The journey of building our new home!: 8.4.2015

Jim and I started the day at the Building Department. Our permit expired a couple of weeks ago and we wanted to talk to him about extending it. Excuse the rant but it always seems very unfair that they lump someone who is building their home totally by themselves in with contractors who pump out houses quickly with a crew. Not to mention that this building is a commercial-type building. The inspector has to come out the same number of times if it takes 6 months or 2 years so it seems very unfair that you would have to pay for a permit again. Plus the permit here in NY was much more expensive than in Ohio. But it sounds like the inspector may be able to push back the permit expiration date - he was going to check things out and let us know.

We also ran into the daughter of our septic designer who is on the Zoning Committee. She's also one of the people who gave us the name of the concrete contractor who did the steel deck. Jim told her that he wasn't pleased with the quality of his work. She was going to try and get a couple more names for him so we'll see how that goes.

On that subject, we finally received a quote from the guy who came out recently to talk about the ground slab. He texted the quote to Jim so it was not much more than a price. However, it was crazy expensive - much more than the quote the first guy had given us for the slab. Jim has to talk to him more but we may be back to square one. Who would have thought this would have been such an issue?

When he got back on site, Jim worked on getting everything prepared to work on the rest of the ledger boards. This meant dismantling one of the scaffolding sections on the upper deck and bringing it down to set up in the auto bay. A lot of work, but now there is a continuous scaffold platform for him to work from as we get ready for sheathing in this area.

Doing the ledger board in this area presented an issue. Because the Pex tubing is in the concrete now and we can't tell exactly where it is, drilling into the concrete in order to attach these boards could puncture the tubing. This wasn't an issue on the front and back because the tubing wasn't close enough and in other areas we had put foam so Jim could drill into that. Jim figured out that if he drilled in the area where the Pex would be curving to go around the shear pins that he wouldn't be in danger of hitting it. This required him to mark those areas by looking at the steel deck design below.

Since he had to drill into the concrete here, he needed Tapcons that had a flat head so that the sheathing would lay flat against the screws. He had some in storage so we ate lunch in the car as we drove to the storage unit to find them.

When we got back, he used the air compressor to put air into the Pex tubing so that we would know if he hit a tube causing the system to lose pressure. Then it was time to begin! We again marked the area for the ledger board by projecting our laser level marks inside onto the outside of the pour stop. Jim put duct tape on his concrete drill bit so that he would know exactly how far to drill into the concrete.

I periodically checked the pressure in the tubing and everything held steady - whew! Here's Jim on the top of the wall fastening the ledger board.

Once the side was done, he had to put the ledger board on the stairwell area, again being extremely careful not to hit any tubing.

Yay! The ledger board is basically all done and this area that we were concerned about is finished with no damage to the tubing. Quite the relief!

Jim putting some flashing on top of the ledger board.

Our other big goal today was to move the windows from the ground level up on top of the now-covered deck. We need to be able to finish putting down the HydroFoam so the windows had to be moved. Jim had kept them on the pallets so he loaded the pallet onto the Bobcat and then he slowly drove up the hill with me walking alongside helping to keep them vertical.

Once we got the pallet up on top of the stairwell area, we unloaded each window and then repacked them onto the pallet and wrapped them with shrink wrap.