The basement continued: The quest for more headroom
Things are moving along in the basement. We decided to use a bench-footing technique to gain more headroom. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "bench-footing" is similar to "underpinning" which are both basically just fancy pants construction words for the process of lowering the basement floor. A house's foundation is tricky business. You can't simply dig down a basement floor without reinforcing the structure because the weight of the house would cause the foundation walls to slide inwards and crack the walls above. Yikes!! Here's a diagram that shows how a new 'bench-footing' style foundation is created
Switching focus: Planning the basement
In our last post I mentioned that we've been biding our time until the windows arrive. As you know, up until now, we've primarily been focusing our construction efforts on the main living space of the house. But now that we've got a little time to burn, we're switching our focus to the basement. Let's start by taking a peek at the plans
Window waiting woes…
You might have noticed things on the construction front have come to a bit of a standstill lately. Well they haven't entirely - we've merely switched our focus from the main area of the house to another. More on that in a bit - but first here are a few of the lessons we've learned in the last several weeks: Windows are expensive. Ok so that's not really something new that we learned. But geeeez! They're made of vinyl & glass people
Burgers with a view…
It's the long weekend!! So to kick things off right, we thought we'd grab a couple of folding chairs and get a little preview of how we'll get to spend our evenings once the house is done...
This puppy’s got a roof!
The roofers were on site yesterday so we stopped by the Dreamhouse this morning to snap a quick pic of the progress - not bad for a day's work eh? We've spent the last couple of weeks reassessing the budget & getting new quotes for the next phase (plumbing, electrical, HVAC etc.) to get the numbers back on track after the few snags we hit early on with the demo, permit costs & some of the lumber overages during framing. So after many days of nothing but phone calls, emails & meetings (for Kevin), it's pretty exciting to finally see a
All framed up!
We've walked you through the main floor, as well as the upstairs, so now we figured it's only fair to show you how it all came together from the outside. Front exterior view Rear exterior view It's one thing to see it on paper, but now to actually have the structure up & be able to grasp the scale & depth of things, only then do you really see the beauty of the angles of the design
Framing Walk thru pt. 2 [Video]
Its been a busy week but Kes FINALLY found some spare time to edit the video footage from the second floor framing walk through. We know that since last week's walk through of the main floor some of you have been anxious to see how the upstairs came together, well you don't have to wait any longer
It’s another Framing Friday! [Video]
Happy Framing Friday!! Today we're FINALLY posting the video of the walk through we took last week when we arrived home from vacation to find the framing crew hard at work. We know we kept you waiting a little longer than we'd hoped, but thanks for being patient with us. So without any further delay
It’s a Framing Friday!
We've been having a great time in Barbados all week, but also anxiously awaiting our framing update from home. This morning
The Race Against the Elements!
You may have noticed that we've been a little quiet on the house front for the last couple of weeks. Well, you're right. We have, and the main reason: WINTER. Now on a normal year, we aren't winter's biggest fans, but this year we're especially bitter as the sudden influx of full blown arctic weather has essentially thrown our construction schedule to the wolves! Okay, to be fair it's not totally Winter's fault, since according to the original schedule we were planning to have had the house structure up and closed in by now. But thanks to the 4 week permit delay, and