What a Weekend!

We started the weekend by putting Derek on a flight to Rome Thursday evening. It is now Monday and do you think we have heard from him yet? Maybe he realized we would be out of town until this evening so he is saving up his euros to fill us in on the happenings sometime tomorrow.

Now taking bets on that happening.

The construction is starting a new phase this week in that all of the foundation and construction concrete work is completed and materials are starting to be delivered. Neal and David are planning on the framing taking 5-6 weeks. Many of the items that come after that take about that long to get here, so they need to be ordered right now.

We spent the majority of the weekend cutting up the trees that needed to be removed and chipping them up. Next to waterproofing (see prior post) this is a real dirty job. We bought a small chipper off of Craig's List last week and I have to say that for its size it did not let us down, and it saved us a few bucks. Renting a chipper would have been $296/day and we bought this one for $250. Now there is a substantial difference in size, but it worked.

The concrete slab laid by Tim and Bob last Thursday works great. We weren't sure it was dry initially, but Tim told us it is covered in a lacquer sealer to slow down the curing. It looks real shiny.

Pat's core sawyer also showed up today to cut the window opening in the lower floor back bedroom. I dug out the wall behind where "I" thought the window was going, but when we re-checked the plans and snapped the chalk lines turned out I didn't need to dig out the wall at all. If nothing else it was good exercise.

While the window was being cut (another dirty job) the first of two loads of materials arrived. This load contained the steel I-beams and posts along with a number of the glulam beams. It also had one of the more overlooked pieces of the house, the nails. Two big heavy boxes of 8 and 16 penny nails.

There will be another load dropped off today about 4pm. Then another load on Friday. The somewhat amazing thing is that the lower level needs to be framed out by then, so that there will be room to drop the Friday load which will be the trusses for the two wings off the prow section.

I wish I could say things were going good for everyone building at AC, but one of our neighbors is having no luck. He is building a round house (Deltec?) and had his materials scheduled for delivery today, along with a week long visit by a construction engineer to help in the erection of the house by Randy Duggans one of the local framers. He found out that the foundation people had not gotten started on the laying of his block stem walls until yesterday, but then the truck delivering the house rolled off the side of the road one turn short of his parcel and has beginning to slide down the mountain. All we could do was offer that he drop by for a beer on Saturday night. I have to hand it to him he "appeared" to be a lot calmer then I would have been.

We left around noon to day for a couple of stops in town to get some of the more important/expensive items ordered.

The first stop was Persnickety Kitchens to work on the design. We are planning on Maple cabinets in a three rail Shaker style. The cabinets will be multi height in that the corners will be 42" high, with 36" connecting cabinet heights. We will go back on Saturday to finalize the design and get a planning budget. The actual design will not be established until after the sheetrock is installed so that final measurements can be taken prior to the order being placed.

We also went by Johnny's plumbing to select the fixtures. Picking this stuff is hard work in that a decision one item can have a cascade of ramifications on multiple other decisions that need to or have been made.

We have selected furniture style sink basins for the main floor and lower floor bathrooms. This is more akin to what is seen in hotels in that the vanities will have legs much like standalone furniture.

There will be a "roman' tub in the Master bath and all stools will be Durvits with soft close lids. Faucets will be brushed nickel. The kitchen sink will be a granite composite in an anthracite color. At least these are our selections until I see the faxed price sheet, but based on John Sr.'s mentioned prices I think we will pretty close.

We will be going back up on Saturday to check the progress.