More house progress 7/22

Living room

Small bathroom

deck sonotubes

living room

kitchen

loft, looking down to living area

Metal siding color for the bumpout (copper), burgandy dark trim piece in the back) will be around the rest of the house. Roof / accent colors are grey.

garage

carport area, that we will be building this weekend ourselves, to save $1700 in labor costs!

The house is flying along. Sheetrock is up and mudding and taping will begin soon. We have to stop by the house 2x per day to check on everything. It seems we discover something new everyday..... Yesterday we noticed a vast cavernous area above the stairs from the 2nd floor to 3rd floor. Why didn't we notice it before??? It is a perfect storage loft for our camping equipment! Emailed the builder right away and we'll be adding a storage loft (for another $$$.... of course). Today I stopped by and noticed a poor job on the concrete board installation for the tile shower surrounds. Luckily I know a thing or two about tiling and so I caught it right away. Pretty obvious though, if it isn't fixed, our tile shower would most definately be leaking behind the wall...... I guess just don't have your sheetrockers install the cementboard for a shower! They don't have a clue about tiling..... Anyways, we check everything in the evening and then email our general contractor about it and also stop by the house the next morning to tell the lead framer. You have to tell as many people as you can find, so that someone remembers to fix things..... Our lead framer is pretty good though, he usually catches most things. At any given time there can be at least 10 people working on the house. The framing crew, who does all the framing, siding, roofing, etc. Then the plumbing crew of 3-4 guys, then the electrical crew of 4-6 guys, then the sheetrock hangers, next it will be the mudder and tapers and after that the painters! Luke had to work pretty closely with the plumber because of our super neat greywater recycle system (shower water will be reused to flush our toilets) and our rainwater catchment and drinking water treatment system.

Right now we are trying to decide if we should get the above ground propane tank or the below ground propane tank. Propane gels at -44 F or so, and becomes unusable. Our friend Brian who has propane puts on a heat pad/heat trace to resolve that problem, but burying the tank would resolve all those problems. However, it would be a very rare occasion for the temperature to get that cold where we live due to the temperature inversion. Maybe once every 10-15 years (?). Especially if global warming continues .... then we will be fine! :)

Pretty soon, we'll take over by doing some of our jobs - acid staining our concrete floors and tiling the bathrooms / showers etc. This weekend we will be building a carport off the backside of the house to store our camper, etc. Should be kind of fun!