Shit + Fan = Our Nightmare

Oh boy... Where do I even begin?

I worked days the last 2 days while the framers worked tiressly on our house. They have been sheeting the roof in near hurricane strength winds and working weekends to try to catch up from last weeks blast of winter. 

Jake was off the last 2 days so he could be around in case we had any problems with the house, plus our windows were delivered on Monday, yay!! 

Jake has been excellent at sending me photographic updates while I was at work. Greatly appreciated!

Although a picture he sent me today, had me thinking... 

Here's the picture, and then I'll point out the problem. 

Front porch looks great, plywood going up, great! But wait a second... Something doesn't look quite right. 

Have a look at what the front of our house is supposed to look like:

And again, here's what it's actually looking like:

Notice anything missing? Maybe the entire roof?! The pitch is WAY off. Someone f'd up, and f'd up huge. 

So after countless tears, phone calls, texts and emails to my dad, framer and roof truss sales guy at 9pm... All but one of us have determined that things aren't right. 

Have a look from the back:

What it should look like...

And what it actually looks like...

Me, my dad, the framer and the roof guy are all meeting out at the house first thing to play the blame game... This is a game I don't want to win. 

Boom Shakalaka

Finally, after days of waiting for the weather to improve, the boom truck arrived to put up our roof trusses! 

It was too windy for a good 3-4 days so it put us behind schedule. 

Thankfully there was still lots for the framers to do. Like frame the basement walls including our laundry room downstairs. We'll have laundry rough-ins on the main floor for when we're old. But for now I'd like more space in the mudroom and I figure I can manage stairs for a few more years :)

The sun is shining now and my fingers are crossed that plywood will be making its way onto the roof today. Next week is supposed to be milder, so it would be ideal for shingling!  

The timbers for our back porch were delivered yesterday. They look so big and strong! 

They are 8x8 pine timber posts which we'll stain to match the cedar on the front of the house in the spring. 

With this crappy start to winter, we're really putting the pressure on to get everything closed up. Our windows are being delivered on Monday... Exciting!!

How our house looked at 7:30am today!

Feels like -19°C you say?

We watch the weather forecast more than a bride who's planned an outdoor wedding. 

And tonight, it scared us!

We were getting ready for bed and took one last look at the projected temperature and saw that it's supposed to feel like -19°C over night. Yikes!

That's cause for concern for our foundation and the heater we bought isn't on. 

So we hopped in the car and drove out to the house to turn it on. The joys of winter building...

As you can see... Jake is thrilled. 

Roof trusses will be on tomorrow... So we'll be one step closer to closing the house up. We can't wait. 

Dealio of the Week

When I was at Rona this week getting the heater for the foundation I grabbed a flyer. I always love a deal!

There weren't any items in the flyer that I needed at the moment, but Rona was having a 15% off any item on November 15th!  So I started to think of things we could buy and save ourselves 15%.

The deal was 15% of any item in the store and up to 15 of the same item so we decided to buy our kitchen sink and ensuite mirrors and check out separately. 

We saw a very similar sink at Home Depot that we wanted for $399. So this was already a deal to us, and we got 15% off!

I have been looking for round mirrors for our ensuite for a while. I can usually find 1 that I like at HomeSense or Winners, but I needed 2!

These mirrors were already pretty cheap to begin with at $63, but even cheaper with 15% off!  

Oh hi legs. 

We have ordered our bathroom sinks online from homedepot.com. For some reason, the exact same sinks on homedepot.ca were $100 more per sink!

They're identical, CSA approved, 8" widespread to accommodate the faucets we picked. Just gotta make a quick trip to Port Huron to pick them up!

So the only things we have left to buy for plumbing fixtures are our faucets and toilets. We don't need them for a couple months yet, so we're going to look for deals!

Baby, it's getting cold outside!

Brrrrrr!! It's a cold day when your house doesn't have a roof. Or windows! 

Thanks to a few cm of snow, we were up at the crack of dawn and out to the house to shovel. Winter is here... I'm fine if this week is just a preview and we go back to 15°C weather again. 

Just shoveling out my kitchen... No big deal. :)

We want to keep as much moisture off the subfloor as we can. And we also need to keep our foundation and basement flooring from freezing. That seems like an impossible task with no roof, no windows, no insulation, and snow. 

So today we bought a propane heater and boarded up our basement windows and the gaping hole that will one day be stairs to the basement in attempt to keep the foundation around zero degrees. We left one removable piece on the door so we can still get in and out easily. 

Jake hammering 2x4s into frozen clay to keep the plywood over the windows in place. I think he had fun :)

All boarded up!

We went with a Mr. Heater Convection Propane Heater. It's 30,000-80,000 BTU and can heat up to 1900 square feet. A 20lb tank (a regular BBQ tank) is supposed to last up to 14 hours. We don't need to have the basement warm, just not below zero.  We decided to get a 30lb tank so that we can squeeze a few more hours out of it while we're at work. 

So after we got the house all boarded up we assembled the heater and tried it out. 

Our plan is to keep it on the lowest setting possible to preserve the tank, assuming that it provides enough heat. 

Once we fired the heater up, we were surprised to see a huge flame! It made us both a little nervous. We kept trying to reassure ourselves that it was fine, the flame was contained and that these heaters were made for this sort of thing. We boarded the house back up and got in the truck. Neither of us were feeling overly comfortable about leaving a propane fueled metal fire pot in the basement of our new house so we called my dad for reassurance. 

The first thing my dad asks, "You've got insurance, right?"  

We do, but that wasn't the reassurance we were after so we quickly went back inside and shut it off. We'll give it another try when we're out there cleaning up this weekend before we trust it alone!  Thankfully the propane heater is supposed to be a temporary solution until we have our own hydro. Then we can use electric heaters and we might actually be able to sleep at night! 

Sunday Funday

After a fun weekend of friends, drinks and food we spent our Sunday morning cleaning up the yard. 

It's just one of the negatives of building your own house, nobody's going to clean up your mess for you!

It actually wasn't too bad. The framers had kept most stuff in piles around the yard so we just carried it up to dump trailer we're borrowing. 

I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but I actually enjoyed doing this. I would way rather play outside in the mud than clean the inside of my actual house. 

It had rained quite a bit the last few days so we also wanted to squeegee off the subfloor. We don't want water sitting on it and saturating the wood. It could cause the subfloor to warp and swell, which could cause problems with our flooring down the road.  

I called dibs on squeegeeing next time. It looked like fun.  Although next time we'll be squeegeeing around more walls! Yay!

The front walls are mostly up! 

The back wall is framed too, can't wait to see it up! Word on the street is that the roof trusses will be on by the end of the week, weather permitting. 

Back wall, framed but not up. 

Roof trusses waiting to go up.

I'm afraid to look at the weather for this week. Since there's nothing I can do to change it, I try not to get too worried about it. I'm just happy that our framers aren't made of sugar and tend to stick out the rainy days. 

It's Framing Men, Hallelujah!

We are moving along right on schedule. Well, our newest schedule. 

Framing started on Monday and is moving pretty quickly!

It will be really nice to see walls instead of having to imagine them. 

Jake and I had mandatory training on Monday, so we weren't around on day 1. It made me a little nervous, but my dad was available if anything went wrong. 

Thankfully everything seemed to go fairly smoothly... We're also thankful that our house is down the road from where we ordered all of our building material because a few things were forgotten. Like nails. Who needs nails to frame a house?!

Knowing we couldn't be there we had arranged for the supplies for day 1 to be delivered on the Friday before and our framer had the most current set of floor plans and the rough opening dimensions for the windows before starting. 

We rushed out to the house after our training day to see the progress, it was getting a little dark, but this was day 1 of framing:

Picture of the back of the house

The back wall was framed. The windows look huge now, I love them!

The load bearing wall next to the stairs was also up because it was needed for the steel beam to be installed the following day. 

As we were leaving the house on Monday night we got a call from our framer. He had noticed that 6 floor trusses weren't made long enough to account for the fireplace sticking out of the back wall. 

Just a small oversight by the truss company, but they fixed it right away. 

This is the plan for the floor trusses that they sent trusses for. Notice the back wall is completely flat?

There should be a few longer trusses to support the fire place, like this:

The trusses were dropped off the next day and all is good!

The steel beams and floor trusses were installed Tuesday/Wednesday:

The subfloor is going down now, glued and screwed to prevent movement and squeaky floors. 

The garage walls are also framed, ready to go up

And even a bit of sheeting is on the back of the house. 

Today we dropped off the saddles for the deck posts and the post should be arriving this afternoon or tomorrow. I can't tell you how excited I am that it's finally looking like a house, and that the weather has been cooperating for the most part. I just want the windows in and the roof on before our first snow storm! November, in Canada... This isn't too much to ask for is it?