Foundation Framing

I was working the other day in the office and suddenly the room got dark! I can no longer spy outside and see what is going on with the construction. The black plastic that will protect my house from getting soggy is now up. Now I have to go outside to check on the progress...which is good because I have to keep getting pictures...although I usually ask Rodney to take the pictures. Once the plastic was put up the foundation crew started trenching the areas where the pillars and beams will go. They dropped off the rebar today that they are going to use and I think they are going to pour on Monday. Now we're really getting started. The plumber also came out today to rough out the master bath!
I can't wait to see what happens next!

The wall is down!

Every day we are seeing more progress on the addition! The foundation crew came out to drill the holes for the pillars. We had to wait awhile for the driver of the drill because of Hurricane Ike. He tried to fuel up his truck and could not find diesel anywhere in the surrounding towns. He finally was able to borrow some and was able to get here to drill the holes. It was incredible to see this truck pull up onto the site and how high the drill went up. They had to drill down 12' in some areas to make sure that the foundation won't budge. Once they drilled those holes they brought in a cement truck to fill the holes a bit and put in rebarb. One of the things that the foundation crew found was that our existing foundation is about six inches higher than what they thought. Apparently the brick is usually hiding a couple of inches of the foundation but they realized ours was hiding a lot more. They came in to measure a window to the ground and found out it was much closer to the ground from the inside than from the outside. So that meant that the bricks had to come off of the side of the house a little earlier than planned so they could see where the foundation height really is. After taking off the brick and looking at them, we might be able to use the existing brick on the new addition -which will be nice because it might be harder than I thought to match the brick. This way we can mix the new and old brick together so it can blend. Now that the bricks are down, the foundation crew will have to come back and lay more fill down before they can put up the foundation frame and pour the cement. Today we should be getting some plastic that will be put on the side of the house to keep it weather proof - just in case it rains! Rodney was thinking that since the brick is down we can go ahead and tile our guest bathroom. We waited to do that since we are going to take out that window and we also knew the brick was going to come down and we were concerned that when they tried to take it down, the force could knock down the tilework on the inside. So we'll see if we are prepared to tackle that project. :)

Progress is being made!

Wow! I can't believe how quickly things are moving along! The septic is completely in and the old one is drained and filled. The air conditioning unit got moved so the foundation group could come in and get the ground ready. They had to bring in a lot of dirt / sand to fill the land to make it level. They moved so quickly we weren't able to get a picture of it in progress - the fill was all there before Rodney got home for lunch. They will be back on Monday to put in the bell shaped pillars and I think start the foundation framework. Hurricane Ike is holding us up a bit...but we'd rather wait it out then have to have them do a lot of stuff over.

From House Addition

Closing Day!

9/4/08
Closing day has finally arrived! We are so excited! We signed all of the paperwork...and it was endless. We technically have 3 days to decide that we don't want to do this project...but we've been waiting since Thansgiving of last year...so I'm pretty sure we know we want to do this. When we got home from the closing the guys were already here to start on the septic! It is so nice to actually see some work being done. It makes me think we really are going to get this addition done!

Rodney and I had been talking since we got married that if we were going to have kids we were going to need to add on to the house or move to a different house. Because the price of land is still really high and because we love our neighbors we decided to add on. Lucky for us we have a brother-in-law that is an architect! Very handy! He stopped by over the Thanksgiving holiday last year and took measurements of the house and drew up a great plan.

From House Addition

We are making our existing Master Bedroom into my office and converting what is now my office / guest bedroom into a dining room which will also be the access to the 3 new bedrooms that will be added on.

Our contractor is Darrell Parchman who makes it a point on his card to say that he returns calls. And let me tell you that was huge! Rodney contacted over 7 different contractors and most of them promised to come by and give us an estimate and never did. Darrell is great about returning phone calls and he gets the estimates to you quickly. We would have started much sooner had the bank process not taken as long. The project is only supposed to take 3-4 months...and much of that is dependent on weather and the sub contractors' schedules.