Completely framed

It's fall, so there is prettiness in Maine. The views from the new porch:

Once the living room roof was re-engineered and all the parts were ordered, they were able to finish framing the house, and install the remaining roof trusses.  First, the living room trusses were added:

 

And the framing for the porch was finished:

And finally, the remainder of the second floor was framed.  

Putting it all together:

Flushing Cats

Construction has been a bit at a standstill while we figured out the new engineering for the living room roof.  Once the new beams arrive, construction will pick up again, and a lot will happen quickly.  That's good, since it's beginning to get cool, and it would be nice to have the house enclosed.

In the mean time, we've been doing what everyone thinks is the hardest part of the whole process:  picking out cabinetry, countertops, faucets, and appliances. Although it does seem to be headache inducing, these decisions are much more fun than the budget decisions we had to make this time last year.   Without going into too much detail, here is what we've decided.

The kitchen will have have gray concrete floors, maple cabinets with either slab or Shaker fronts (in the picture below, the doors are Shaker and the drawers are slab.)  The counter top will be an unpolished gray granite reminiscent of soapstone on a chemistry lab bench.

 

Example of a kitchen from Northern Kitchens

We've decided to splurge a bit on the kitchen sink, and have settled on one large white cast-iron sink, reminiscent of the one at the farmhouse where Matt's grandparents lived in Gouldsboro, Maine.  Ours is a bit fancier (Bonus: it's recyclable, just in case we want to throw out the expensive kitchen sink)

Fireclay sink by Rohl

 After much deliberation, we settled on this kitchen faucet by Grohe:

Earlier this year, Jen's mom surprised us by giving us a belated wedding/house warming gift of two handcrafted ceramic sinks for the master bath from Maine Kiln Works, one of our favorite potters in Gouldsboro.  We decided the guest bath needed one too.  We actually bought the sink for the guest bath this fall, and it's been sitting in a box in our kitchen for the last two months.  The sinks for the master bath are being made, and we will pick them up this fall.

Sink for the guest bath

Sinks for the guest bath

All of the sinks will have this sort of funky faucet from Kohler. The showers will have a Swanstone (which is a similar material to Corian) base with tile walls and faucets that match the funky Kohler sink faucets.

 The title of this post comes from our visit to the plumbing fixture place.  It turned out that Carol's assistant accidentally specified a very high power toilet.  Dan's comment:  "You could flush a cat with that thing!"  (Obviously, he's never met Oscar.) 

Oscar

The salesman assured us that unless we had some sort of unusual medical problem, we wouldn't need the ultra-high powered toilet.  Instead, we settled for a normal, everyday toilet (not the square one or the hatbox one or the one with the seat warmer.)  Matt actually took pictures, but I'm pretty sure you know what a toilet looks like. 

In the time it's taken to write this post, the beams have arrived and the rest of the framing is in full swing.  We'll have pictures soon!

Weird and Awkward

So, the last week has seen a weird and awkward phase of the house building project.  A bit of history: Carol, the architect has not been happy with our builder almost from the beginning.  It takes him a long time to put together estimates, partly because he also teaches full time at the local technical high school.  He is used to working directly with a client and not an architect, who is an intermediary between the builder and client.  We mentioned in an early post that there were "growing pains" between the two, and although there have been times when things were pretty good, for the most part, there have been a lot of problems with communication between the two of them.   Dan's main goal has been to build a house that we like on budget, but he's not an expert in design.  Carol's goals have been to build a quality house with an eye toward a particular design.  When the two of them don't communicate, we get caught in the middle.  Since we began building, Carol's role has been "Construction Administration."  But, with the continuing communication difficulties, the past few weeks have been particularly tense.  Dan has made some mistakes that can't be corrected, and then we realized that a change Carol made in the south wall last spring resulted in a living room roof without support. It's still a fixable problem, but coming up with a solution that made everyone happy was rough on the various relationships.

So, we were not shocked when we received a letter from Carol saying that her contract had expired, and she was not interested in extending or amending it.  She has agreed to answer questions about the plans, but she will no longer act as Construction Administrator.  We like and trust Dan, and he is comfortable working from the plans to the complete the project. There is a reputable structural engineer who Dan has worked with down the street (he actually worked for Carol before he retired), so we will have a local expert opinion if we need it.   And so we move on.

Anyway, quite a bit has happened since we posted last time.

First, the roof trusses arrived, and the guys installed them on the garage in no time:

 That, combined with the second floor framing on the house, made it look a lot more like a house. 

Plus, they framed the base of the porch.

For a while, we've had a tradition of stopping at the local hole in the wall convenience store to pick up some of our favorite Italians (sandwiches, not people), to have a picnic on our property.  We would perch our sandwiches on a stump near the "picnic pine."  The picnic pine is gone now, but now we have a picnic porch!

Joisteses

A lot has happened in the last few weeks, but with the start of school, we've been a bit overwhelmed.  Here's our update:

With the first floor framed, the next step was to put up the floor joists (or joisteses, as Dan the Mainah calls them.) The second floor extends past the first floor on the south side to serve as an overhang, which is supported by steel posts.   For now, the steel is painted with primer, but eventually it will be a shade lighter than the siding.

Leveling plates for the posts were placed on the ground:

And the steel posts were bolted down.

The bolts on the levelling plates are no ordinary bolts.  They are galvanized, 12" long, and $30 each.  But, they allow for adjustment of the steel posts' vertical positions.  Even after the house is framed, they will allow the builders to make small adjustments to the positions of the steel posts.  Then, the tops of the bolts will be sawed off, and the levelling plates will be covered with landscaping. 

LVL (laminated veneer lumber) beams connect the tops of the steel posts.

And then the floor joistseses were installed.

With some second floor subfloor in place, the entire space began to feel enclosed:

 Last weekend, we were even able to climb up the scaffolding, to get our first view from the second floor!

Power to the People

When our neighbor Fred built his house in the 70's, the power company payed to bring power from the road to his house.  Unfortunately, those days are long past.  Originally, we hoped to bring our power in underground.  However, the 900 foot driveway, combined with a very rocky path to get there, meant that would be prohibitively expensive--especially since the power company would require double power lines, in case one ever went bad.  So, we settled for poles instead.  As it turned out, only four power poles were required, and they are pretty well disguised.

But at least we were able run the lines underground from the last pole to the garage, where they hooked up the meter.  Even with our eventual solar panels, I'm pretty sure this is the last time our meter will look like this:

After we paid CMP $1000, they hooked up the first pole to the road and installed the transformer on the last pole.

Then they flipped the proverbial switch, and we had power.  The work crew wasted no time in making use of it.  Like I said:

A window conundrum

Although most of the windows of the first floor are on the southern side, there is a ribbon of windows on the northern side, to display the amazing northwest views.  The framing for these windows is already in place, but when we checked it out, we discovered a problem:

We talked to Carol and Dan, and the windows were installed at the specified height.  Proportionally, this height makes sense, since the bottom of the window would be at the same height as standard height of chair and sofa backs.  When sitting down, we'd be looking right out the windows.  However, in order to see out of the windows while standing, Matt would have to stoop over (he's 6' tall.)  Since two of the seven windows had not yet been framed, Dan put in temporary framing to show two other heights to consider:

Original on the right, 6" higher in the middle, 12" higher on the left

Here's what Matt sees through each window:

Original

6" higher

12" higher

From this angle, 12" is obviously best.  We also brought up a few chairs of different heights to simulate the dining and living room chairs.  We stood in the kitchen, as if we were doing dishes.  We imagined sitting at a desk under the window.  We looked through all three heights from every possible angle.  And in the end, we decided to raise the windows 6".  So, we brought the crew a half dozen donuts since the deconstruction process was likely to be worse than the original construction.  The last time we were up there, they were moving the last window header.

The Z-axis

We've finally begun to move out of two-dimensions!

The garage from the driveway

Standing in the house, looking past the entry, at the garage wall

Standing at the front door, looking at the garage wall

More garage...

Inside the garage

And about a week later, there is house! Eastern side, from the driveway

Viewing the eastern and northern wall while standing at the southeast corner of the house. The south wall of windows will be framed later.

Closer to the northern wall

Back (western end) of the garage, and the northern wall of the house in the foreground

Looking through the coat closet into the garage