Shared Interests

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.

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. 🙁

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.

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][]!

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. 🙂

[trusses for the quilt shop]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/2007/05/09/trusses-are-here/
[Andy]: http://warboss.wordpress.com/
[porch tear-off]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/2007/04/30/porch-tear-off/
[Armstrong Plumbing]: http://affiliate.yellowbook.com/Intelius/Addresses/Listings/Listing/135145655/?Partner=il.iaf&T=&Q=businessname%3a+armstrong+plumbing&WH=Sacramento%2c+CA&CT=3&AN=0

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.

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.

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.