The Promised Land

The roof is done! Just over a month since they were supposed to be here the first time and three weeks after they started, the roof is on. To focus on the positive a bit, it looks great. The dove grey is a nice color and goes with both the old roof and the yellow siding quite nicely.

Under the Weather

More rain, but no more roof. Running around putting buckets under drips in the roof on the weekends is becoming tiresome very quickly. The only exciting part was that water was coming from new and interesting places this time. The biggest problem is still the space between the old and new portions of the house on the lower floor. After some investigating I realized that even though they finished putting the roof on the overhang near the patio, they didn’t put the siding back. This basically channeled water directly into the house, kind of the opposite effect that a roof and siding are supposed to have.

Close but no Cigar

On Saturday, two roofers arrived and started working on the last of the roof, or so we thought. After putting in nearly a full day they realized they were out of roofing material. For those of you keeping count, that makes three weeks after the first promise of roofing delivery. The truly silly part is that they finished the part of the roof over the carport, but not over the actual new house. So the car will remain nice and dry, the interior of the house however. . .

A big tub arrived on Monday. You’ll notice I say, ‘a’ big tub and not ‘our’ big tub. After arriving home first and looking at it, I was thoroughly impressed and excited for Colleen to see it. Unfortunately, when she arrived home she discovered it was not in fact the tub we had ordered. This began a series of emails back and forth with the PM where he displayed some truly bad customer service skills. First attempting to deflect some blame back on us, then complaining out the restocking fee they would have to pay, then saying we would have to wait for 5-6 weeks for the new tub, all the while never offering us anything in return for the delay. After some follow up on the phone, we found that most of the project could keep going without the tub so we opted to wait it out for the one we really wanted.

Needless to say, it was not the best few days for the addition.

Marching Priests and Sounding Trumpets

It's starting to feel a bit like the seventh day in Jericho around here (religion major gotta throw in a Bible reference once in awhile; Joshua 5:20): the walls are tumbling down. Two walls bit the dust yesterday. We took out the small wall immediatley to your left as you entered the house. It didn't really have much need to be there and we thought it would make that entry way feel a bit more open.

Second and more notably, the partial wall that was still existing under the big I-beam is now gone. Its absense leaves a 10 foot span with nothing but a thin sheet of clear plastic in its place.

As the kitchen slowly begins to take on its much larger form, Colleen and I are forced to use less and less of it. We lost another cabinet the other day, and the counter near the sink is basically part of the construction zone these days, so it can only be used sparingly. Its an unfortunate side effect and not a trend that is likely to reverse any time soon. We do have some great renderings of what the future cabinet layout will look like though, someday I'll make a blog out of them. . .

Also in the news: The roofers arrived! They aren't quite done yet, but they have done most of the roofing at this point and hopefully will finish before any more rain shows up.

Life in the Bubble

What the last two weeks lacked in productivity, this week made up for. I'm pretty worn out from volleyball this morning and helping Meghann and Duncan get their house ready for market on Monday (link to be inserted when house is listed), so I'm going to keep this brief and let the pictures do most of the talking.

First, the siding is now all done and it looks great. Here is a look at the rarely photographed patio side of the addition. This picture also shows that the final window has gone in. The little one on the second floor right in the middle of the picture was added to the guest bedroom.

Not only did they put in that new window, but they finally cut the door from the old upstairs to the new upstairs so we (and the construction guys) no longer have to climb through the window to get into the new master bedroom. Because they were doing all this work on that wall, they put up a wall of plastic in the room to keep the dust at bay. It's was a very nice thought, but it really gives you the feeling that you are carrying some sort of highly infectious disease or were horribly irradiated or something. Here's a shot of the new door and window from inside the bubble.

The big push to put the new door in was so that they could bring up the new tub! To get ready, they already built the box for it. Colleen is particularly excited about this part. Here we are sitting in the future location of the tub.

While the carpenters were working on the walls, the HVAC guy was here climbing around above them. All the new venting was put in this week. As an added bonus, for less than a thousand bucks, we were able to get central heat/air to all the upstairs rooms on Colleen and my side of the house. I don't have any pictures of that because, quite frankly, it's boring to look at.

Another thing that's boring to look at but was a good deal is our new gas tank. Our plumber warned us that the pressure our current tank was able to put out was not going to be sufficient for our future needs. So we called up the gas company and had them come out. For only $800 they are going to bury a new 400 gallon tank and run the line up to the house for us. This also made Colleen's mom very happy as it will get the current gas tank out of her flower bed and out of our future patio. After so many things in a row where we felt like we were over paying, it was nice to get a few things we thought were deals.

I'll leave you with the standard weekly update picture. Notice that it still has no roof on it (promised for Friday and then for Saturday). Hopefully that will happen next week. Lots of work to the kitchen is supposed to happen next week as well. They are set to take down the little wall (immediately to your left as you wall in) and frame in under the big beam (currently just a big ugly hole with blue styrofoam in it).

Happy Two Month Birthday

The addition is officially two months old now! Hard to believe that only two months ago we had a grass covered hill in our backyard (hard to remember having any grass for that matter).

Although the progress for most of those two months was relatively quick, it has slowed down recently while we waited on the siding/roof guys to show up and get to work. I was literally writing this blog on Saturday morning with the following track record of promises for the siding:

• Wednesday the 26th “[The roofer] expects to have the roofing materials any day and will get right on it. He thinks he should have it done by the end of the weekend.
• Thursday the 27th “Siding on Saturday”
• Tuesday the 1st “I think we’re tracking on the siding. He thinks he’ll start Thursday”

On Saturday at 10:30 in the morning, we finally got a siding guy. Yep, one, singular, siding guy. To his credit, he's a good worker doing something that must be hard to do on your own. As of now (he worked Saturday and Labor Day) he is about half way done. I don't know much about siding, but it seems like a pretty good job. Below is your weekly house picture (I cheated a little and took this one on Sunday since there wasn't much exciting done by Saturday afternoon).