The first floor turns out to be a bit of a Lincoln Log situation, with some of the concrete and the framing interlocking. Because part of the garage slab hangs over the basement, the basement framing and first story floor structure had to be completed before they could pour the garage slab. And along withRead more about First floor framing & concrete interlock[…]
Post as in beam, not post as in blog. 🙂 Sometimes the reality of the house isn’t clear from flat 2D floor plans and engineering drawings. As the house gets built, the true nature of things reveal themselves, sometimes requiring changes to either improve aesthetics or something that doesn’t function well in practice. One exampleRead more about An unwanted post[…]
We’ve started planning the HVAC, which is a real pain. Consider the structure of the second floor: The first floor looks very similar. If you think about how you might snake ducting from one area of the house to another though those joists, keeping in mind that you can’t actually go through most of them,Read more about HVAC considerations[…]
It’s been a couple of weeks since the last update so I thought I’d throw out a teaser on the progress with the first floor framing. The walls are almost all up and most of the 2nd floor joists are in place. Here is what it looks like from the side: And from the top:Read more about First floor framing update[…]
We arrived back from a week vacation in Minnesota (where thankfully it was not humid) to find the basement had a ceiling, and the first floor had a floor. And we have stairs now going into the basement, instead of a ladder. Thankfully, because we have cameras mounted that are taking periodic snaps, we wereRead more about Finally above ground[…]
I just thought this was in interesting before an after shot of the backfill between the basement walls and the surrounding grade.
The framers have been on site for a week or so mapping out the basement walls. The last few days they’ve been installing the bottom plates on the top of the wall and for the basement inner walls. Today they started throwing up the first actual walls. Pretty exciting!
The excavators did a bunch of over-excavation of the area that will be the garage and driveway. The idea is that to insure proper equal settling under the entire span of a structure, you remove a bunch of soil, and then put it back all at equal soil compaction. To do this, they remove soilRead more about Soil compaction[…]
The pouring of the basement slab is somewhat of a milestone, as it means we are close to getting out of the ground and building up. The concrete team has been working for weeks to prep the basement floor for the slab pour. The floor started out with just bare dirt, the interior wall footings,Read more about Basement slab[…]
Most of our house is wood framed, but there is a bit of structural steel and they installed it today. This would have (or could have) been done earlier, but this was part of the catch-22 we had with the staging area on our lot. We had to get some of the back fill doneRead more about Structural Steel[…]