course, so that took a lot of time and extra material for corner blocks:
Upper section nearly done. We had some freezing weather in between this, so I had to tarp over the whole thing to keep it from freezing, which was interesting to do up on the roof...
And finally all complete:
After I finished this, I went back to the front wall to wrap that up as best I could (pictures above for how far I got). The one big remaining thing was that I had not covered the garage wall yet with anything. Given that the Tyvek was exposed for 2 years (not good) I needed to get that covered before winter. I put up the 2 layers of tar paper, the vented cladding, metal lath, and then got the scratch coat done as the very last thing before it got too cold. At least we are stable now for the winter, and it can get wrapped up next spring when it clears up. Technically, my exterior is now "finished" as I can say it is "stucco" so that keeps the inspector off my back.
This gets us up to about a couple months after we moved in - Late Oct/15. We moved in Aug 15 , 2015. While it is definitely easier dealing with one house, at this point, we still had a lot of things undone that were making the "residents" cranky... There's only so much Dave to go around... I do what is most critical right now...but we are in OK shape at this point.
So when the weather breaks in the spring and the ground firms up, I will focus on finishing off the stone work first. This will be like late May/early June, at best. For the winter I used the tractor to put the pallets of stone up and out of the way for snow plowing.
After this, I turned my attention to getting the radiant floor heat going for the winter before it got too cold and things froze up on me (can't fill radiant with water (step 1 after making connections) if it the tubing is below freezing as it will freeze in the tubing). I'm actually getting very close to being caught up in time now. The later you get in the process, the slower things go, as finish work is much slower than rough work, The finer detail of finish work requires more attention, basically. After radiant, I went on to the kitchen island, which is what I am wrapping up now (mid Jan 2016). So we are close to caught up, though as I noted, the volume of progress slows waaaay down as the project progresses. A little more to follow before I am completely caught up...
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