The Second Story

The last week has produced a full second story and roof - no shingles yet, though. There's been a few slow downs with the framing, but we're close to wrapping that part up and to the point where we can dry-in the house.

Also added has been a few trim pieces which, along with the trusses, is giving the house a little character now.

Also framed last week: the garage!

Prior to bringing in the trusses, they lifted in the roof panels.

Next, the trusses - 28 in all - were lifted onto roof.

About 10 of the trusses are the square interior trusses that make a better attic space. This is giving us room to put the HVAC system in the attic and give us some extra storage. And the result of putting the HVAC in the attic is that we could make the mechanical room in the basement smaller, thus giving us more room in our family room.

These are the front trusses, the ones over the "old" part of the house. Since the new setback laws require 20' from the street, the second story begins back a ways, where as the main floor can be closer since it's grandfathered by the old house design.

mmmm......symmetry

Here a view of the interior of the trusses. You can see the square interior pieces in the foreground, then changing to the triangle interior in the background.

Once the trusses were in, the framers could start adding the roof panels that will form the foundation for the roof to be installed. With all the rain the past month, we're eager to have a roof and start drying the house.

Almost there! With the trusses in and the roof panels on, some of the trim got added.

Also done: framing in the garage. It will be so nice to have a DRY garage to do projects in and store bikes. The old garage regularly flooded with a couple inches of water.

Framing, walls and rain!

The past few weeks have seen a flurry of activity around framing - in the rain. It hasn't been fun for the framers, but the house has really started to take shape. In about a week, the roof will be up and we can start the process of drying out the house.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Mr. Casey and Mr. Tim, and our wives who make it all possible, we also started to build the retaining walls that will grace three out of four of our property lines.

The walls will contain 600 blocks total, plus about 30 cap pieces and 24 corner pieces. That's a lot of stone. We thought we could get that laid in a week, but I grossly underestimated the effort needed.

With the basement level framed, the sub floor for the main level was installed, and a few exterior walls lifted. Here's looking towards the back yard. Starting to the left is the kitchen, then the office, and then the craft room.

Seeing the exterior walls of the main floor go up really made the place feel like a house. It also started to make all the spaces real, and not just drawings on a plan.

This is looking from the SE corner of the house towards the front. The large windows we have planned in the front have been a great space to pull lumber up and into the house. The hole in the floor to the right is the stairwell.

After about a week, the main floor really started to take shape. Here are some internal walls going up, with the wall in the center dividing the kitchen space (left) and a hall to the right.

Part of the main floor work was installing the old post from the original Sunnyside house. It'll be near the entrance. This piece of wood was originally a beam in the basement. It was milled 105 years ago, and with some light sanding, you can still see the old mill marks on the wood. Super cool. We're really happy to have a piece of the old house used so prominently. It's a great testament to the history of the house and the generations before us who've made this all possible.

Halfway through the recent progress, we took delivery of a mini excavator to help build the retaining walls. I took a week off work to build the walls, and Mr. Casey gave up his Spring Break to join me. But, as I drove the machine to the back yard...I got it stuck. Sand. (Casey later showed me a trick to getting it out). But before he arrived, I spent nearly three hours begging God to help me get it out and trying everything I could think of to no avail. Eventually, at the point of total desperation, I had an epiphany, and realized I could just put some plywood down so the tracks wouldn't mire in the sand. Worked perfectly the first time....and something I wish I had realized three hours prior. Sigh....

In my effort to get the mini "unstuck", I may have damaged part of the water proofing around the foundation.

Nailed it.

Once in the back, we moved the mini to the south side and started to excavate for the first retaining wall. Took about 500% longer than I estimated.

As we excavated to the place where the wall would end, we hit a large concrete block - one of the ultra blocks that were left in the ground to save money (removing them is expensive). Apparently, we didn't imagine the wall being that deep. So, we had to bring in a 90 lbs jack hammer to break it up. Like a hot knife through butter. (side bar: jack hammer had to come back a day later when we realized we didn't break off enough).

Once broken up, Mr. Casey made short work of clearing out the rest of the area for the retaining wall.

With space excavated, we started laying out the retaining wall base. YouTube University said you'll spend 90% of your time getting the base perfectly solid and level, then the rest is easy. And they were right. We spent about 7,000 years laying what you see in this image. Needless to say, we realized quick we were NOT going to finish laying all 600 blocks of wall in a week.

The wall along the south property line creates space for the MIL entrance (left), and extends up and back to create egress space for the MIL bedrooms. It runs from the SW corner of the house all the way to the SE corner, with two turns to create small retaining walls as the level of the soil steps up.

You can see the start of the wall in the background. The wall will continue up along the left side of the image and into the foreground.

Mr. Casey is strong! Here you can see the first turn we made. And, thanks to God, the base row of the upper section was perfectly the same height of the top row of the lower section, making a nice clean line.

The wall in the back section will eventually be 5 stones high. Here you can see the overall size of the egress space for the MIL bedroom windows.

This is looking down on the wall from the second story. That's a lot of blocks!

Once some of the flooring was done on the second story, I climbed up there to get a sense of our new view. Here's a panoramic of what I saw. On a real clear day, you'll be able to see the tops of the Olympics in the background.

When excavating for the walls we had lots of large chunks of concrete from the broken ultra blocks. So I dug a big hole....

....and buried them. They're about 8' down. Very cost effective.

As the second story floor was being put in place, they had to reinforce the main floor interior walls to hold the floor. The result: a spider web of braces.

Once the floor was secure, braces were taken out. Here's a shot looking from the back end of the kitchen towards the front door. Same basic location as the photo above.

Slowly, the second story has been taking shape. You can see the north and south exterior walls up.

A few days after the above photo was taken, most of the interior walls for the second story were done. Here you're looking at our walk-in closet in the main bedroom, and behind it, the rest of the bedrooms. Stairs are to the left off screen.

I climbed up to the top of the second story wall to get this shot. This is the back NE corner of the house (the guest room). This gives you a pretty good view of the ultimate layout of the second story. Next week: roof! And then the house can FINALLY start getting dry. Its been raining almost constantly since the 3rd week of framing.

An Untold Demo Story

During demo back in December, we had a little scare. Namely, I (Chris) lost my iPhone in a pile of debris.

How it happened: Walking back and forth on top of demolished house rubble to take photos, I slipped my phone in the inside breast pocket of my jacket...or at least I thought I did.

The phone actually missed my pocket, and just slipped right out the bottom of my jacket and into a pile of debris.

Apparently my phone is a ninja phone, because it made absolutely no sound while falling into the pile. I had no idea I had done this until I reached for it again to take another photo. That's when I had that sinking feeling of "Oh no...no....no....no, where's my phone. I JUST USED IT!"

As, I heard the excavator's engine rev up, that first sinking feeling was quickly followed by another "Oh no....no...no....my phone is being CRUSHED TO DEATH! STOP!" St. Anthony then became my best friend for the 1,236th time in my life.

Over the course of the next 10 minutes, the contractor, the demo guy, me and my Aunt Bea desperately searched through the rubble looking for it. I was already preparing myself emotionally to find it crushed...or to never find it. It was a real 'needle in a haystack' endeavor. Here's the pile we were looking through:

The red arrow marks the location where we found my phone...about 3 "layers" of rubble down.

Everyone was calling my phone, hoping to hear it below the surface of some pile, but my phone was down to 3% battery...and when you call it 50 times, it goes to 0% really quick. Not to mention I had it on silent.

Just before we gave up, the demo guy thought to move his tractor over a little, which let us lift up some more broken boards to look under.

Like a marble falling down through the cracks of a marble run, my iPhone had slithered through multiple cracks in the rubble to be a few layers down - face down in a pile of broken glass and wood but undamaged and out of battery. How it got that deep, I have no idea.

I now keep my phone in a different pocket.