Roof completed

The roof now has all of its shingles, so I no longer need to be afraid of rain - yay! Here's how the back of the house looks now:

In the picture above, you can see my anenometer poking thru the roof to the far right. :-) In this picture of the main house attic space, you can also see the anenometer support pipe at the far end:

The rectangular opening is for the attic access stairway. When I was up in the garage attic space, it certainly felt nice and large, but I still had to duck slightly under the trusses. In comparison, the main house attic feels even bigger - lots of space and no ducking required.

Obviously, the housewrap (Tyvek) has started going on as well. This is from the side:

This is some sort of rubber membrane around the bottom of the side covered porch area; I think (need to confirm) that is to protect the house when a concrete porch surface is poured in here:

The opening for my garage attic access door has been rough-framed:

More progress has been made on the plumbing work too. Here's some rough-in work on the master-bathroom wall:

As mentioned before, the plumbing is being done in PEX, not copper piping. Blue tubing is for cold water, red for hot.

The one-piece tub-showers for the upstairs bathrooms have been man-handled into rough position; this sometimes requires temporarily removing studs to make room (studs were removed to the left in this picture):

One issue that came up was the fact that neither the plumber nor the heating contractor had provided for a water heater in their bids (not sure what happened, maybe it was a "I thought the other guy was going to cover that" type of situation). I know tankless heaters are all the rage right now, but I still have doubts about payback period. Even Navien's website only advertised about $80 a year savings over a tank-style heater; modern tank-style heaters may have a bad reputation these days, but the facts seem to suggest that they are mighty efficient for what they do. I mention Navien because we did get a quote for a top of the line Navien tankless water heater, but it was just too much money - I could have replaced a normal tank-style water at least twice before coming close to that amount. Yes, I'm sure that cheaper tankless options exist, but in the end I decided to go with a standard tank-style water heater. The only decision left then was propane-fired vs electric, and I went with electric: so far I've added nothing to the house that requires propane, which may be useful if I need to defer purchase and installation of the propane tank due to finances. Paul did mention that we will need at least a 65-gallon water tank heater, due to the need to supply the jetted bathtub that will be installed in the master bathroom. Sounds good to us - we both like long hot showers.

We are also installing a hot-water re-circulation system. so that there's no delay in hot water supply when you turn on the tap. This is a luxury that does cost money, both upfront and ongoing (since you're losing heat\energy when the system pumps hot water around the house that doesn't get used). OTOH, I'm guessing that the plumbing supply lines to our master bathroom will be at least 50-60' long by the time they're snaked through and around all of the various obstacles. I'm willing to pay a bit each month to not have to wait for hot water in my bathroom....

Couple more plumbing luxuries: we will have several outside water faucets, and one of the faucets near the front of the garage will have both hot and cold water, to make it easier to wash cars. Of course, I'm not sure this is much of an advantage: out here in the woods, your car will never stay clean... :)

We also spent some time this week selecting garage doors. Northwest Door is a local manufacturer and we picked one of their steel-faced, insulated, "Therma-Classic" models. These are "carriage-style" doors that should match the colonial look of the house pretty well. I also picked out some good quality, belt-drive, Liftmaster garage door openers.

Finally, this next week should be very busy - siding will be started, and windows and doors will be installed. Stay tuned...

Roofing continues

I had once figured that as soon the second story was on, I'd be able to see more stuff than just trees around the house. It didn't work out that way. Then I figured that from the roof, I'd be able to see more stuff. Again, not really:

The picture above is looking eastwards....nice view of the trees though. Here's a nice view of how the house and the well 'driveway' are located respect to each other:

In addition to roofing, the heating guys are onsite routing all of the radiant tubing and installing the control manifolds. Here's a bunch of tucked-up tubing:

This is one of the control manifolds:

The manifolds have to be accessible for service, so most or all of them are located in closet-areas and will be covered with an access panel, instead of being drywalled-over.

An extra support beam has been added underneath the stairs:

These are the water storage tanks; the blue metal tank is a self-pressurized one for normal house-hold drinking water, and the plastic tank is simple storage for the fire sprinkler system:

While my quest for a roof-top mounted sprinkler system isn't looking so good, an interior sprinkler system is still required by local code. IIRC, this is because we do not have adequate road access for a fire truck to reach our house and then have enough room to turn around and leave. Oh yeah, the fact that there's no public fire hydrants nearby doesn't help either.

Finally, our fiber-cement siding has been delivered:

Dawn and I spent a bunch of time yesterday looking at plumbing specs and styles, before finally settling down on a list. Originally we had planned to go with Kohler everywhere, but switched to Moen in the bathrooms due to style issues. This may end up saving us some money too.

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! :-)