We passed frame inspection! Woo hoo!
Lots of things are going to happen pretty quickly, now. Insulation goes in tomorrow (Wed). Drywall starts Thursday. Our plumber and HVAC people are also scheduled to be on-site Thursday to hook up the gas and fire up the furnace, respectively. (We need to have heat for the drywall tape and texture, which is scheduled for all of next week.) Our cabinet maker has already finished our cabinetry, so he’ll bring them down from his shop late next week or on Monday, Nov 12. Of course, this project wouldn’t be complete without at least one major scheduling glitch: our tile guy is going on vacation for two weeks, starting on Nov 14. We’re trying to work something out between the tile setter, the cabinet maker, and the drywall crew, to see if we can get the kitchen sink and counter tops done before the tile setter starts his vacation.
All the stuff above is being done by tradespeople. In the meantime, we have a few things to do as well. Tonight we need to prep for insulation, so all the exterior walls, (including between the house and the garage), need to be cleared and any outstanding wiring issues need to be finished, (e.g. telephone/network wiring, running the few remaining branch circuits into the breaker box). Wednesday night we need to make sure that the entire house and garage are completely empty, so that drywall can be delivered in each room and installed on Thursday morning. We’ll need to pick up a pair of high-efficiency filters for each of the HVAC returns by Thursday afternoon, so that our furnace doesn’t get ruined by drywall dust. This weekend (probably Saturday) we’re going to meet with our tile setter and figure out how many tiles need to be bullnosed in which direction(s), so we can get that started next week. Once we’re ready for tile, I think we’ll resume working on Barb’s quilt studio.
The end of our project is looking a little closer… Well, the end of phase 1, at least.
(Update: I forgot to include the pictures. Doh!)
It’s been a while since I’ve posted–too busy working on the house to write much about it!
The stucco crew was out last week and got the house wrapped and lathed. (And incidentally gave me a ton of things to do in order to minimize future water damage. Great advice, things that needed to be done, but it burned up a lot of the time I had planned to use for wiring.) We got dinged for $800 for re-flashing all the windows. Turns out that the flashing along the bottom of the window was supposed to be left loose/flapping, i.e. only peel the top inch or two from the adhesive, so that the waterproof paper could be slipped under the flashing. So the stucco guys put new flashing along the bottom of all the windows while they were wrapping the house, and because of that they had to also flash the sides and top of the windows. (It’s just like the roof, you have to work from the bottom to the top.) Here’s a picture of the shop, without paper, to show the original window flashing:
I got most of the wiring done while I was on “vacation” last week, so we called for our rough frame inspection last Friday. And we finally failed an inspection. 
It was Chris, our regular inspector (yay!), but he busted me righteously for not having all of my grounding wires tied together. (I thought we could just leave the wires in the boxes and make up all the connections after drywall. I was wrong.) He also nailed the contractor for omitting sheetrock nailing blocks around the bathtub and lack of insulation “dams” at the eave vents. (According to the contractor, the insulation people usually put these in before they start blowing in the insulation.)
The contractor sent out a couple of guys to take care of the insulation dams and the bathtub framing issues yesterday, and I spent the weekend and yesterday afternoon/evening tying all my ground wires together and generally making the wiring look neat and tidy. We’ll get a re-inspection sometime today, and hopefully we’ll pass this time around!
Assuming that we do pass, insulation is scheduled for tomorrow, and drywall will be installed Thursday and Friday. Taping and texturing will take up all of next week (Nov 6-10). Cabinets will be installed on the following Monday. Countertop tile installation will begin that evening or the next day and should be completed by Nov 17, and we’ll work around the tile guy to install our appliances. I doubt that we’ll be able to get our tile flooring in before Thanksgiving (Nov 22), but I’ll let the tile installer make that decision when the time comes. But it looks like our kitchen will be functional for Thanksgiving this year!
Normally I’m very supportive of the Sacramento County Building Department. Nearly everybody I’ve dealt with has been helpful, professional, and even pleasant. On top of that, the inspector who’s assigned to our job is outstanding. But he must be on vacation or something, because today I had my first less-than-positive interaction with somebody from the building department.
Enough about that. It doesn’t even warrant a post on its own, so here’s the important news. Our gable vents finally arrived, so we can finish the three “showpiece” gables! (The one over the entry and the two in the back yard.) We are going to finish prep work for lath this weekend so that the stucco crew can come in on Monday and get the house wrapped and lathed. They’ll be finished by Tuesday evening or Wednesday some time. While they’re doing that, I’ll be finishing the electrical rough-in. Once both the electrical and lath are done, we’ll call for our rough frame inspection. Insulation will go in the walls the day after frame inspection, (assuming I remember to call them back and confirm!) The day after that, drywall starts. Drywall delivery is scheduled for next Friday morning at 7:00, so the house and garage will need to be completely cleared out by then. If we’re super lucky the drywall will be up, taped and textured by the end of the following week (Nov 2).
Just to make sure this weekend is extra fun, we’re driving to Napa (1.5 hrs) tomorrow for Caitlin’s gymnastics meet (4.5 hrs), after which we will be going down to Oakland (1 hr) my cousin’s housewarming party (who cares how long, it’s a party!), then driving back to Sacramento (1.5 hrs, designated driver presumed). So enough blogging, I’ve got way too much to do!
Barb took a couple of well-earned days off from our remodel and went to the Pacific International Quilt Festival with my mom on Friday and Saturday. But I wasn’t working alone–J and Andre did a bunch of work for me on Saturday. Major accomplishments were framing the old doorway in the kitchen and sheathing the west gable, which is generally the windward side of the house so the place has been a bit warmer. They also framed the attic access in the garage. While they were framing, I got started on the kitchen wiring.
Barb got back on Saturday night, and she and I worked all day on Sunday. Barb (with some help) pulled the old window air conditioner out of the wall in the front room, then framed in the hole left by the A/C, insulated and sheathed it. She also got most of our crawlspace vent covers nailed in place. Meanwhile I got most of the kitchen wiring done.
The original west wall will be insulated tomorrow, and Barb and I will sheath the wall in the evening. (It’ll be nice having the drywall covered again, now that the rainy season is here!) Andre and J are supposed to be back on Tuesday or Wednesday (or both) depending on the weather. I need to finish wiring the front porch so they can sheath that gable, so I guess that’s my other priority for Monday night. Lots to do this week if we are going to try for our framing inspection, so it may be time for me to take some more time off from my day job…
Construction started on our remodel/addition project six months ago, today. We were hoping to be finished by now, but at least the end is in sight! I’m almost done with the wiring (finally!), and we’re just about ready to jump our next major hurdle–rough frame inspection. Once we’re past that, we’ve got about four weeks until our kitchen is operational, so we ought to be able to host Thanksgiving this year. Hooray!
I haven’t been posting many pictures, either here or on our flickr remodel collection–either I can’t find the camera when I need it, or (more typically) I’m just too busy to shoot any pics. Yesterday was an exception. We had our GC send out a crew to finish some of the framing yesterday, and I managed to get some photos of (what’s left of) our kitchen:
I also managed to get a picture of the laundry/utility room before the doors were installed:
The stucco foreman came out to look at the project yesterday. He gave us a rather long list of things that needed to be taken care of before he could put up the lath. But the good news is that he had his crew set up the scaffolding early so that we could use it to finish sheathing our gables. (That’ll be much easier than hauling sheets of plywood up a pair of ladders!)
Work remaining before rough frame inspection:
- (us) Finish rough electrical–mostly the kitchen, which I can start now that the kitchen framing is done;
- (plumber) Finish rough plumbing–water heater T&P hookup, utility sink vent reconnected;
- (us) Take care of the issues listed by the stucco foreman;
- (insul.) Insulate the original west wall of the house (insulation crew is scheduled for next Monday);
- (us) Sheath the wall after insulation is installed (rain forecast for Tuesday, so Barb and I will do this Monday evening);
- (us) Sheath the rest of the gables (after rough plumbing is finished);
- (stucco) House wrap and lath for stucco.
We’ve got a busy weekend ahead of us! But hopefully we can be ready for our rough frame inspection by late next week, which would leave us five weeks until Thanksgiving. It’ll be close, but I think we can make it.
One of our neighbors had told us that the Sacramento County Building Department would not allow fold-down attic stairs to be installed in the garage. I just got off the phone with the inspection supervisor, and he told me that they are allowed, but they must have a 1-hour fire rating. I’ll have to check our stair kit’s fire rating when I get home tonight.
We’ve been having some trouble(s) with our Windows PC lately, and while I’m completely capable of diagnosing and fixing whatever the problem is, I just don’t have time to screw with it. I’ve got a house to finish, ASAP! But I couldn’t just ignore the problem, because the kids need a computer for quite a bit of their school work now. My wife suggested that we get a Mac. I’d been thinking the same thing for months (years?), so I picked up a 20″ iMac the very next day.
It took me less than 20 minutes to unbox the thing, set it up, create accounts for all four of us, and “verify that everything was working” (i.e. play with the new toy).
Scott McGown has started a Mac-users email list for CSUS. Here’s Scott’s invitation:
You’re invited to subscribe to the new MACUSERS-L listproc. MACUSERS-L
is a discussion list to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information
concerning the use and support of Apple macintosh computers.
It doesn’t say anything about campus-only, and I just subscribed from my gmail account so it looks like off-campus addresses are accepted, but: this is a listproc mailing list, and it’s especially finicky about off-campus addresses. In order to subscribe successfully, I had to send a plain-text (no HTML, no MIME!) message formatted exactly like this:
blank-line
SUBSCRIBE MACUSERS-L firstname lastname
END
Leave the subject blank and send the message to listproc at csus. edu.
This is a brand new list, and I haven’t seen much traffic yet. The only significant discussion so far has been re Parallels versus VM ware/Fusion.
I’ve been spending nearly all of my “free” time working on the wiring. I’ve come to realize the biggest hurdle (for me) with rough electrical: You do all the work on the wiring, yet there’s no outlets to plug into, no lights to switch on, etc. All that stuff has to wait until after drywall!
Anyway, here’s the progress made by room/area:
- Caira’s bedroom: Done except for termination of network/phone lines.
- Caitlin’s bedroom: Done except for running+termination of network/phone lines.
- New bathroom: Power run for lights and fan, but a fair bit of work remains to be done.
- Laundry/utility room: Done except for network/phone feed. (The patch panel will be in the utility room, so all the comm wiring terminates there.)
- Hallway: Done.
- Nook: Done.
- Kitchen: Main (fluorescent) lighting placed and temporarily wired. (Lots left to do!)
- Dining/game room: West wall (switches, outlets) done.
- Living room: No high voltage work, still need to run network/phone lines.
- Great room: West wall (entertainment center) wired, including speaker wires, network/phone wiring. Wall outlets done. Sconce lighting done.
- Front porch: No progress.
- Garage: Ceiling outlets (lights, garage door opener) done. Power run to GFCI outlet, but not terminated.
- Back porch: Coach lights [re-]placed. Still need to wire them and patch the walls where they were originally placed.
- Quilt shop: Floor outlets done. Outlets on west wall. Quite a bit of work remaining, but the shop is lower priority than the house at this point. (It’s a separate permit, so we don’t need to have it done at the same time as the house.)
- Attic: Whole-house fan done, FAU done, power (40 A @ 220 V!) run to condenser, attic lights almost finished. Power is run for one attic fan.
The major items on the punch list are (biggest to smallest):
- Kitchen: Can’t do much until we fur out the original east wall to line up with the new wall, but we’ll lose our remaining kitchen facilities when we do that. Thus it will probably be the last thing we tackle.
- Quilt shop (low priority)
- New bathroom: Run power for vanities (2 x 20 A circuits). Determine final layout of vanities, place and wire vanity lights and outlets, wire ceiling lights and exhaust fan.
- Great room lighting: We’ll need to remove some of the old joists to make room for can lights and ceiling fan mount, then place and wire the new cans.
- Dining/game room: New outlets and network/phone wiring in three original walls, complete with fire blocks–not fun. Replace original ceiling light box with a ceiling fan mount.
- Garage: Need to install & wire coach lights flanking roll-up door. Waiting on installation of new personnel door for its light.
- Front porch: Two can lights over porch, outlets for Christmas lights (with in-use weatherproof box) at peak of gable.
- Attic: Install both attic fans, run power to second one. Finish attic lighting circuit. Test whole-house fan.
I was browsing houseblogs.net over the weekend. One of the members had a link that caught my eye: LumberJocks is an online woodworkers community. I joined immediately, even though my own shop won’t be done for at least six months.
Sacramento County will only permit up to 50% of current residential space for unoccupied additions, e.g. garages and shops. Our house was originally 1090 ft2, so the max non-occupiable square footage I would be able to permit was 545 ft2. Barb’s quilt shop was only 480 ft2, so that was the shop we built first. Our addition is 1120 ft2, so once that’s done we’ll have 2210 ft2 which’ll be more than enough for a permit for my shop (768 ft2). But I can’t even apply for a permit for my shop until both the house and Barb’s quilt shop have passed final inspection.
I probably won’t be very active on LumberJocks until our remodel/addition is finished. I may lurk from time to time, but I’ve been way too busy working on the wiring to get involved with anything else.
