Housewrap 2

Today DH and HD finished putting the housewrap on the house. For some reason, adding the housewrap made the house look ENORMOUS!

Unfortunately, this will probably be the last update for a while. Winter has hit and money has run out for now. The perils of building a house without a loan. Rest assured, we'll be back in the new year with plenty more updates though. They'll come lightning fast too. Why? We're expecting to be done building and moved in by June 2013! That's 6 months away!

HD and DH putting the wrap on the peak of the house. Those are not short ladders either.

Housewrap 1

Today, DH and HD started putting the housewrap on the house. We decided to go with EasyGard instead of Tyvek. Cost is one issue, and from all our research it's comparable to Tyvek. DH said it went on very easily once they figured out exactly how to do it. The parts you'll see done only took them about 3 hours to do! That's amazing! Tomorrow, they're going to do up in the eaves and the small band underneath the fascia. They are confident they'll be able to get the house fully wrapped by the end of the day tomorrow.

Before/Currently

Pics of the housewrap on the house. 

 The house from the neighbor's yard. This is a side you won't normally see.

 The side of the house facing the garage

 The side of the house you normally see. 

The front of the house.

The trusses are on!

Today, MD, HD, and I raised the trusses for the roof. DH helped after he got off of work. It was definitely an entertaining experience. (This post will be picture intensive. You've been warned.)

 The first truss being attached to the lift.

 There it goes! Up into the air.

 Being lowered into place.

 First truss set and tacked into place. If you look to the far right above the ladder, you can see where we braced it by nailing it to a board that was attached to the garage.

 Several of the trusses up.

 A pic of hubby's Dad up in the trusses attaching crossbeams.

 Setting the last truss on!

 Hubby and his Dad up in the trusses attaching some bracing boards.

All done! It looks like a house now! Because of rain, we'll be taking a few days off. Next step after is to add the plywood sheating to both the roof and the walls.

Demo is done!

Woo hoo! Demolition is completely done! The rest of the old floor deck was removed little by little by DH over the week. The wall separating the old basement with the new crawlspace has been removed. Even part of the dirt we removed has been pushed back down. Now, we start CONSTRUCTION! The next thing that will happen is the new floor deck going on. Then the walls will go up. So, the next three weeks are going to see a LOT of progress! I can't wait!

I know it's hard to see, but here is the foundation as it sits. The pink parts are the old basement walls, the grey is the new crawlspace. Now you can finally see just how much we added on.

We've got block!

Woo hoo! We've officially got a whole foundation for the house now. The block guys came yesterday to drop off the block, then today to lay the block for the crawlspace. Next is pouring the concrete into the basement walls to strengthen them. Then we remove the rest of the floor deck. From there, it's ALL construction instead of demolition. Woo hoo!

The block truck.

 It had it's own crane onboard to unload them!

 All of our block for the foundation.

 The block is laid!

There we go! Now you can sort of see how big the addition to the main house is. :)

Basement walls

Today DH and MD shored up the basement walls in preparation for rebar and concrete to be poured into them to help stabilize them. Then, they started tearing off the floor deck. The plan is to finish tearing off the floor deck on Friday. Block guy for the crawlspace foundation will be here sometime next week!

 See! Part of the floor deck has been taken off. DH is going to try to salvage the hardwood flooring to use in a different project later on.

 Yeah. The block was really really loose. Good thing this wall is going to be removed.

See how they braced the wall in preparation for the rebar and concrete! And yes, this is standing on the concrete pad, looking through the wall into the basement.

We've got concrete!

Woo hoo. The concrete company came at 8 o'clock this morning. By 8:45am, when I showed up, they had half of the pad poured and were smoothing it out. By 11 o'clock, they were gone. They were fast and amazing. Now, we'll let it dry for a few days before we move on to the next step. That will be either laying the block for the walls for the crawlspace -or- removing the floor deck to shore up the basement walls. One of the other will happen in a few days.

 The cement truck

 Half of it poured and being smoothed.

All done!

Framework

Well, it took longer than we thought to do, but the frame for the concrete slab is finally done. Levelling the pad for concrete had to be hand-dug. So it took many more hours than we thought. Then, on Sunday, we had torrential rains that held up progress. Today, DH finished the final things to get the dirt slab ready for tomorrow's concrete pour!

Excavation Day Two

Today's pictures aren't as impressive as yesterday's, however we did get a lot of work done. We put in the drainage pipe and excavated the whole new addition area. Oh, we also broke my Dad's dump truck. Tomorrow we'll be putting the framework in for the concrete slab of the crawlspace. The slab will be poured on Tuesday. The foundation will also be shored up on Tuesday.  So, Sunday and Monday will be rest days. Yay. Days of rest!

 MD and DH putting in the drainage pipe.

 DH standing in the hole that will be the crawlspace for the new addition.

 Here's what the 'house' looks like now. That's 8 feet of the basement wall you can see here.

 And here is the mound of dirt lining the property. Why? Remember how I said the dump truck broke? Yeah. That's why. We can't remove the dirt from the property because of the dump truck being broke.

This is no little pile of dirt either. LMS is 4'6" tall and it's as tall as she is. It extends the full length of the property too. Insane. 

Excavation Day 1

Yes, I said Day One. You'll see why later. Anyway, today started off amazing. I was truly astonished at how fast things went today. In fact, the pictures will do all the story.

 How the house looked when we began the day. It didn't stay like this for long.

 The excavator!

 There goes part of the rest of the house!

 Boom!

 And there goes the rest!

 Smash. No more house.

 DH working down in the trench next to the basement. It's deep. We have some foundation work we need to do, which is why we're digging around the foundation.

And this is why there is a Day One. The track came off the excavator. 15 mins AFTER the place closed for the day. Isn't that how it always goes? The plan now is to finish excavation tomorrow, after the people come and fix the track. Then, we're off and running on construction!

Preparations have begun

So, when we last left off with the house (a week ago), this is what it looked like:

A giant mess in desperate need of cleaning up. Well, DH and I cleaned up the random wood, etc that way laying around.  We also cleaned up the huge pile of stuff that was off to the left side of this picture. (You can't see it in this picture.)

Well, the other day, my Dad came in and cleaned up all the block and concrete bits. I don't have pictures of him doing it, as we weren't there that day. However, I -do- have pictures of the after-effects!

 As you can see, the block and random concrete bits are now gone. The only block remaining is the few you see acting as steps into the other half of the house.

The next step will be to excavate, pour the slab, and lay the block. That's supposed to happen sometime in the next week or so. My Dad has to make precise measurements, figure out what we need, rent the excavator, line up a masonry, etc. So, the next update will come once that process starts.

Almost....

We've almost completed demolition on the addition part of the house. The main part of the house will be staying for a while. After we clean up what's laying around, the next phase will be squaring off the foundation.   That will happen after precise measurements are taken, excavation is done, etc. So, after tomorrow's cleanup, the house will mostly likely sit for a little while. That's fine, because DH goes back to work on Thursday.

 My Dad digging out the concrete pad that was under the mudroom.

 This is how it looked this afternoon when we broke for extreme heat. 

 Hubby knocking the underlayment boards. 

 He threw one at me!

This is what it looks like tonight. As you can see, we have a fair bit of clean up to do.

See. This is the view of the pile of stuff we have to clean up. This was BEFORE we took all the floor joists/etc off.