Chipping away
For a tiny bathroom, removing the tiles/walls is taking an awfully long time. Our house was constructed with metal lath and plaster and the bathrooms were tiled in a lovely 50’s style: one is pink with black and the other is/was yellow with black. Busting through the plaster and lath and tile is involving a lot of work with the sledge hammer and then sweeping up garbage cans full of debris, putting it into the bucket of the tractor and driving it around the house to the dumpster.
At lease the tractor makes the work a little easier.
Boiler Chimney
Today the guys finished up the sleepers and the mason came and extended the chimney for our boiler…. All of this in preparation for the trusses arriving on Friday and being put up on Monday.
It’s HOT / preparing for trusses
Today the guys started attaching sleepers to the perimeter of the roof. These are all being set level to each other to make up for the fact that our roof edge is definitely not level.
It was ridiculously hot and humid and is supposed to continue to be in the 90’s for the rest of the week so tomorrow work is starting at 6am in an attempt to avoid noonday sun.
It’s Friday
Trusses are expected to arrive a week from today.
We are still trying to find the sweet spot where torrential downpours outside don’t result in moisture coming inside…. we are almost there, but not quite. We have been lucky, so far, and any water that has come in has been caught quickly with nothing ruined…. but it will be very nice to have the trusses up and sheathed so that there are overhangs and a water proof lid on our home.
We had a torrential downpour yesterday…. all day, so the guys put a bunch of time into clearing the roof of water to start the day and doing some extra taping and flashing before heading home for the weekend.
Rain is coming and we are headed to a wedding
Craig and I have been busy baking the cake for a 250 guest wedding and today, we have to deliver.
Meanwhile, here at the homestead, the guys are preparing for rain. The plan for the day was to do a minimal amount of framing work and then to make sure that everything was buttoned up tight against the rain…. Oh yes, and the electrician came and hooked up the power for the AC.
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Craig and the cake in the walk in fridge -
Lysha and Leanette -
The bride and groom’s table
No walls and new walls
The tree cam is back! We have some good footage of today’s work.
On the inside: the plumbers came and disconnected the fixtures in the yelow bathroom. On the outside: the bedroom wall was knocked down and the new exterior wall was framed.
Kevin-the-contractor gave us good news: the trusses will arrive on July 6th, which means that we should have a watertight roof over the house by July 10th. That will be a relief for everybody.
Busting out the meditation room
Monday the crew increased from two to three and the speed of work picked up. The tree cam wasn’t up because there was a chance of rain and I hadn’t finished the mount for the waterproof box so we don’t have much in the way of movies but we do have some stills.
A temporary wall was put up in the meditation room, about 4′ in from the old exterior wall and then, boom, boom, bang, bang, out came the old exterior wall. Then there was some more bang-banging and all of a sudden we had a new exterior wall framed.
In the middle of all of the banging, Craig and I scrambled out to the almost demolished exterior wall and scavenged the hardware from the windows so that we have spare hardware for our remaining 60 year old Anderson casement windows.
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destructo-chango -
how to mount a camera on a tree
Demo the meditation room
Friday there was some more progress insulating the floor and the guys moved inside and tore apart the meditation room. When they removed the wallboard we finally learned what the house is currently insulated with: rockwool. …. It’s pretty good stuff, but you can’t put enough of it in a wall framed with 2×4’s.
In other news, the HVAC guys (in orange) came and reconnected the AC… whahoo! I’m not normally a big fan of AC but, with the construction going on, we can’t open and close windows at will, so a little help cooling down the inside of the house is fantastic….. plus, once the guys start working inside they will appreciate it.
And….. the camera moved outside to the cherry tree. We need to make some exposure adjustments, and I’m looking around for an inexpensive wide angle lense adaptor, but for the moment, it works.
At the end of today’s movie you can see a big tarp being secured over the wall and the new foundation. That’s because it’s supposed to rain all weekend and we wouldn’t want to flood the new foundation or have rain driven in through our exposed walls.
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baseboard heater gone -
closet trim gone -
wall board and rockwool insulation gone
Sill plate / Floor joists
The new addition to the house ties in to the original foundation and also to the 10′ laundry room addition that a previous owner added. Those two foundations aren’t perfectly level with each other so there has been a bit of extra time spent to get the sill plate for the new exterior walls dead on level.
So far, we have been filming the construction from a couple of locations inside the house. At this point we really need to move the camera / raspberry pi outside so that we can see the framing action on the wall. We’ve picked a big cherry tree as the place to mount the camera…. tomorrow Craig will mount a 2×4 high up on the trunk and I will try to come up with a waterproof enclosure that we can put the pi/ camera into which we will mount to the 2×4.
Up until today, the guys did not know that we had been making little time lapse movies of their work. Today we broke the news to them and they took it pretty well… or at least we think they did; proof of their acquiescence will be when the power cord to the cherry tree setup doesn’t magically get unplugged during the day.
