Drywall in da House

Drywall has to be the most dramatic noticable change to a house other than the initial framing. In just two days all of the drywall was roughed-in (nailed to the wall/ceiling) and in another two days the seams have all been "taped and bedded" where tape is applied to the seams between drywall boards and drywall compound is spread over the tape. They are even starting to texture the walls!
They should be completely done Thursday =8-O

Here are a whole bunch of pics over about 4 days work time:
Starting in the bonus room

*very* rough around the windows initially ;-)

they start with the roof and upper walls and do the lower walls later

starting to wall in the bookcase areas around the fireplace

the kitchen appliance area early

the front room first day

second day and the bonus room windows are a little more trimmed

the breakfast room where it meets the family room

the drywall crew passes wires through small holes where they were hanging (speaker wire is blue).

Laundry room done

Much more done in family room

Kitchen wall

high up in the family room ceiling

they have added the curved corner pieces for all of the vertical wall intersections

View from the front door

Checking the laundry/craft room out

Checking out the breakfast room

In the shower and bath areas they use special drywall with a waterproof coating on it

View up the stairs to the bonus room

Oh, so *that's* who drinks pineapple Fanta...ewww

The drywall joint compound comes in plastic bags and mixes with water...the bags come in small boxes that make a lot of trash when thrown all over the place along with the drywall castoffs...

Texturing has begun on the cathedral ceiling already

They tackle the high spots first, standing on the scaffolding


In other news, the geothermal people came back and connected all of the ground loops to the pipes coming out of the house that have been there since before the slab was poured.
Unfortunately they dug the trench, put in the pipes, and then piled dirt back loosely so it looks like we either have giant gophers or Bugs Bunny went by on his way to Albuquerque.


Guess who is cleaning up the drywall leftovers and boxes of drywall joint compound?
The dumpster is full to the top and we need to have it replaced with an empty one!


Texturing will be done this week and next Monday should be the start of wood flooring. And we got our cabinet plans figured out too so they should be ready in a couple more weeks! Moving right along...

Flooding and Foaming

This has been an interesting week...
We had a major storm system come through, and though it wasn't dangerous from a tornado standpoint, it was a real flood-bringer. Our area got more than 5 inches of rain in one day! A lot of roads in the area had to be closed.
Obviously this hampers the geothermal drilling a bit. Fortunately it did not stop the insulation crew from coming in and finishing insulating the exterior walls of the house. :-)

First things first - a flooding before/after montage:

On the trail leading between houses out here we built a footbridge over the creek. This creek is fed with runoff from the property as well as some on the other side of the road, and most of it flows into the man-made pond out here. If the pond gets full, three things happen: 1) water flows out of an overflow pipe until the pond water level gets back down to the planned max level 2) water flows over a low spot in the retaining wall and floods into the neighboring pasture and 3) the creek backs up and rises until water can drain out of the pond.

Here are some pics of the footbridge the day before the storm (we knew storms were a-comin' because my trick knee started acting up; and, uh...the weatherman said so too I guess).


The gravel path is for a 4-wheeler to cross, and has an iron pipe in it to flow water when the creek is at normal levels.


After the creek backed up (the next day)!



Then the day after:


Unfortunately the gravel 4-wheeler path partially washed away!


On the plus side the rain brings grass and flowers


The pond in its fullness (those trees are normally not underwater):


The overflow pipe trying to rebalance the water level:

Somehow nothing much was damaged out here.

Back to the house! The foaming is all done and we're ready for drywall.
Laundry room:



The office is foamed:



This is the wall where the wires and gas line go to the outside, you can't see any of them now


This is the wall where all of the plumbing and geothermal pipes were visible before:


Random pic of the day:
We use only the finest Halliburton Hole Plug for our geothermal wells...


Since the drywall is already at the house, I expect that will progress quite quickly next week. More pics of that as it happens!

Geothermal Drilling

Yes another update immediately - lucky you, right?

As hoped, we passed frame inspection on the house (the shop will be done later since it has a separate 1/2 address and permit anyway)! Apparently after inspection is passed the red tag is unceremoniously ripped off...no we didn't do it ;-P


We finally got some progress on our geothermal well drilling. I had no idea how involved all of this was, it's pretty interesting.
Here is a .pdf document made by the company whose equipment we're using that explains all about it: Geo Concept Guide
I recognize a lot of the components from the doc already installed in the house.

So essentially they drill some plastic pipe loops deep into the ground and circulate fluid through these pipes (sort of like antifreeze) that transfers heat to/from the earth. To do this you need some drilling equipment and lots of flexible pipe!

They decided to drill the first loops right in front of the house:


The drilling rig:

Drilling frame (lays flat when the truck is driving!):

The pipe is some extremely stout plastic:

The rig braced and ready for action:


They also bring a trailer that carries the pipes, a cement mixer for securing the pipes in the ground, and a water tank to mix the cement on site. They hooked into our water well to fill up their water tank and help drill the wells and test the loops.


Since we have two pumps/zones in our house we have two sets of ground loops. Here is the closet near the master bedroom that will house one of the pumps.

Starting the second set of loops:

They will connect the ground loops to the rest of the system soon.


The loops on the front of the house are all set!

I hope that's just mud spatter on the outside of the porta-potty...

So that's the next quick update. Supposedly before the end of the week we'll get the rest of the foam sprayed in the exterior walls! Moving right along now.
In theory our completion date should be mid-July!

Frame Inspection and Mods

Spring is here and the redbuds, pear trees and chickweed are starting to bloom.
This goose seemed confused on whether he was done flying home or not.


Well we got our frame inspection, and as predicted we got a "red tag" on the first go. The plan is basically to get the inspector out to have a look, assuming that he will find something, and then get a list of things to fix and act on them. Sometimes the lists can be long, but ours was not too bad. Yes of course we got a red tag the first time!


The good news is we only had to fix three things:
1) Remove insulation around fireplace flue vent to comply with fire safety regs.
2) Secure green baseboard splices on exterior frame walls with bolts within 12" of the splice joints.
3) Improve clearance around staircase (to bonus room) so that there is at least 6'8" or headroom at the top and bottom of the stairs (and all the way up).

The bad news: the staircase clearance issue required remodeling so we had to get the framers out to re-do the top of the stairs to the bonus room as the slope of the roof prevented us from getting clearance the way the stairs ran.
The solution: turn the top three steps 90 degress to the right at the top of the staircase to make them end towards the middle of the bonus room where there is more headroom.

Pics after remodeling:
end of stairs cut into middle part of room (before rail):

After railing added:

View from stairs:


Issue #1 above was fixed very quickly by trimming the attic insulation near the stovepipe.
Issue #2 was solved by retrofitting bolts to the baseboards (drilled into the foundation) everywhere there was a splice in the green baseboards on the outside framed walls.
Example:


Another thing that happened early in the week was the delivery of all of the drywall for the house! They stacked it up in just about every room. I wish I was there to see it delivered, I hear they have a fancy way to get these heavy pieces off the truck.




Now that we are getting ready to pass inspection, we need to prepare for the insulation crew to finish foaming all of the exterior walls. Some of the walls that look like interior walls will be open to the air and are actually considered exterior. Examples of this include the walls shared with the garage, and the closets containing the geothermal plumbing, as they have doors that open to the exterior. So to be able to spray these with foam as exterior walls, they have to have drywall installed to back the foam.
While the framers were there, they did this rough drywalling, among several other things.
garage drywall:

closeup of new staircase remodel from below:

apparently the framers got bored and kicked a dirty soccer ball against the wall:

and got really bored and drew this fabulous drawing:

Baby Got Back!
So there you have it. Now we just wait on final inspection to pass and we're ready for foam and drywall.