Tag Archive for 'quilt_shop'

07
May

We passed!

We passed our final inspection on the first try! WOO HOO!!!

Unfortunately we’re not yet finished with our remodel/addition. There are still a few items on the punch list, but the rest of the work is basically:

  • Telephone/network wiring
  • Finish the trim work (doors, windows, baseboards, touch-up paint)
  • Some extra work in the dining/game room
  • A few exterior finishing touches

We can’t put much effort into the house right now because we have to get our next inspection on the quilt shop by June 18, about 6 weeks from today.

06
May

“Final” inspection today

We have our “final” inspection on the house/addition today. I don’t expect that we’ll pass on the first try, since nobody else I know has been able to pull that off. The final inspection punch list is empty for now, but Chris (our inspector) will probably give me a list of things to fix once he’s had a look around.

I still have some non-inspection work to do–things like door- and window trim, telephone/network wiring, hanging some (plug-in) fluorescent lights in the garage, etc. I also want to install two “extra” smoke alarms in the front rooms of the house. These aren’t required, but it just seems sensible to have these in every room, (except places where they’ll be sounding false alarms–the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry room). The wiring is installed for these, and I have the smoke alarms, but I can’t find their wiring harnesses or mounting rings. :\

Sadly, I’m probably going to have to stop working on the house for a while. Our permit for Barb’s quilt shop will expire in mid-June, unless I can get it inspected before that time. There’s not a whole lot of work left to be done before the next inspection (rough frame and electrical):

  • Stucco/siding transitions (east and west sides)
  • Rough-in exterior lights (6)
  • Re-flash windows
  • (McCann) Exterior lath, stucco prep
  • Fix bowed stud on south side of building
  • House wrap south side of building
  • Rough-in spotlights for design wall
  • Rough-in ceiling lights (T8 fluorescent tubes), switches (2 banks, 3-way switches)
  • Rough-in wall outlets (5, including two 4plex)
  • Rough-in ceiling fans (2)
  • Compressor closet: outlet (dedicated), overhead light, switch
  • Compressor plumbing
29
Jun

Quilt shop windows

The windows and sliding glass door were installed on the quilt shop yesterday.

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I didn’t get to stick around and take pictures of the window installation, since I had to scoot off to work. (In fact, I was walking out the door when the window crew showed up.)

Mark Martinelli is our window contractor. He’s installing Milgard windows–we had these on our last house and were very satisfied with them.

Something that I realized after the sliding glass door was installed: I should have asked about a keyed lock, so we could come in via the glass door in the morning. I called Mark about this, and he said it would be pretty easy to take care of. It sounds like they just change out the latch handle and replace it with a keyed latch.

21
Jun

Quilt shop entering the home stretch!

Barb’s quilt shop is just about to enter the “home stretch”. We met with the GC last night and decided it was time to push hard on this aspect of the project because:

  1. The quilt shop is a separate permit from the main structure, so we can schedule inspections for it separately;
  2. There is no discount on the roofing or the drywall if we have those crews come out and do both the house and the shop as a single job;
  3. I can’t possibly do all the electrical work for the house and the shop at one time, but the quilt shop by itself is a manageable piece;
  4. It’d be helpful to get the quilt shop finished, because we’d be able to move some weather-sensitive things out of the house and into the shop before we demolish the back of the house and open it up to the elements.

With that decided, we’ll hopefully get the exterior inspections (roof diaphragm and shear wall) done tomorrow so that we can get the roofers out here ASAP.

Just for future reference, I’ve got a couple of pictures of the interior as of today:

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23
May

Electrical panels, other remodeling progress

The electrician was out yesterday installing our two electrical panels, the main service panel on the quilt shop and the sub-panel on the house. (Also, Barb and I finished sheathing the west wall of the quilt shop last night.)

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SMUD is scheduled to be out on June 6. They’ll take down our overhead power line and pull underground conductors through our conduit to energize the new panel. The unterminated conduits in the pictures above are for telephone and network lines. AT&T will be out on June 1 in the afternoon to put these services underground.

This evening we should finish sheathing the quilt shop. (We got started on the last wall yesterday, but the mosquitoes came out early and in force, so we quit a little early.) Once we’re done with the quilt shop, we’ll start knocking off the remaining rafter tails on the west and north walls of the house.

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Our lumber package for the roof should arrive today, and a crew should be out today or tomorrow to get started on the roof. Woo hoo!

Also today or tomorrow, one of the framers should be installing the fascia on the quilt shop. Once that’s done, Barb and I can start sheathing the quilt shop roof.

22
May

Roof delay

Looks like we’re going to have a slight delay before our roof is started. The lumber for the roof won’t arrive until later this week so there’s no rush for us to get the rafter tails pulled from the existing roof. Instead, we worked on Barb’s quilt shop this evening and got the north and east shear walls all nailed.

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Tomorrow night we’re hoping to get the rest of the shear walls nailed.

13
May

Quilt shop sheathing

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Between Andy, Barb, and me, we got all the walls of the quilt shop sheathed, although I still need to drive some more nails into the middle of the OSB panels. We also need to sheath the gables. Once that’s done, we’ll start working on the roof. Then it’s time to remove all the bracing from inside the shop and start installing the electrical wiring. Mark Martinelli is coming out sometime on Monday to get us a quote for the windows and sliding glass door for the shop.

11
May

Inspection #2

We get our second inspection today: joists and under-floor plumbing for the addition. While we were waiting for the inspector to do his thing with the addition, we continued work on Barb’s quilt shop.

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Speaking of the quilt shop… After the trusses for the quilt shop arrived, the framers carried them up to the plate line. (They came on a tractor-trailer truck, and the driver couldn’t get into the yard far enough to deliver them to the top of the structure.) Only then did we discover that one of the gable-end trusses wasn’t quite straight along the bottom–it was bowed in the middle, so there was a ~1″ gap between the top plate and the bottom of the truss on one end. I’ll admit that the truss company has excellent customer service: they had a rep out to our site in about an hour, and it’s at least a 45-minute drive from the factory to our house. The rep measured the truss in about a dozen places, then measured the height of the wall upon which it was sitting. According to her, the foundation, framing, and the truss were all about equally at fault, and the errors all happened to compound each other, but the truss was within normal limits. All I know is that the framer and I laid a string line along the bottom chord of the truss, and the lumber extended almost 3/8″ beyond the string, but the rep wasn’t interested in that (imho most important) measurement. So the framer ended up fixing the truss himself. All in all, we lost most of a day’s work due to the trusses, after spending about $1,000 on them–not a good trade. :(

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But at least we have a structure ready for sheathing, almost… It had rained quite heavily between the concrete formwork and the actual pour. On the day of the pour Greg, one of the concrete guys, went around and re-hammered the “kickers”, the diagonal braces that keep the forms from shifting under the weight of the concrete. The other guy on the concrete crew didn’t think it was necessary. (He’s no longer with the company.) Lo and behold, the forms that didn’t get tightened up did end up shifting. Fortunately for us, it was only the quilt shop floor where we had this problem.

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Greg is on-site today chipping and grinding off the excess concrete from the slab. As he finished each side Andy and I nailed 4′ x 10′ OSB sheathing to the frame. Once the sheathing was fastened, we cut all the window and door openings from inside the building and removed the interior bracing that was holding the walls plumb and straight. Many thanks to Andy, who has already helped us with the porch tear-off!

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The under-floor plumbing was done by Armstrong Plumbing. They gave us a pretty good price for the job, although I had to excavate the sewer trench myself. (Believe me, I earned that discount! The sewer trench ran perpendicular to the floor joists, and it was incredibly tough to maneuver a shovel in between them.) The HVAC contractor and my GC were both impressed by the plumber’s work. FYI: the plumbing photos are pretty boring. They’re mostly for reference if/when we need to work on the plumbing in the future.

Just an aside: the hardest thing (for me, anyway) about journaling this project is… verb tenses. I started this article on Friday morning because there was nothing I could work on at the time. Mid-way through the article, a subcontractor arrived whom I had to deal with. Then people started returning my calls, more workers arrived, etc. It wasn’t until the following morning that I got to look at this again, by which time all the present-tense verbs needed to be changed to past tense. I think the key thing I’ll have to focus on is writing shorter articles, and more of them. (Or maybe “more pictures, less text”. My wife just accused me of verbosity. Gasp!)

Incidentally, we passed our second inspection handily. :)

09
May

What a weekend!

I can’t believe it’s been five days since I wrote an entry here. Seems longer in some ways, shorter in others…

Over the last few days, the framers have been installing the remaining joists. This morning, they finished with that and moved on to framing the walls for the quilt studio–notice I didn’t say, “started framing…”? These guys whipped out all the framing for that building in less than a day.

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In my last post I mentioned that we had some rain, and it’s still not completely dried out. And of course, the wettest, muddiest spot is right where the plumber had to do the majority of his work. But the good news is that he has all the drains installed. I had to do some nimble redesigning of the kitchen this morning, since one of the joists ran right down the middle of the “wet wall” in our kitchen and the sink was going to end up on the wrong side of the current exterior wall. Let’s see: drill a 4″ hole through the old foundation and have rough-in plumbing sticking up in the middle of the existing kitchen; or move a joist 2″ and the kitchen sink about 15″? Hmm… I went with moving the sink a bit. We haven’t ordered our cabinets yet, so this isn’t a huge deal.

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Speaking of the kitchen sink, we ordered that over the weekend. We found out today that it’s a “special order”, so it’s going to take about a month to get here. Good thing we ordered it early! If it arrives on time, it will be just about when we’re ready for it. We also ordered the toilet for the new bathroom, but that’s only going to take a week to get here. We’ve got a few more plumbing fixtures to order, and after our experience with the special-order sink I think we need to get cracking on the rest of these.

Most of our weekend was spent removing siding from the house. We got all the shingles off the south side, and a bit more than half off the west side. We also pulled a bunch of old wires, cable, etc. from the sides of the house, all in preparation for framing the addition and demolishing the south wall of the existing structure.

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