December was a rough month, with much less progress than we had hoped for. We were still productive when we could be, but we did have a few setbacks, and learned about a few things we should (and shouldn’t) do for our building. Because of that, this post has fewer pictures and a lot more text than most of the recent updates.
A few days after we got our first measurable snow, the temp had warmed up enough that most of it had melted. We wasted no time moving on to the next projects, as we knew that our luck for good weather could run out at any moment.
Now that the exterior walls were up, and the trusses were installed, the next major step was to get all the plywood sheathing on the rest of the walls and the roof so we could get the roof underlayment on so the building enclosed and protected from the weather, but there were a handful of other things that had to happen first.
The slab was finally poured, and all the work done up until this point was now permanently hidden from view under a whole bunch of concrete. Just a couple days after the pour, we were right back at it with a fresh pile of lumber, ready to start the next phase of the project: WALLS!
The first week of October was spent moving a lot of dirt and putting a bunch of stuff underground in preparation for pouring our slab. We are done digging in the ground (for the most part) but there is still a little bit more work to do in order to get everything ready for the concrete.
Continue reading
The trees had been cleared for our site, the footprint for the house had been brought roughly to grade, and the form boards for the concrete slab had been installed. The next step was to start digging for all the utilities that needed to go under the slab.
We had been waiting patiently since mid-August 2013 to find out what the appraiser thought of our house plans. This was a critical point for us since the bank will only loan us up to 80% of the final value of the house, and since the housing market is still not in great shape, chances of it appraising at a value much higher than the cost to build was slim. Fortunately we had the value of the land and garage to help make up that remaining 20%, but there was no guarantee that we’d be able to meet required value to secure the loan amount we needed.
Back in April, we discovered a building method called REMOTE (look at the previous blog post if you need to know what that means). We figured out all of the important details about what it would take to build the house that way, and started the process on getting new quotes to see how close we were to our budget. We had already eliminated the basement and upgraded to the exterior foam at a lower cost than the spray foam, but we had yet to actually find out the new total price once all the other details were considered.
After deciding in October 2012 to wait until the Fall of 2013 to start our building project, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the house. The disappointment of how expensive our bids ended up being prevented us from getting too excited about continuing to plan out our house. We knew we wanted an energy efficient house, and up to this point, spray foam insulation was the only really good option we knew about. But putting spray foam on the basement walls, main floor walls, and in the attic was going to be super expensive.
The Winter of 2011/2012 was unusually busy for business, and the summer is always crazy, so after returning from our honeymoon, we only had limited time to talk about the house. We did settle on what we thought was a good floor plan, and had drawn up the house as a basic but spacious house with a full basement. We still figured there was plenty of time to figure out the details because we decided we would break ground on the project in May of 2013.
Continue reading