Our roof is finished! Bill and his guys came by this morning and got it done in a few hours.
I didn’t have time to go up and take a picture of Barb’s shop. There is some extra roofing material stacked up on the back of the house roof. We’ll use that for my shop in a few months. But in the meantime, we’re going to haul it off the roof and store it in Barb’s shop. No time for that right now, since we’re getting ready for out demolition party tomorrow.
Our roof was “loaded” (i.e. the material was delivered and distributed around the roof) on Tuesday. The truck just barely fit down the backyard driveway.
(More photos on the Roofing photoset on Flickr.)
Hall’s Roofing started putting up our composition roof on Wednesday. Bill and his crew made a lot of progress on Thursday–by the end of the day they had most of the house covered:
They hadn’t started on Barb’s quilt shop yet, but that’s an extremely simple roof–no penetrations, valleys or hips, just a simple gable roof with an easy 4/12 pitch.
Bill expects to finish the roof on Friday if it doesn’t get too hot; otherwise, they’ll knock out the remainder on Monday morning.
We’re into the 12th week of our remodeling project. Barb and I both had five days off for Fourth of July, and we spent most of that time working on the house. We got a bunch of stuff done over our “holiday”…
We met with Eric, our cabinet maker. He should be contacting us today or tomorrow for final approval of the cabinet plan. Cabinets should be done in about 2-3 weeks, and installed shortly thereafter (assuming drywall is done). Eric suggested that we look into prefabricated vanity counters for the new bathroom. Tile Outlet had these for ~$375 each (’Uba Tuba’ 37″ granite with sink bowl installed and pre-drilled faucet holes). No grout lines to clean, and it’ll look great! Eric also suggested that we order the cabinet trim piece for our microwave, so I stopped by A&A and talked to Gavin about that. ETA is about 1.5-2 weeks (2007-07-20).
Barb got all the exterior sheathing removed from the back side of the original house, which should make for a quicker demolition party.
Nearly all of the construction debris has been loaded up. The back yard looks much better now, and it’s a lot easier to move around. We’ll be buying the bathtub tomorrow, since we’re finally able to drive the truck into the back yard again.
We met with the roofer, Bill Hall, after we passed our roof diaphragm inspection. He gave us a bunch of new chores, almost all of which are done. Barb went to the supply house and picked out our roofing material: Owens-Corning 40-year “Oakridge” teak.
Our HVAC contractor, Jose, came and looked over our project. He needed us to make copies of the floor and electrical plans, including any changes we are considering for subsequent remodel phases. He took care of most of his venting/roof penetrations today. We still have to figure out exactly where the furnace is going before he can place the flue vent.
Windows for our addition should arrive sometime this week, in which case they will be ready to install next Monday (right after our demolition party this weekend).
We got all of our non-glass doors ordered from U.S. Building Materials (off Sunrise Blvd, south of White Rock Rd). Great folks, by the way! ETA on the doors is about two weeks (2007-07-23).
I started working on our electrical installation. I got most of the outlet and switch boxes positioned in the bedrooms, hallway, laundry room, nook, and the added-on area of the living/great room. I still need to do the bathroom. The kitchen and the rest of the great room may have to wait until after the demolition party.
Lots of stuff done, but quite a lot left to do!
Update: Added a bunch of tags to this post.
We just passed our roof diaphragm & shear wall inspection–woo hoo! Next up we’ve got to schedule a whole bunch of jobs:
We’ve contacted all of the tradesmen and most of this work should be completed by next Tuesday. The roofer might be able to start on Tuesday, and hopefully we’ll have a finished roof by the end of next week.
Barb and I spent most of Sunday sheathing the roof with Jimmy and Jay, a couple of the guys on the framing crew. We were too busy for photos at the time, but I got a few pictures of the roof sheathing afterwards. We still have to look for ’shiners’ on the roof, but after that we’ll be ready for our next inspection–roof diaphragm and shear wall.
We had a few hours of our weekend remaining so we picked up our new water heater, a 40 gallon Kenmore PowerMiser 12. It meets the new California energy efficiency standards, plus we can get a (small) rebate from PG&E for it. OSH had a better price than Sears, plus we had a 10% coupon for OSH so we ended up paying about $330 (plus sales tax) after the discount and rebate–not bad for a high-efficiency water heater with a 12-year warranty!
We spent all day Saturday putting plywood and OSB on the roof, but we had to call it quits when we ran out of material. Fortunately we got the main roof covered, along with half of the front gable.
We ran about 20 sheets short on the OSB. I’m actually glad that we ran out–we were all getting pretty whipped, and if we had kept it up I’m afraid that somebody might have gotten hurt. We weren’t quite exhausted by the end of the day–Jimmy and Jay still had enough energy to clown around in front of the camera:
The house looks much better now that the roof is (mostly) covered. We were also finally able to get the remaining lumber out of the front yard and water the grass. After just a few days of watering, our brown/tan front yard is starting to show tinges of green. (And it smells more pleasant, too. I hated that dusty, dry grass scent!)
Our next project is to finish installing the plywood around the outside edge of the roof, so that we can get gutters installed. The masonry crew will be out to extend the chimney about 5′ or so. Meanwhile we’ll tack up the rest of the OSB over the gables and shoot a bunch of nails in the body of each sheet, so we can get our roof installed (after shear and roof diaphragm inspection).
The framing crew is putting the finishing touches on the roof today–fascia and barge rafters!
(More photos on the house fascia photoset on Flickr.)
They may not finish until tomorrow, but it doesn’t matter too much. We don’t have the roof sheathing material on-site, so we couldn’t get started on that even if they did finish today. The GC should have at least the initial material (CCX plywood for the eaves) by tomorrow afternoon, so perhaps we’ll get started then.
God, I’m looking forward to having a roof again! Having the sun beating directly onto the ceiling makes the house unbearably hot. I should have realized that was going to be a problem, but it completely blind-sided me. Fortunately the weather has been pretty mild the last few days–highs have been in the low- to mid-80’s. Phew!
It’s been a long, hot week. Temperatures have been in the upper 90’s and today we hit 101 (38°C). We’ve had a few delays with the roof, but it should finally be finished in two more days. Our general contractor convinced us to change our plans from a truss roof to “stick framed”, and we’re very glad we listened to him! This saved us a few thousand dollars (mostly on the foundation), and we got a huge attic–about 60 feet by 10 feet, if we want the minimum height to be 6 feet.
This past week we also got the power and telephone lines buried. The power line had been resting on the roof of the quilt shop, so we were finally able to sheath the quilt shop roof last weekend.
Lots more pictures are available in the Remodel Week #9 photoset on Flickr.
Things are going to get really busy now! This coming weekend we will probably be sheathing the roof of the main house, which has about 6-7 times the area of the quilt shop. It also has four valleys, whereas the quilt shop was a simple gable roof. On the other hand, we’re going to be laying down a lot more full sheets of OSB than we did on the quilt shop. If we can get some extra help, we should be able to get this done over Father’s Day weekend.
The following weekend (June 23-24) is our second demolition party, if all goes according to plan. More to follow, so check back often!
I finally go some close-up pictures of the ceiling beam that was flown onto the roof last week.
This thing is huge! If you can’t read the tape measure, it’s 16″ x 5.25″ wide, and 32′ long!
I came home for lunch today, just in time to see the roofing crew preparing to hoist the first rafters of our new roof. All thoughts of sustenance forgotten, I grabbed our camera and snapped a bunch of pic’s–check out the “Raising the roof” photoset on Flickr, especially good as a slideshow.
