Cabinets and sheetrock and millwork, oh my!

We're complete slackers when it comes to updating this blog. Lots has happened in the intervening months since the last post.  We got our surface materials bid (floors, counters, etc.) only to find it was much higher than our allowance.  After some redesigns, we got that under control, and floors are in the process of being installed.  Cabinets have been mostly installed, with only a few glitches on the cabinet maker's part (one which still needs ironing out...).  The interior is painted with a base coat of what will be the ceiling color, "nice white", and the exterior is almost entirely finished except for stone trim and, a minor matter, the entry staircase.  The entry stair has been something of a challenge, as we apparently built Rapunzel's tower.  But we'll get something eventually.  Maybe a ladder.  We're hoping once we have the stairs and the stone in place, the existing exterior colors will all tie in nicely together.  As it is, you can't miss our house in a crowd :-)

Next up, more floors and bathroom surfaces, then painting somewhere in there, appliances, and... moving in?  Supposedly completion is scheduled for the beginning of September. We'll see if we make it in by Kael's second birthday (Sept. 25th).  Given that he now knows how to climb out of his crib, the sooner we can get him into a baby-proof room (i.e., not our office and library), the better.

After framing

We've often been told that progress seems to slow down once framing is complete, but in some ways it seems like things have speeded up, because now work is progressing in parallel. In the few weeks since framing more or less finished, we've gotten most of the rough plumbing (including a couple of bathtubs), most of the windows, the HVAC ducts (including the heat pump), and the beginnings of the light fixtures and electrical wiring. We also have our electrical hookup, so we don't have to pay for generator gasoline anymore. They managed to get the power poles in without taking down any trees, and the pole on our property actually blends quite well with the trees around it.

Here are a few recent pictures of progress on the interior:

It's really starting to come together.

Framing is done

Apologies for the long delay in posting; life has been hectic. There hasn't been a whole lot to report: framing has continued apace, and it's been delightful to see the house coming together. You can see a bunch of progress photos in our Picasa album. Framing is more or less finished, and the roof is on, so the house has started to dry out, and become much more pleasant to be in. We went with a slightly less attractive roofing material than we'd hoped, but it turns out to be nearly impossible to see the roof from anyplace we're likely to be, so it's not much of a problem.

In commemoration of the completion of framing, I shot a quick video tour so you can see how it fits together:

The one thing I don't think I really captured in the video is the spaciousness of the house, the way you can stand in the dining room and see all the way up to the peak of the roof above the loft. Spaciousness was a top priority when we were designing the house, and I think it's really paid off.

Framing

At long last, framing has finally begun! It's interesting how this all seems to move in fits and starts; it seems like we go for weeks with very little progress, and then boom, we have a ground floor:

From Framing begins

And then, a couple weeks later, a second floor:

From Framing the main floor

The trenches behind the house have been backfilled, and the eco-block walls have been lowered and buried, which dramatically improves the rec room view:

From Backfilling

The dispersion trench, where all the drainage from the house gets dispersed back into the ground, has been completed as well:

From Framing continues

Of course, things aren't completely trouble-free. The big problem right now is electricity: the cost of bringing in underground power looks like it will be prohibitive, so we're going to need to have an electrical pole at the end of the driveway. That means that at least one of these maples is going to have to come down:

From Backfilling

We're hoping we can get away with just taking down the one overhanging the driveway, so we still have trees on either side; we really like how they frame the driveway and separate us a bit from the road.

Glitches notwithstanding, it's very exciting to finally see the house itself start to come together. There are a lot more pictures in the albums linked above- check them out!

Filling the foundation

We had a visit from the city's building inspector. We're told he thought that everything looked good, except he didn't think any of the dirt we'd dug out was usable as fill material- apparently the cit's had three garages washed out in the last year due to poor fill material underneath them, so they're cracking down on fill material. This means we needed to truck out that huge dirt pile and truck in a bunch of gravel and high-quality dry, compactable soil. Thus, more cost (trucking and dumping are not cheap) and more delay. The silver lining is that our house will be that much more secure with good quality fill underpinning it.

The other complication we're hitting is that we need to get an excavator behind the house to fill in the trenches between the house and the retaining walls, but with the clearing limits so close to the house and the steepness of the slopes, they're not sure they'll be able to fit it. Their options are basically to take the excavator along the rim of the slope by the garage:

From Filling the foundation

or up this slope here (without touching the plants):

From Filling the foundation

If they can't figure something out, those trenches may not be filled until next year, after the construction is completed. I'm not sure why they didn't think of this earlier.

One way or another, the foundation should be mostly done soon, and framing is still planned to start next week. Apparently we're going to start framing before the concrete floor is poured, which the foundation guy thinks is going to make things more complicated, but apparently they've got a framing crew basically sitting idle because of the delays we've been hitting, so they want to get moving.

The plans and the name

Two side notes: first, if you're interested in following along at home, here are the plans. They're not 100% up to date (in particular, they show a rockery on the South side that has been replaced with a concrete retaining wall), but they're pretty close.

Second, if you're curious about the blog name, the inspiration is from a speech by the King of Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Listen, lad, I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all this was swamp. The King said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show him. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in these isles.

We felt this adequately summarized the experience of trying to get the house built, and was appropriate given the "wetland" (for which read "slightly damper patch of ground") that caused us so much trouble in the permitting phase. We had no idea how much more appropriate the name would become when we found out about the soil quality.

Drainage

I'm beginning to feel like a broken record, but... we've hit more delays due to the lousy soil. We've just had a day and night of torrential rain, and it turns out that the soil got even muddier than our geotech engineer expected, even given how lousy we already knew it was:

From Foundation drainage

Because of this, much of the pile of fill material we've accumulated is useless, and will have to be trucked out, so we're going to be delayed backfilling the foundation. We're also realizing we have a problem with the driveway:

From Foundation drainage

What you see here is the corner of the garage. The driveway comes in on the right, and the garage floor is at the level of about the top seam in the concrete (about six feet, for scale). The problem is that black fabric fence represents the limit of the area we're allowed to disturb, so to get the driveway at that level without putting any dirt outside the area of disturbance, we're going to have a very steep grade. We're not sure yet how we're going to do that; we may need another of those huge concrete block walls.

Mostly what's been happening this week is installing the foundation drainage. My dad in particular has been expressing concern about this, because foundation drainage is one of those things that's very difficult to fix later on. The drainage system we're putting in is fairly robust. The white pipes in the picture below are perforated sewer pipes, which drain water out of the foundation. The whole interior of the foundation is going to be covered in a foot of river rock gravel, burying those pipes, followed by a plastic moisture barrier and another layer of gravel. Probably the key element is those concrete block walls, which hold back moisture seeping downhill, and divert it around the house.

The good news is that this incredible rain is sort of a stress test for the drainage system, and it actually held up quite well:

From Foundation drainage

It's hard to capture in pictures, but the ground inside the foundation is quite solid and sturdy, even though the ground all around the house is treacherously muddy. We did get a puddle of water building up in one corner, and some erosion around the inside of one part of the foundation, but both of those areas are going to be filled in (see the album for pictures).

Despite these problems, our most recent visit did give us a couple reminders of why we chose this property in the first place:

From Foundation drainage

From Foundation drainage

It's going to take most of the week to backfill and finish the drainage system, but with luck we may be able to start framing before the end of the week!