Porch

After several days of delays caused by pump scheduling and breakdowns, Randy was finally able to do the porch cap, which will allow Hyrum's guys to build the columns on which the porch roof rests. Randy said taking pictures doubles the price. I think he was kidding.

Incidentally, Randy's wife's maiden name is Reading, and she grew up in the stake in West Jordan. Her mom has been a widow for about 10 years, and tonight Randy was missing the party to celebrate her engagement to Brent Diamond, whose wife died last year.

Trusses and Stuff

Crane

Bonus Room

View from East

First Time Upstairs

I do take requests

We had a request to see the slab after it was done. I didn't get many pictures, because I was too busy spending several hours cleaning the mud off the street so we don't get shut down, but I did get this one.

Elevator Shaft

Look how deep our garage is!

Our plan was to be able to open and close the back door of the van entirely within the garage so we could load and unload a wheelchair with shelter from the weather. I think we'll have plenty of room for that. I hope we'll also have room along the back here for power tools and lawn & garden equipment.

And this is the view from the family room window. Not bad, huh? There's a lot of green on these mountains for September. Brigham City always seemed to be brown by the end of June.

Visitors

Mom, Vickie, and Kellie stopped by on their way home from Logan today to check out the house.

Status Today

Taking Shape (literally)

Framing began on Monday, and today there are almost four sides and some of the interior walls done. I thought the house looked smaller than it should when it was just a slab, but with walls in place it feels much bigger.

Here's our first most-of-the-family photo in our new house. This is the view from the East window in the living room, at least until we have neighbors.

Our first walls

Okay, they're not standing yet, but Joe came this morning and laid out the base plates and built these walls that will make up the back and sides of the fireplace.

Cement and Ce-MORE-ment

Last night Jim got the supplies and returns for all seven circuits of tubing into elbow sleeves and secured in place while I removed tarps. Then he connected them all together so we could pressurize them to test for leaks. Since we don't yet have power on site I made five trips back and forth to the garage to charge two air compressors.

This morning Jim borrowed his brother Gary's generator, and that made filling the tubing much easier. Both sets held at 100 psi for an hour, so we dropped them to 40 psi for the concrete pour.

Randy came this morning to pour the slab. He decided there wasn't enough slope in the garage to pour that today, so he cancelled some of the cement and will come back Friday to re-grade and pour the garage. I drove the kids over to watch for a few minutes. There were two trucks there at the time, and Sawyer called them "cement and ce-more-ment."

One note on the foam staples: they work fine for laying out the tubing, but when cement drops in a large pile and oozes outward, it drags the tubing with it and rips the staples right out of the foam. After we discovered this problem in the first few seconds, they spread an inch of cement over all the tubing first to help hold it in place, then filled in the rest afterward. I hope the tubing all remained close to the right place so we don't end up with too many cold spots.

I forgot to mention to Randy that we needed to keep dirt off the streets, and before he was done the Farmington City Dirt Nazi showed up and staked in a violation notice at the curb. I went back tonight and spent a few hours trying to clean the mud off the street. Randy brought his Bobcat for me to use, which helped get the largest stuff off. Lydia came over to help too. I heard a story about muddy footprints on the road getting a project completely shut down, so I guess I should be grateful it's just a warning.

The warning also mentioned that we needed to have a lined concrete washout area on the lot, rather than washing out in the garage where we'll be pouring more cement in two days. Nobody I've talked to has ever heard of such a requirement, and nothing was said of this requirement during the permit process. Apparently it's a very new requirement.

Now that's what I call a storm front

I went over this morning with the intent of re-covering the tubing after the wind blew the tarps off yesterday, but it didn't look like there was any threat of sun anytime soon, so I didn't bother. I went back again tonight after the sun came out and got everything covered back up so it won't get sun tomorrow.