remodel

Things are slowly getting back to normal around this place. Furniture is not parked in bizarrely innapproprate locations. Thick (saw)(drywall)dust no longer coats every surface in the house, thanks to a long day of vacuum dusting by my lovey. Fresh paint or other compound containing some type of solvent no longer is the scent-o-the-day. The family computer no longer has the keyboard and monitor on the floor. I don't care what you may say, but I do not find that sitting criss-cross-applesauce or laying on my stomach to be a comfortable position to type from.

The remodel certainly took longer to finish the final few tasks that I expected them to. We're way off the schedule. Hah! What schedule? The last two weeks have been full of evenings of seemingly endless ticky-tack work: the small things that don't seem to add much towards the completion of the project. And yet, without them, it's not really finished. Like the last couple summary paragraphs at the end of an essay: it's already all been said, so rephrasing seems so ... pointless.

The need for some centering and reflecting and more time with God is strong. I've been so focused on work and ... work at home, that attention has been seldom focused elsewhere. Michelle and the kids have been great during the project. Putting up with so much noise, contractors, disarray, and me. Listening to me go on about how a contractor didn't do this or that right, or, at least, how I think it should have been done. Sawing molding past bedtime, followed by the thwump of a pneumatic finish nailer, and then the surprisingly loud compressor. Not getting the cars washed in weeks.... Oh, ok, months. The grass got mowed a couple times since June. And not by me, either. Thanks, honey. :)

Normality has nearly returned in full-force and I am looking forward to relaxing when I come home from work. Or, at least, having something normal to do, rather than remodel work.

In case you're wondering, the webcam has not found a new purpose yet. I've been too occupied to pay it much heed.

If you thought that the frequency of postings about the remodel reduced dramatically when I returned to work, you're right. When things were hoppin' and I was always around, it was easy to keep the site updated frequently.

So, to borrow an oft-used VH1-ism, "Where are they now" with the house remodel? About 98% complete. Really. All the work is done with the exception of punching down a nest of new ethernet and voice drops, terminating some coax cable with compression F-type fittings, puttying nail holes in the base molding, and affixing the new doorknobs. Once those are complete, it'll be time to call for final inspection.

Because this is a "page" entry and not a "blog" entry, I'll save some more stuff for my blog. Thanks again for reading and commenting, and watching, and following along with the activities. It has been a lot of work, but it has been worth it.

The Construction Cam is now offline. All the possible video captures of the house remodel project have been captured. There is no more work to see.

I may turn the camera into a Weather Cam and have it watch the sky, link it with a small internet accessible weather station, or a security camera of some kind for the front door or side yard where it's hard to see the kids when they're out there. Who knows....?

Thanks for watching, and be sure and catch up on all the timelapse and also the house remodel photo album if you haven't already.

I feel rather lame for not having some more pictures to share yet. I've got a lot of pictures sitting on the hard drive at home, but haven't taken the time to go through them and select the real special ones for the online photo album.

What I did spend some time on, instead of uploading pictures, was working on making some QuickTime "Virtual Reality" (QTVR) images. This involves standing in one place in the room and taking a series of pictures in a circle which overlap slightly. Then, you need a program to stitch these into a cylindrical, single image. Once I'm happy with that, another program (there are some programs which do both of these steps) takes the cylindrical image and turns it into a QTVR cubic image which can be viewed on any computer in QuickTime Player, or via the web. This lets you look left, right, up, down and zoom in and out with mouse movements, giving the viewer a relatively good idea of what the space looks like from that one spot where the pictures were taken.

So where are these cool things of which I write? Well, the sentence which started with "Once I'm happy with that, ..." is key in that I wasn't happy with how the images were turning out. That pretty much sums it up. When they make me happy/ier, they will get put on the web.

At this week's end, the remodel construction area is looking much more house-ish. The insulation was installed and passed inspection the same day. But what really makes it look "real" is the drywall. In just two days, a single drywall hanger completed 98% of the upstairs rooms. To me, that's amazingly fast.

That's all there is for an update without pictures.

Next week, we'll have the drywall hanging completed Monday. Tuesday through the end of the week will be mudding, taping, and PVA primer/sealing of the drywall.

Another day without any pictures, but a good day of work, none the less. All mechanical work was supposed to finish up today, but there weren't enough hours in the work day to complete the tasks at hand. Part of the problem was missing communication between the contractor owner and the field workers. Some specific details just fell off the radar and it was enough to cause them to fall a day behind. But, it's all good, as rough inspection isn't scheduled until Wednesday afternoon. The final electrical hookups for the outside heat exchanger and inside blower unit are complete, and our electrical cover (rough) inspection passed easily.

The siding was mostly completed last week with the back and side completed, which is about 75% of all the siding work to be completed. What remains is the front walls, which will be completed after the sheetrock product is brought in through the front window space. The window will be removed to get the product inside, so siding that wall will be done last.


In other exciting news, the HVAC is finally getting installed! What was originally scheduled for July 5 got started 8 days behind schedule. Friday's completed work included installing 5 new vents and assembly of the coil and blower units on the platform built for it. Unfortunately, one vent is in the wrong place and one duct travels right next to a recessed light, so I'll be sticking around Monday morning to chat it up with them. Also, I'd really like to have the blower unit in a different place which is more accessible. We do have to change the filter periodically, so having the unit in the attic space is already a bit of a pain.


All of the electrical fixtures, outlets, and switches are wired up, and the last few small studs are finished. The storage room wall is sheeted in plywood now, too, so we can hang anything pretty much anywere without having to use drywall anchors.

This week should see a lot more activity again, as the HVAC should be done by Tuesday, electrical cover inspection on Monday afternoon, framing inspection Tuesday afternoon, gutters on Tuesday or Wednesday, insulation on Thursday, insulation inspection on Thursday afternoon, and sheetrock install starts Friday. The construction schedule page is kept pretty well updated.

There's no pictures today, but there was some more progress. Today, it was the roof getting a treatment of what appears to me to be a synthetic roofing "felt." It's pretty plasticy-feeling, but it's got some good weight to it, so I can only assume that's what it is. I'll get the true skinny from the roofer next time I see him. To capture all the action on the roof, I once again moved the construction cam to the peak of the neighbors roof. So, there will be another installment of the timelapse archive today.

Well, we'd been very blessed this past week+ with awesome remodel weather. As is typical for the 4th of July in northwest Oregon, however, it rained today.

I was still lying awake in bed when I heard the sound of someone using a large concert band bass drum somewhere nearby. I thought about the parade at the St. Paul rodeo, but it was still too early and I don't think the sound would travel from St. Paul that well. I looked outside and saw the lightning and then booked downstairs to check my favorite mashup weather site and saw a severe-rated rain storm coming up from the south. It was just making it's way through north Salem. Oh, goody.

Even though it looked like it would mostly his McMinnville and Dundee, I got on the horn, and finally, after about 45 minutes, had my framer and a 30x60' tarp ready to spread. Now, let me hand out some free advice: a 6/12 pitch roof may be relatively easy to walk on in general, but if you try to walk on a tarp on that roof, you will not stay in place. You will slide and you will see flashes of your family and friends as you scramble for a foothold, or to grab the rumpled tarp with your fingers. Oh, and if you're holding onto a handful of nails or a staple gun, it's ok to drop them first. Here's another bit of information, not advice though, but just a so's you knows: a large tarp is hard enough to unfurl on the ground. On a roof, with a bit of wind, lightning and thunder, it's enough to nearly make you curse aloud at the inventors of the machines which fold those dastardly things in such a way that no mere mortal can understand.

So, in the end, my house was covered with a relatively short shower of rain which looked something like this to the weather radar folks:

So, now I have a really nice blue tarp roof. Like the kind Jeff Foxworthy talks about. Sorry, I have only one dog and he doesn't sleep under the front porch. And I don't even own any cinder blocks to prop up my car with. Aren't those storm clouds to the west, after the rain passed through, just dark and nasty-lookin'? I'm sure it dumped hard on McMinnville.

Saturday the 1st of July was the day that the framing got to about 90% complete. The roof was 100% completed, and then work began on some interior wall completion. Additionally, the electrican came and we got all the wires back into the garage ceiling.

The mess of wires which we say back on Day 1 has radically changed and...
...now the nice TJI ceiling is home to all the wires.

And now we have a completed exterior frame of the house. All the roof and walls are done. Inside, there is still a bit of work left to do, such as completing the walls up to the vaulted ceiling height.

From the inside, this is a picture standing near the front window of the new room looking towards the opposite corner at the back of the house. You can just start to get a feel for how the room will look with the higher ceiling. The opposite corner has the opening into the girls' new closet along the back wall. I think the girls now have one of the better views in the house. All the nice trees and grass in the side yard, and, as Jolee exclaimed looking out the window, "I can see Grace's house from here!" She then went to the other window and excitedly said, "I can see Grace's house from this window, too!"

Sunday work will complete the internal framing. Next week, we will see the plumber complete the rough bathroom work on Monday, then the roofers come on Wednesday.

Today was Day 5 of the remodel. That means one day of demolition and four days of construction. It seems miraculous that so much work has been done in so short a time. But, in fact, it is only because of a lot of really hard work and blessings of good weather from God that the house is to the stage it is now.

First thing in the morning, the trusses were erected from their drop point from yesterday. This involved a lot of walking right on the edge of the house, up two stories from concrete. The framers seem to have very little problem walking that high right on the edge. I do.

Once locked in place, and the overframing on the original roof was completed, along with a real pain-to-build hip, the trusses received a nice new coat of sheeting. I have enough problems walking on a roof with nothing or a string of Christmas lights in my hands, much less a full sheet of plywood.

With the rear roof complete, the front finally gets sheeted. At the end of the day, we had all but the dormer roof complete.

Tomorrow, Saturday, the wiring mess in the garage gets put back in order, the roof should be completed, including the shed roof over the garage and the bump-out for the fireplace.