Long time gone

Hi All,

Sorry we've been gone so long, we lost our camera and got caught up in the long and somewhat uninteresting process of siding the house. I've attached a few pics to show you what it looks like from the outside as it stands. There is still some touch up work to be done, fascia and soffit work to be completed and the screen porch to be added on but you'll get the general idea.

This is the northern face, the plastic is over the wooden front door and the entryway hasn't been built yet. We are experimenting with lining the bottom border with stones to help break up the giant barn-like fascade... a huge metal dragon has also been considered... your suggestions are always appreciated.

This is our Eastern face. In the bottom right corner is the guest room, above it with the arched window is the master bath. The sliding door to the left is in the master bedroom and will open onto the deck atop the screen porch. The door at the bottom left is to the kitchen which will open into the screen porch.

Tesla is guarding the Southeast corner. Closest to her is the kitchen, the great room prow is next and the greenhouse is on the very far left.

From the southwest you can better see the great room and the greenhouse.

Siding and Windows

It has been some time since our last posting, largely because the work we have been doing isn't terribly photogenic. Since the last posting about panels we have been doing detail work with sheathing the walls, getting the roof on and building the garage. I would have liked to have a few photos of building the garage but I forgot my camera on those two days, que sera sera.

Most recently we have been installing a boat load of strapping (read: 1x3 pine strips) on the walls to create ventilation channel between our siding and the house. This is highly recommended on all new construction and virtually imperative on SIPs construction. Without the ventilation chase if water migrates between the siding and the walls it is likely to rot your walls ... which would be bad.Here is a picture of the eastern face of the house fully strapped out. The windows went in it yesterday. The upper right hand corner is our master bath, with the guest bedroom below that. The sliding door in the middle goes to the master bedroom and will connect to a deck above our screen porch which will likely need to be built this spring.


Here is a view of the south wall of the garage, recently roofed and the corner of the greenhouse which we will begin closing in today.



This is the front side of our garage, the window on the left is part of my shop.


And here is a chop saw sitting in the middle of our living room, windows recently installed. The small window you can barely see on the right goes into the greenhouse.

Flyin' Panels onto the Roof

As of a week ago tomorrow we have all of the walls and the roof panels installed and protected with roof guard. Probably the coolest part about putting on the roof panels was spiking them with these giant harpoonesque hooks that the crane uses to pick them up.

I was very eager to get the roofing paper on so thunderstorms would stop dumping buckets of water in through our roof so we worked all day last Sunday to get the paper on and squared away.We spent this week cleaning up our messes and starting to trim out the panel edges to get ready for installing the metal roofing. The metal roofing will hopefully be going up by the end of this week; at which point it can rain all it pleases and I won't care.

Here are the hooks.

Tom demonstrating smashing a hook in (take it up over your head and swing it like a hammer!)

A roof panel hooked and ready to fly...


Up it goes...

And just because it is cool to see a panel flying through the air.

Here are few more shots of the interior as it sits a the moment. This is taken from our closet on the second floor.

The table saw is sitting where our future stairs will be.


The arched window with the ladder up it is our bathroom window and the shadowed room next to is is our bedroom.


And here is a view of the east side of the house with the roof panels on and the roofing paper peaking out over the top.

Second Floor SIPs go up

Here are a few shots from the Sunday when we put up the 2nd floor SIPs on the North and West walls.

Ross booming Dave up on the Lull.

Tipping up a wall panel.

Closer...

And its up.

Timber Frame is Up, North and West SIPs walls are up

The timber frame finished going up on August 2nd. On Tuesday the 3rd we put up the 1st floor North and West SIPs walls. On Wednesday and Thursday we installed the floor joists and built the floor deck. On Friday we began installing the wood ceiling on top of the timber frame and got ready for the next load of panels. On Sunday we finished the V-match wood ceiling.
Northwest corner of the house, with first floor SIPs up. Tom is standing in the door from the soon-to-be garage into the house.

I was quite pleased to drive the lull (giant 4x4 forklift to move materials and people around. With a 40 beam it is a pretty sweet piece of equipment.

We framed the great room face (south) with 2x6s because there are so many windows it would be inefficient to use SIPs.


Finishing up the V-match ceiling.


Ceiling view from standing in the Kitchen.

Timberframe 1/2 up

Thursday of last week was largely spent solving the complicated framing problem of making the top 7' of the prow. We are just finishing it up here.

The timber frame arrived on site on Friday afternoon. The crew was a guy short so I hopped up on the crane truck and helped unload the posts and beams. Here is a shot of about 1/2 of the pieces laying out on the slab.

When we arrived on site on Saturday morning the first bent was just being raised.

By mid afternoon the second bent was going up.


And my favorite part of this whole endeavor so far has been watching the guys use a giant homemade wooden mallet to "tap" joints into place!


The rest of the timber frame is scheduled to go up today (Monday) and we will begin putting up the SIPs walls on Tuesday.

Panels are Cut and Greenhouse Block Wall is Up

First things first, while I showed what the SIPs look like in my last post I did not show the awesome tools we use to cut them, so here you go.

The most useful too for cutting the panels is a Stihl electric chainsaw with a custom made blade guide/angle finder mounted on it, which is really fun to use.


We started out using this massive 16" circular saw to make straight cuts and it just didn't really have any significant advantages over the chainsaw and it was much harder to use so it has been tabled for the moment.
We need to router out channels on the edges of panels for connecting splines and around windows and doors to add in 2x6 framing to hold the window and door frames in place. This is the sweet router we use to do so.



And because I couldn't resist I learned to drive the forklift for the job and here is a picture of me driving it with my sister in law Liselle riding on the front :)





Here is a panel that has been cut out with a window cut out and 2x6s have been nailed in place to frame it out.



The panels have all been cut and are sitting in 10 or 12 piles in the warehouse we are renting. Here are the wall panels ready to be installed.



Unfortunately, we hit a bit of a snag in our construction schedule. We are having a local guy timber frame about 1/2 of the interior and he is about a month behind schedule (the frame will hopefully arrive on site at the end of this week.) So to keep ourselves occupied we build the concrete block wall for the back of the greenhouse. I had some great help from Tom and a few of the guys we work with... Ryu was less help but still good company.


And since it has not taken a month to build those walls we have been doing a bunch of the interior framing in the warehouse as well. We'll move the completed bents to the site when we take the panels over in a week or so.


Pretty soon it should start to actually look like a house!