Building A Home For Our Family

The drywall, taping and mudding, and texturing are now complete!  The house looks great - so much brighter and more like a home than a construction site.

We’ve started painting the ceilings and some of the rooms, and today Matt installed our first light fixture.   It seems like such a little thing, but when I think of all it took to get to the point where we could install a finish light fixture, it seems like a very big thing indeed!

Since our previous image was a bit old and didn’t really reflect the current state of the house (picturesque as it was) I’ve updated the image to be more current.

This replaces the image referenced here.

The new image is a composite of two different views of the house taken at approximately 1:30 PM PST on November 15, 2008.

The image on the left is primarily the front (North) side of the house and the image on the right is the back (South) side of the house.

You can see in both that it’s been painted and gutters are installed. On the back side, you can see out woodstove chimney (left of the big cedar).

Last year our well went un-insulated all winter and during a particularly cold stretch we had a pipe break. Fortunately I noticed it within about 12 hours because I saw that the electrical meter was spinning at a crazy rate. For the last 10 or 11 months I’ve meant to do something to prevent it from happening again this winter, but the house has always taken priority

Since we’re currently having drywall hung and textured, I can’t really work on the house so I decided to finally do something about the pump house. The fact that we’re expecting temperatures to be in the high teens had something to do with it too.

I figured it would take me a few weekends to really get a good pump house up and didn’t really want to spend that much time on it right now (much less the cost of building materials) so I “made do”.

Before I could work on anything up there, I needed power. When we ran the wires for the well back in the summer of 2007, we ran four so that we could have two hot legs for the 220V pump, a ground and a neutral for a 110 circuit. I used one hot leg and the 110 to put in a duplex plug.

The basic frame is made up of three pallets that my Dad had. I bought three 4×8 sheets of 3/8 OSB for about $9 each and cut and stapled them up with my pneumatic stapler. It ends up being a surprisingly stable structure.

The backside of the pump house. I’ve since gone back and cleaned up the gaps some by stapling additional OSB over them and using leftover mastic from our SIP installation to “caulk” them.

The kids hung out and helped. Here they’re playing in the “snow”. I had Emma help me a as a counterweight when cutting the OSB. I put the sheet in the back of my truck hanging out over the tail gate and Emma sat on the end in the truck so that it would remain horizontal for me to cut.

I cut a final sheet and used screws to hold it in place over the 4th wall. Now I’ll be able to access the internals by simply taking a couple screws out. This will give me the access I need to turn the light on and off to be doubly sure nothing will freeze.

Today was the day - rough electrical, rough plumbing and rough framing.

There’s a few minor things that we need to fix but we’re all signed off.

The inspector was very impressed by the electrical panel (thanks, Chris).

All-in-all it was much simpler than I expected it to be. Now we’re on to drywall, then the finish work.

Here’s a couple pictures of our paint selection process.  We ended up going with the one on the corner of the house - the lighter one, not the one on the top painted board.  We’ll have a cream-ish trim color and a red-ish accent color and door.  They should start painting next week!

One more receptacle box. A bit of wire cleanup. Rough electrical will be done! (assuming I don’t find anything else while cleaning up and reviewing it all).

Need to fix a stud and redo some vent piping to make the stud more vertical. Need to install vents for dryer and water heater.

I’m very close on finishing everything I need for the rough inspection. I’ve got an appointment with a guy next Saturday to talk about drywall and get a bid.

Recently completed:

• All ceiling fan boxes mounted and wired.
• Can lights on landing wired.
• Fixtures in kids bath mounted and wired.
• Master bedroom and master bath swept and vacuumed.
• Extra lumber moved outside (thanks, Jonathan)
• Wood flooring moved down from upstairs storage to kitchen area (thanks, Jonathan)
• Phone line pulled from phone box outside into house (thanks, Jonathan)
• Remaining electrical box in away room wired
• Telecom box in hearthroom nailed and wired

Tuesday night

• installed can lights in built-in on landing
• finished cutting block for ceiling fan in second dormer
• installed boxes for plugs under built-in on landing

Wednesday night

• Wired boxes for plugs under built in on landing
• Hung block for ceiling fan in second dormer with copious amounts of subfloor glue and some drywall screws

Completed in the last week or so:

• Ceiling fan box in the open area
• Electrical box for the track lights in the open area.
• Wall heater in the downstairs bathroom
• Ceiling fan box in the first bedroom (only the master left!)
• Scaffolding taken down (no longer needed! (until we install the ceiling fan…))
• Can lights installed in hall downstairs.
• Can lights wired in hall downstairs.
• Switches and light bulbs installed for can lights in hall downstairs.
• Now can turn on/off lights from the doorway
• Cut lumber and installed block for ceiling fan in dormer of 3rd bedroom - drywall screws and subfloor glue.
• Started to cut lumber for block for ceiling fan in dormer of 2nd bedroom.
• Cut wood and installed supporting member for one of two light fixtures in kid’s bathroom.
• Started installing box for light for above.
• Cut holes in exterior walls and ran wiring for outside plugs (3 of them). Caulked holes to keep insects and weather out.
• Moved receptacle for freezer to be 38″ off floor so that it is visible when the freezer is closed.

We bought a chest freezer a few years ago and it’s been wonderful. When we were designing our house, we created a special space just for the freezer in the utility room. Last weekend, we lost power for a few hours. Up here, it’s entirely possible to lose power for hours to days during the winter storms. During the brief weekend outage, we realized that it’ll be a lot easier to run the freezer off our generator if the plug is accessible. Now, we will be able to unplug the freezer and plug it into an extension cord going out to the generator without having to unload the freezer and move it away from the wall.