Exterior Painting Almost Done

The painters made great progress since we were at the house yesterday. The painting on the back and garage side of the house looks to be done. For some reason, the digital camera shows the trim color as white, but its really a cream color.

Here's a shot of the full length of the back of the house.

All the painters have moved to the front of the house and it looks like it won't be much longer till that side is done too. The lath for the stone has started to go up on the lower level.

Even the stone masons made progress today. Looks like the chimney is (finally) almost done. Now they can start on the stone for the lower level of the house.

The insulation crew is almost done spraying the foam in the walls of the upper level of the house. They should start on the lower level on Monday.

House getting more colorful

Insulation application continued today, but with only one foam truck. It was more of what was on yesterday's webpage, so no new insulation pictures today. The foam crew thinks they will be done Monday. Click on pictures for a larger view.

The more obvious progress was from the painting. Here you can see the darker color we picked for the horizontal lap siding now showing up on the bedroom wing of the house. The lighter color has just started to show up, on the panel below the lower window on the right side of the bedroom wing. You can also see the painters caulking and puttying on the Great Room wing of the house. You can also see the very small amount of progress on the chimney stone.

On the back side of the house, you can see both colors finished (well, one coat anyway) except the trim has not been painted its cream color yet.

More Foamy Insulation Pictures

Day 2 of applying the spray-on insulation. These pictures will probably be boring except to those folks interested in seeing more pictures of the foam process.
Today we had two spray trucks and three crews working, so things were going a lot faster than yesterday.

Here you can see what a room looks like when the roof, exterior, and interior walls are completed. The interior wall (to the left) is insulated for soundproofing. This is part of the Master Bedroom.

This is a sequence that shows how the foam expands. Here the applicator has just sprayed a section of vaulted ceiling to his right. The foam comes out as a thin liquid that just seems to get the wood wet.

After he has sprayed, the applicator waits to see how the foams expands. This is after 1 second.

This is after about 3 seconds.

This is full expansion about 5 seconds after he sprays it on. The foam expands to 100 times its original liquid volume.

The painters are nearly done caulking and cleaning the siding, so one crew has started applying the light green color that goes on the vertical siding on the back of the house. With just one coat, its hard to see the difference in the light green to the right of the painter and the unpainted siding to the left. Hopefully we'll start to see what the colors really look like pretty soon.

Insulation Started

Although prep work is still going on in some parts of the house, the insulation crew was able to get started on one end of the house today. We are insulating the whole house with spray-on foam insulation. It creates a nearly air tight seal for the house. Click on pictures for a larger view.


This picture is take from the hallway of the bedroom wing looking up at one of the installers starting to spray foam on the underside of the roof. This area over the guest room and laundry room is the only part of the house that doesn't have a vaulted ceiling , so you can see he has to precariously balance on the part of the scissor truss while holding the hose and spraying.

Here's the finished look for the non-vaulted roof area.

Here they have started to work on the vaulted ceiling area in the master bedroom. We are insulating some of the interior walls for sounds proofing, so some drywall has been put up on interior walls to form a backing for the foam.

The dry wall you see here separates Norris' office from the master bedroom and hallway.

A Little Progress this Week

Some work has gone on inside the house, taking care of odds and ends getting ready for the insulation crew to start next Tues. Progress on the exterior stone work has been hard to notice, probably because of the difficulty of working on the high end of the chimney. Click on the pictures for a larger view.
This picture was actually taken a few days ago. The crew working on the upper part of the chimney has actually made a little bit of progress since this was taken.

The stone masons have also torn down the stone that was incorrectly put up on the chimney at the deck level (all the loose stones lying on the deck) and started to put up the right stone.

There were several other smaller things that got taken care of this week. Here you can see the doors on the garage side of the house were installed.

The water pump was installed in the well and hidden behind this ugly fake rock. Its ironic that with tons and tons of real rock lying around our property, we now have a fake rock. We'll have to figure out how to use some of our real rocks to hide the fake rock that is hiding the pump.

And last but not least, the water storage pressure tank was also installed by the pump people.

Digging and More Digging

We went to the house today to meet with the ceramic tile installer to make sure he knew what we wanted tiled and to get his help in designing the foyer flooring, as we are looking to do an inlay of reclaimed chestnut surrounded by tile.

There was plenty of other activity as well. Here the grader is digging a hole for the 500 gallon propane tank in an area behind the house that he is pretty sure will be "soft digging." He soon found out (Big Surprise!) that it was too rocky. So we picked another spot in the front of the house that was mostly fill dirt, hoping there wasn't too much danger of hitting rock again.

Here he lowers the tank into the ground after finding a better spot in front of the house. We'll just have to landscape around it to hide the top bubble of the tank.

While we were there, the supplier of the exterior stone showed up to deliver 14 pallets of the correct stone and haul away the previously delivered wrong stone.

More digging was going on behind the house where the water proofing crew was replacing some of their materials in an area of the foundation that looked like it might be leaking.

More Dirtwork, the Energy Star Inspector makes an appearance

Today the inspector for the Energy Star certification program made a tour of the house and pointed out to our builder's folks all the potential air leak points so that they can all be sealed up before insulating. The grading contractor is back with a mini-track hoe to do some more lot grading. Here he works on the back side of the house doing some back fill and also digging up a spot where the foundation might be leaking.

The grader also did some work on establishing our front walk way and some space around the walk for landscaping. You can see one of the boxes of the wrong stone on the left. They were supposed to be picked up and the right stone delivered sometime today, but it hadn't happened by lunchtime when these pictures were taken.

March 7 - Stone Siding, Steel Columns, and Tile Selections

We haven't done much with photo updates lately since most of the work for the past few weeks has been confined to wiring and HVAC, but that is pretty much done now. In fact, we passed the electrical rough-in inspection yesterday. The framing inspection comes Monday, then we are ready to start insulating and then on to dry wall. In addition, some exterior work has started up now that the weather has warmed. Click on pictures for a larger view.


These boxes contain some of the exterior stone that was delivered this week. Unfortunately, the delivery truck got stuck about 20 ft up the driveway, so he had to drop most of the load at the bottom of the drive.

The stone masons got started installing lath on the upper parts of the chimney via this somewhat precarious looking rigging. I'm not sure OSHA would approve.

One of the last remaining tasks before the framing inspection next week is to erect the steel column that runs from the basement floor all the way up to the roof ridge beam. This is done by bolting together a 10 ft section in the basement and a 24 ft section in the great room. They will eventually be wrapped in wood trim, but for now its just some really heavy steel. Here you can see it takes 8 guys to lift the upper section into place (5 below, 3 up). One of the primary goals was to not have the column fall through the front windows. Not sure what OSHA would think of this setup either.

A section of the floor had to be cut out to have room to swing the column into place.

You can see the forked top that wraps around the ridge beam.

Here the upper column is being mated to the lower column. The whole process took about 2 hours, which the guys accomplished without breaking any glass (or bones). Hats off to Steth & Todd's framing guys, who would really prefer working with wood than steel!

We also made our ceramic tiles selections this week. For the master bath, the rocks on the left are for the shower floor, and the tile to the right will be used for the shower walls and bathroom floor. The rock strip in the middle of the tile will be used for the accent band in the shower. The colors aren't exactly right since the camera doesn't like the flourescent lights at the showroom.

We selected this stone for the guest bath. The small tiles at the left are for the floor, the tile to the right is for the floor and shower wall, and the rock strip in the middle of the tile is the accent strip for the shower. These colors didn't come out accurately either. We also picked tile for the downstairs bath and for the foyer, but those colors were so far off we decided not to use those pictures.