Roof started

The plumbers have been busy drilling lots of holes to run their stuff through. The single-piece tub-showers for the upstairs are staged in the garage:

In the upper left of the above picture, you can see that the "mechanical wall" has been drywalled. Good to have that done before all of the plumbing and manifold stuff starts getting attached there. A bunch of other plumbing supplies have been staged in the garage as well, including a 86 gallon water storage tank from Amtrol. More of that later as the stuff gets installed.

The roofing has begun, although so far it's only the back-side of the garage roof:

I like the roof color. You can also see our paint test panel on the backside of the garage in the picture above. We think we might have gone a bit too dark, but time will tell.

It also looks like Paul has finished priming and painting all of the soffit areas...I've taken some pictures of those areas but they didn't turn out so great (the pictures, that is).

Some additional bracing has been added to many of the outside walls:

We are having to make some decisions about upgrades on various things. The attic trusses were one such item, and the exterior door for the garage attic is another. The original bid had 7" reveal siding (fiber-cement siding), and we changed that to 4", primarily since I think it looks more authentic for this style of house. Naturally that costs more money, partially due to extra material (each piece of siding covers less surface area, so you're paying for more "overlap" area, and also more pieces means more install labor.). I also need to decide on the final electrical plan - lots of choices, and on my initial take I went crazy with can lights which added more than I expected. Decisions, decisions! :-)

Roof is "loaded"

Paul mentioned today that the roof is "loaded" and that the roofers will be starting no later than Monday. Perhaps I wasn't thinking, so I asked if that meant that all of the shingles are loaded on a truck at the supplier? No, it means that the bundles of shingles have all been hoisted to strategic spots on the roof:

It could have been worse - I could have asked if "loaded" meant that our shingles had a lot of add-on features... :)

As mentioned before, we are going with a basic but high-quality shingle, in a basic black. I didn't know the exact type until today: "RoofShake 40" shingles from IKO brand, in their "Dual Black" color (the shingle tabs alternate in color between dark and light black). It will look fine, I'm not worried. They come with a 40 year warranty, which is fine.

The front porch is starting to take shape:

The plumbers have started working too...here's some of the kitchen rough-in:

The pipe coming out of the floor is for an island sink drain (that might have been obvious, but hey). Also, the window above the kitchen sink looked a bit low, and I sent an email to Paul asking if we needed to raise that a bit.

Well, enough blogging for now: I need to go confirm some shower valve choices (these need to installed during rough-in...).

Keep on trussing

The trusses are stood up over the second story portion of the house, but not yet sheathed. We had some rain last week which was slowing things down I'm sure. Nevertheless we can now see the final exterior views starting to take shape. Here is the front of the house:

Side:

Here's the back porch view:

In the picture above, if you count the open spaces between the trusses, and start from the left, you will see that the ninth space is wider than the rest. This area was framed wider to accomodate the Bessler sliding attic stairway that I talked about in a previous post.

I spent some time this weekend assembling the support post for my weather station anenometer. I made it out of 1" galvanised plumbing pipe, with a U-turn at the top so that the sensor cable could be routed inside of the pipe with no leaks. When I had the rough assembly all done in the garage at home, we went out to the site so I could calibrate it with a compass (so that the anenometer will report accurate wind direction data). This is a picture of me with my anenometer:

The pipe is 10' long and I plan to have 5' below the roof for support, and the other 5' above the roof (4' above the roofline is the advised minimum to have accurate readings). I did not permanently mount it yet; will talk with Paul in the morning to see when the best time to do that is.

This is my garage attic space:

Paul is going to put together a bid\budget for what it would take to build a set of stairs (U-shaped with a small landing) for access to the garage storage space.