Traffic Calming

Yesterday we had 15 trucks outside out house, including an enormous concrete mixer. Today was much quieter, just five vehicles.

The landscaping crew continued their work on setting up the forms for the front yard concrete (due to be poured on Tuesday, weather permitting). I have to forgive them their last trench, upon which I poured such scorn, as it turned out to be the base for the courtyard wall.

The guys from Jim's Bunch continued working away inside the house. They ripped out the inside of the closet in our bedroom. They have installed the dresser in our bedroom, and also finished off the wine fridge area in the kitchen. Various bumps and hammers from other parts of the house, tasks unspecified. Everything seemed quite calm today.

Site Supervisor II declares that the job will be finished in six weeks.

Photos here:
i) The old hot tub box on the side of the house, where our predecessors kept the water chemicals and stuff. We're having it taken off - retaining the potentially useful electrical outlet, because you can never have too many - and the wall made good. This photo gives a little peek into the way the house is built, with stucco, paper, chicken wire and lumber.
ii) The dresser in the master bedroom in process. This will be painted.
iii) The back yard as viewed from the redwood trees. The concrete was dry enough for me to venture out this afternoon.
iv) The fancy metal flashing at the weep screed which now extends all around our house's perimeter. Apparently this is state of the art and will block any pesky termites from finding their way in. (The little blighters had eaten quite a lot of our door steps and similar, it turns out.)
v) The wine fridge area in the kitchen almost done. I live in hope that the fridges will be moved into the kitchen and out of our dining room early next week.

Still no rain, lots of activity

The rain in holding off, so we have teams of guys around the house again today. The hardscaping crew are still in the back yard trenching and adding drainage pipes. I had a discussion with the Hardscaping Boss and the Landscape Designer today about adding an additional 200 feet long trench alongside the pool in order to allow the power, water etc to run from the house to Hubby's blessed outdoor kitchen. This trench will have to be dug by hand and will take two men three days to complete. Does that sound expensive to you?

Here's a photo of the dissipator pipe, and also of the man digging a hole for it in the lawn area. (Look for his head and a long stick in his hands at the center of the photo.)


The house wrapping continues and is nearing completion.


The central vacuum man was here scoping out the work and prepping to make an estimate for the vacuum to be extended into the bedroom/bathroom addition. Turns out that the regular pipe for use with the vacuum is so long we don't need to add attachment vents in the office or laundry.

The lights in the dining room and hall that were out over the weekend are back in action. Apparently the outage was caused by a short in the kitchen. We still don't have a doorbell, but that's hardly an issue since no one ventures over the front yard any more.


This is how the kitchen looked at the end of Sunday. The dry-wallers have now completed their work, the walls have been primed, and the cabinet company is busily completing the installation of the cabinets. Site Supervisor II reckons we lost a day with the dry-wallers taking too long.


Finally, the concrete guys are back, pouring additional concrete around the foundation of the bedroom. You remember the not-perpendicular-house problem from a few weeks back? After the additional foundation material has been poured, it will no longer look like our addition experienced an earthquake.

Perpendicular House Photos

Here are a couple of photos of the foundations and sheathed walls on the bedroom addition. It's a bit hard to show, but this is the point at which the walls and the foundations head off in different directions. You can see that the wall sticks out about three inches from the foundation, whereas on the other side it sticks out about an inch and a half. I assume the inch and a half is the correct distance...

Day of Reckoning

I'm back from my trip and, as you can see, Hubby totally failed to keep the blog current, so I'll bring it up to date...

The wood encasing the concrete foundation footings on both additions has been removed, the footings have been inspected and passed, and we are good for the next stage. As I write, Azmir and a couple of other guys are installing the floor joists across the foundation footings on the bedroom/bathroom addition. Gentle sounds of sawing and hammering in the background. Nothing happening on the office/laundry side.

The lights throughout the house are now working, though we're not sure why.

Installation of a new furnace and ductwork was completed on Friday. We now have a new thermostat in our bedroom hallway, and a defunct one decorated in blue builder's tape in our living room. The furnace seems to be working well.

The Landscape Designer and our Site Supervisor met last Wednesday to discuss issues like grading, drainage, landscape lighting conduits, and the location of the "backflow trap T connector". No, I don't know what that is, but I'm sure it's important, or she wouldn't have come all the way from Oregon to discuss it.

The Arborist has applied for the permit to remove our second Monterey Pine. He expects to get it next week. In the meantime the debris from grinding the first stump is sitting in two mounds that look for all the world like a termite holiday camp. The Arborist says they'll dispose of that when they come for the second tree.

We have started to receive and pay the bills for the construction work. Largest check (for over $47,000) to Jim's Bunch for work completed in the first month plus supplies on hand. Also checks for $5,000+ to The Architect (on top of $30,000+ we have already paid for the design phase); $1,300 to The Surveyor; and $3,300 to The Arborist. And there are probably others I've forgotten, but those are the big ones I wrote this morning.

Now I need to think about bathroom medicine cabinets and drawer pulls.

Our first construction error

The concrete guys were here today to finish pouring the "footings" as they seem to be called here. They poured one layer yesterday and then a second one today. Site Supervisor admitted this afternoon that the concrete guys had made a mistake in the footings: Apparently the floor joists are usually set into the concrete, but ours are somehow floating on the top, according to the plans. As you can tell, I have a deep understanding of the structural engineering. Anyway, the upshot was that the concrete guys had to take remedial action, cutting into the first layer of concrete, adding new rebars with "special epoxy bindings" and generally making sure that the floor joists will have somewhere to go. I thought it was pretty decent of Site Supervisor to confess that a mistake had been made - after all, I would have had no idea simply by looking.

When we got back to the house yesterday dinnertime, we were disturbed by the sounds of giant rats under the floorboards. Of course, it turned out to be the asbestos guys finishing their work; and they weren't done till it was dark. Now that must be a very unlovely job to do. The fact that the exterior of our house was plastered in Danger signs was equally disturbing. Today all the heating vents through the house continue to be sealed up with blue builder's tape. I'm starting to like it - a nice splash of color among the neutrality of our usual background.

Anyway.

The furnace guys were back today installing the new furnace in the garage. We chose to have a high energy efficiency model which will cost us $2,750 more but is apparently eligible for a $1,500 rebate from the State...assuming the State still has any money for such fripperies. Tomorrow the HVAC team (as Site Superviser refers to them) will tackle the new ductwork. Here's a photo of some of it sitting on our drive...
Luckily the weather has been stupendously good the past couple of days - the dashboard thermostat in Hubby's car said 80F at one point - so we are not feeling the lack of heating one bit.

We also had a visit today from our homeowners' insurance company's appraiser. He told us we need to install fire extinguishers in at least three places including the garage, also some temporary fencing along the side of the house to stop people accessing our back yard, and that if the assessed rebuilding cost for the house exceeds $1,500,000 - which it might well do, this being an expensive area for everything - we will be required to install a centrally-monitored fire alarm system. Hubby is not too thrilled about that.


(Photo of the big cement truck outside our house this afternoon.)

Change of scene

Today we have men under the house abating our asbestos problem and other men in our garage taking out our furnace in preparation for the asbestos team to tackle the asbestos insulation there too. Not very photogenic (or very interesting). So here's a photo of Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove, where I was over the weekend (at a dance workshop in the historic Asilomar Convention Center).


Anyway, back to the plot. The surveyor came out on Friday and said that our foundation footings are in just the right place with respect to the side yard set back, so the concrete guys are hoping to get on with pouring the foundations later today. The weather is lovely, so it would be a good day for it.

Archaeological excavations #3

Turns out that our former family room bathroom was built over an old concrete garden patio, with the result that there is no crawl space. The Architect is puzzled how this could ever have been allowed, but the upshot for us is that we need to have a crawl space created one way or the other in order to meet code now. This was discovered by the foundations guys breaking in through the exterior wall in preparation for creating the opening that would connect the new crawl space to the old crawl space. Er, no. Just a solid bit of concrete, madam. The family room definitely has a crawl space under it - there is a hatch in the floor - so the construction guys just have to work out how to traverse the five feet from one area to the other. Nice.

Other work in progress today includes the compacting of the dirt outside the dining room and where the office will be built. Clouds of dust. Lots of noise.

Other news: Our neighbors have sold their house.

Outpouring of funds and issues continues

Turns out that we should have had an official survey done of our property lines before we started work, as our office extension will be right up to the line of the eight feet set back required by the building code. Luckily we haven't poured any foundations yet - all we have is a dug trench - so we have secured the services of a surveyor and he will be coming over tomorrow or Friday. Meanwhile, the foundations work continues unabated on the other side of the house, where the building is well outside the eight feet setback and there is no issue.


Yesterday was Return of the Bob Cat Day. It was very windy. While the guys were excavating the crawl space, the dust and dirt was flying around in great clouds, mixed with the green pollen dust that cascades from our central cedar tree at the slightest provocation. It was a day to stay inside the house, so I did. It's windy again today, but the excavations have finished and they are now building the wooden retaining walls for pouring/shaping the concrete.

The large cedar stump pictured in an earlier post is now thoroughly gone - it is where the foundation guys are working right now - but the pine stump in the back is still with us. The Arborist spent three hours grinding it yesterday and will be back tomorrow to finish up. (We know he means it because he left his equipment here, and if he leaves it too long he won't be able to get it out again.)


Not much happening inside the house this week. Azmir pulled up some of our kitchen floor tiles yesterday - Very Noisy - and managed to salvage two out of four. (The Architect is hoping the salvage operation won't work, so we'll have to change the floor out, but we hope the opposite.) He was cutting a hole in the floor for the gas guy to use in running a pipe for our tumble drier from the kitchen into the garage, where it will be living for the duration of the remodel. The door on the washer-drier closet is also gone, and I can now see that the vent hose from the drier has a big tear in it, which is no doubt why the kitchen fills up with steam when you use it.

What else? A Corian rep was over yesterday too, measuring up and assessing whether we can reuse the countertops. He thought we could, but left us many leaflets with many alternative options to look at. Hubby is resistant, commenting that our kitchen will soon be like George Washington's axe.

I ordered two new wine cellars on Monday. Hubby had better stock up on something to make them worthwhile. Ca-ching! We are also replacing our main furnace, and just decided on the high energy model which costs $3,000 more. Ca-ching!

In fact the whole remodel is - ca-ching!

Footings begin

Cheerful Latino men in my garden with string and bits of wood marking out the location where the concrete for the foundations will go. Yay!