The journey of building our new home!: 9.15.2015

Today started with an early morning phone call from the concrete contractor confirming tomorrow's schedule - the concrete will be there bright and early at 7:30! (However, he called Jim this evening and said that the time has changed - 6:30 is now the time! Early, but it will be so nice to have this block checked. After the last concrete pour not turning out exactly as we wanted, we are even more nervous this time.

One thing that helped today was that when Jim went to the site, there was a car at the end of the driveway. Jim unlocked the chain and drove in. It turned out that one of the people that work with the contractor came to survey the job and make sure all was well. He's the one that does the screeding, so it's his responsibility to make sure it comes out flat. Jim had a really good conversation with him and felt much better going over the job with him too. Hopefully we'll be able to sleep tonight - tomorrow will come early!

Meanwhile, we pressed on with a multitude of jobs today. First, Jim put up another stud in the other area of the wall that will carry a lot of the roof load.

Then it was time for house wrap. Jim bought a new tool - a pneumatic staple gun that also puts a cap on the staple. That way the staple can't come out. Since the house wrap may be exposed for awhile, this would help ensure that it would stay flat and secure. However, after spending awhile trying to get it to work correctly, he finally gave up. It stapled well but the caps kept jamming and wouldn't come out. So he will have to figure out what's wrong with that but we needed to press on.

We first put up the 9' wrap and then used the 3' to cover the top section and lap over the bottom.

Then Jim taped all the seams...

Once that job was checked off, it was once again time to move scaffolding around. Since concrete is tomorrow and we got finished with the first section of sheathing as planned, we could take down the first two towers. That way there is no blockage of any type for the contractors to worry about.

Scaffolding coming down...

Since we had a rainy day on Sunday, there was a little washout and Jim wanted to make sure all was well with the leveling.

Scaffolding towers down! The front side really is taking shape now.

Then we switched focus to making sure all of the loose ends were finished for the concrete pour. Since it's going to be an early start, Jim wanted to make sure he had some lights available in the back corner if they were needed. So he rigged up a way to have some lights up out of the way.

On the back wall, Jim decided to raise the level of the concrete by 1/4". This will allow a very gradual slope in case of any water getting in since things aren't going to be totally closed in for awhile. Making a new chalk line meant first "erasing" the line that was there!

One of the things the contractor and Jim talked about this morning was where the slope in the floor will go - Jim wanted it gradually sloped towards the garage door so that if a sloppy car is parked in that spot, water will run towards the garage door. So Jim pounded in two stakes where they will start the slope.

Then he had to get the laser level out to make sure the stakes were at the right level.

Once all the pre-concrete jobs were done, it was time once again to work on scaffolding and build the next sections higher. This was a scary, precarious position Jim was in - standing on the top of a plan with nothing around him dragging up a very heavy piece of scaffolding.

Then it was time for some creative scaffolding. We need one more tower on the front of the building in order to be able to finish all the sheathing. But if you remember when we first started, the front is on a hill. Our first piece of sheathing was done with Jim on a ladder on a hill - don't want to do that again! But in order to build scaffolding, Jim had to do some grading.

You can see how high the incline is at this point...the trick is going to be getting the next tower to line up perfectly with the existing one so that it can all be secured together.

Doing some grading on the top side...

We were saying that there is a lot of very "unglamorous" work involved in this project. All of the hard work moving all the scaffolding around, grading the area, shoveling dirt - that's just to get to the point where you can actually do the work!