The journey of building our new home!: 8.12.2015

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

8.12.2015

Jim had a good analogy about building your own house like we are - it's kind of like a tree. It starts out with the trunk - you are just doing one thing, like digging in the dirt for footers. You know that that's your job every day. Then as you finish that job and branch out to another job, that job leads to yet another job. Before long, there are a multitude of jobs that all need to be done, all branching off from that trunk, and it becomes more difficult to manage.

We're kind of in that mode now - there are so many different things to be done and so many directions you could turn. Jim doesn't like switching jobs all the time but sometimes you have to.

Today was one of those days - Jim started out moving scaffolding yet again. The scaffolding was blocking access to getting things in and out of the doorway plus we needed to be able to reach the side area for sheathing. In order to make the scaffolding safe - since it has to sit on a slanted deck - he screwed the block down to the deck, then screwed the screw jack down to the block.

Then he made more support plates for the upper landing and got them all screwed into place. The one on the left required lots of cuts to make it fit around all the other steel supports.

Switching gears, we headed down to the ground floor. Jim will use the same temporary manifold system to put air into the Pex tubing on this level also. So he needed to take all the upper deck connections apart. Again, we had to make sure to write the circuit number and whether it was an inlet or outlet on the tubing so that Jim can get everything back in the right place.

Then he just tied all the loose ends together to get them out of the way.

Back to laying down the HydroFoam. We did as much as we could and still leave area to work for when we pour the auto lift pad. Jim wants to wait to talk to the concrete contractor to make sure they are both on the same page about the pad in conjunction with the rest of the floor. The first guy thought Jim should raise that area a little to provide a slope in the floor towards the garage door. Hopefully the new person is going to come out this week and we can get a plan in motion.

Then we got the saw out of the deck area and Jim started cutting some of the foam board to fill in around the edges of the floor space.

The plan worked perfectly - two layers of foam board brings the edges to the same height and keeps everything tightly in place.

Once we knew that would work and that we had enough down to show the contractor how it will be finished, it was time to switch gears once again - back to sheathing! Bringing up more plywood...