It is a snowy mess out there.  There are people who would love this but I am not one of those.

All this snow right now will not help with any deliveries if they cannot get into the driveway.

We had planned on getting some work done but clearing snow has become a priority and our snow blower is in Eden Mills.

I guess we can call another soffit person and maybe plan on getting some insulation done to warm the place up.

The ceilings are done upstairs but I am not happy with them.  They are so rough it will take some time to get them smooth.
When the drywall was delivered it took them the guys from Castle Lumber a while to get the sheets where we wanted them.

Brian and I will have to sit down and decide what we do next.  It is always nicer to have a plan even if it gets changed because of things we cannot control.  Like a plumber not showing up for a week.

It will get harder to deliver if and when this garage gets closed in.

This original window is going to be kept.  Just need to keep it from getting broken.

Hate snow.

We don't think they have finished snowplowing yet.

E/B

AHHH!!!! A week off to spend with family.  It is very nice to have the kids here Christmas is really meant for kids.  They are so gullible.

It has been hard to keep the addition warm so we have heaters on all the time and have put plastic and tarps over the stairways to keep the heat in.  It has made a difference because we can leave the door open between the two rooms and not freeze in the old part of the house.
We will have to decide on the insulation soon but I resent spending that kind of money on one item.

Dave did show up yesterday to finalize some of the venting and will be back in a week to work on it again.
We never saw the plumber except for the Monday last week so hope he will show up next week when the guys get back to work.
On Friday we spent a good part of the day sweeping the floors and vacuuming the stuff brooms won't get.  We hoped to keep the kids a little clean if they were going to be on the rough floors of the addition.

When Brian was out with Dave they found large animal droppings in the garage and the tail and fur of at least one squirrel.  It is creepy because we cannot figure out what it might be.
In the snow we have had there is a trail of an animal going in the garage but no trail out.  Still could not see anything in there and it's still creepy.

Enjoy your holidays,

E/B

Wednesday and we are behind the expected date for having the strapping and vapour barrier done.
It is much more complicated upstairs with all the rooms and the sky lights too and with lots of pot lights to go around.  Even if we don't have to put vapour barrier on the walls it still takes time.

If they get the strapping done this morning and the drywall is delivered they can start that this afternoon.
The guys who deliver for Castle lumber are never happy about doing deliveries.  They would prefer to just dump the stuff in the drive and leave us to sort it out.  When we expect more they won't smile or talk to us like it's some sort of punishment for making them work.  The store got 11,000. dollars from us last month so they can carry the drywall upstairs thank you.

We just have to get Lisa back since they were not ready for the inspection yesterday.  No drywall until she tells us we can.  We have gotten along so well with lisa even though the guys we work with do not want to call her.  They have the head inspectors cell # and would rather deal with one of the guys.


I'll get photos for later.

E/B

Thank god Brian is a perfectionist.  The electrical inspection was a breeze.  Brian was quite happy to find out that all that work was appreciated.  Of course Brian had every line straight and labelled.  He made good use of the electrical handbook.  What that means is we can move on.

The guys are now putting up the vapour barrier and will then strap the ceiling to get ready for drywall.
Even if we can get the roof done it will make it warmer for Christmas and we can eat in the addition.

We got the first door in yesterday and that was big.  It is a sign we are moving on and not having to rely  on tarps for doors.  The deck and stairs going to the door are long over due as well.

Bill is getting the plumbing done which would be nice but a lot of it has to wait until we have picked out tubs and flooring is in.

I am hopeful we can get this done soon we need to keep moving forward but are still getting slowed down by other people.  Once we get what we need we move pretty quickly.

We may have to let Russell go soon as we are still waiting for the other house to close and cannot afford two guys for the rest of the build.  They have still not firmed up the offer so we wait.  We won't see any money till March so have to look at the budget very carefully till then and we still have some large purchases to make.  Always the most fun part of any build is to try and keep within budget and we have not done that for sure.  We had not intended to hire anyone but needed the help.

The re-built wall.  What a mess the home inspector should have picked that up.

Our first door.  AWESOME!!!!

The deck in the garage.  The stairs will move once we are done.  This is so that drywall etc can be delivered easily.

Just love having stairs to the basement.

Next step is strapping then drywall.

E/B

So here we are another day and another event hijacking our plans.  It turns out that we cannot ignore the window in the old master bedroom.
It is much more degraded and dangerous than we thought so it will have to be fixed before we can put house wrap over it.
We can see daylight all around the window so there is not much holding it in place.  Brian is afraid a good strong wind will blow it out.
I guess if we are still waiting for doors and the electrical inspection it will keep the guys busy but I would rather just throw plywood over it till spring.
Bill the plumber is still not here and won't be till Monday now.  He has had a lot of health issues and we give him some slack because of it.  It has slowed us down but we don't want to cut him loose when he is down.

Maybe today will be the day Lowes has our doors in but I'm not hopeful.  Once we get them I am taking the credit cards we got there, and never used, back and they will be in little pieces.

There is not much holding that window in.

The other side of the house has not much damage.

E/B

We are making progress even though it is not what we were scheduled to do right now.
Since we are still waiting for the electrical work to be done, for the plumbing to be done and for the doors to arrive, the stucco is coming off the older part of the house.

It is hard work but the weather has been great so far and it needed to be removed at some point anyway.  The guys will get it off then typar the walls and we will repair and replace windows in the spring.  Rick had to bring a bigger bin so this is about the seventh bin so far.  Maybe more I'll have to count them.
Tuesday Russell was here by himself and man did he work hard to clean up the driveway and garage.  Yesterday they did some more framing and messed up all his work.

Brian is excited because as they are taking the stucco off he is seeing what this house looked like at one point.  There was a lot of detail that he would like to put back on the house.  It will give us the opportunity to use accent colours so I just need help in deciding what they may be. Anybody???
He may change his mind about the green colour because it was a nice yellow at one point, very muted, which might look better.

We are also getting more quotes back for the insulation.  The last one is $12,000.  but does not include one of the rooms so make it $15,000.  Still waiting for a few more to come in before we decide what to do.

Furred and ready for siding, we just need to pick a colour.

Back of workshop/m-bedroom top.

Side of workshop and garage.

A much bigger bin.

Special electrical boxes for ICF walls. 

Master of the electrical work.

We will remake this.

More than one paint colour?  Victoria style maybe?

Lots of sections that look like this.  This will be spring work.

E/B

No photos today since they would be very depressing.  The yard is such a mess with garbage all over the drive and around the house.  The bin was only delivered today and it is very small and probably won't fit all the garbage.

Today was filled with people giving us estimates on garage doors, soffits  and insulation.
We were floored at the cost of blown in foam.  Even if Mike Holmes uses it all the time it is incredibly expensive.  The first quote is about $20,000. that is just for above the ceiling in the upstairs and foam insulation in the garage, workshop and sunroom roofs as the walls are already insulated.  The second was $17,000.  and we have two more to come in.  The soffits were quoted at $20.00 a foot unpainted and $28.00 a foot painted add $5.00 a foot for eaves troughs  Adds up when it is 300+ feet.

The plumbing supplier was also here to try and get us to make some choices for valves mostly.  I can pick out trim pieces later.

Then Dave the heating and venting guy showed up to give Brian a list of things that need to be done for when he comes next.

That means wiring is going slow so we cannot drywall yet and that means we remain cold.

The guys will rip down more stucco while they wait for Brian to catch up on the wiring.  They can't work out in the yard much since the clay is dangerous.  They slip and slide so we are waiting for it to freeze.
 It is slow because of the interruptions and we are making changes as we go.

The house should firm up in the next few days though and they have moved the closing to March 8th which will not be too bad.

E/B

We had such a great few days in Eden Mills.  It was so nice to walk around the house without shoes and not feel  grit underneath like we do here.
It was nice to visit with some friends and be treated to dinner, nice to see Evan too.
Got some packing done as the conditional is almost up.  We'll have to decide if we will give them an extension but I know we will.

When we got back the guys had most of the front of the garage finished.  The roof is on and shingled and the walls are framed.  It changes the look completely since we don't have this massive hole in the front of the house now.

There is a lot of garbage again so Rick will be dropping off another bin tomorrow.  We have spent a fair bit of money on having him pick up these bins to clear the drive whenever a truck is coming to deliver something or the concrete shows up.  I hope this one won't have to be moved for a while.

Got a call from Lowes today to apologize for our treatment when we bought the doors.  I don't know if I already mentioned this but Brian and I had gone out and bought 6 doors from Lowes.  When he was writing up the bill the cost of the doors was higher than on the wall even the ones in stock.  The others he said they don't keep in stock so have to order them anyway but they would cost us more as well.  Brian was not happy so he begrudgingly marked them to the posted price.  He said he would put four of the doors that were there aside for us and we could pick them up at anytime.  When we went back to pick them up he had sold them to someone else and only had one in stock.  Wow, we had already bought those doors.  Anyway I wrote and email to Lowes, who would now like us to explain the chain of events so they can make us happy.

Really I have time for this?

Ah well we make progress and I should be happy with that no matter how much I would like to speed it all up.  Brian is a perfectionist and we always get the best results because of it.

This will look so nice when finally done.

The waste does not look so bad from this side.  See all the stucco gone?

There is a brick pathway under that dirt.

We put that foam over the door for now to keep the wind out.

E/B

Okay.....We got the floor poured but was it ever cold.  The coldest day this fall.  -11c or more.
The concrete is not curing properly so John has been over every hour trying to power trowel it but it is still quite wet.  We have put plastic on the window and door into the room plus hooked up a heater by the door and a couple of big lights to help keep it warmer.
Because the concrete was sticking in the chute Cecil put some extra water in it and it is not firming up as well as it should.
We will see how it is the next time John gets here but it may end up being a rough floor.

The water pipes here keep freezing so we have to go and turn them on every half hour to make sure they don't burst.

The power company was here and hooked up the new service today so we were also without heat for a part of the day until Brian got the wires we had run hooked up.  Still nothing hooked up in the addition but hopefully we can run a few pieces of equipment now without tripping a fuse.

All we need to do now is get the parts for the doors and close in the first floor and we will be warmer.

One wheelbarrow at a time.

We were trying to keep some of the concrete off the floors.

Russell moved almost all the concrete.

You had to lift the wire up a bit so the concrete gets around the tubes.

E/B

Okay the pressure test worked so we are on track to pour concrete tomorrow morning.
Not having to go through every tube to find a leak is a relief.  It turns out it was the manifold connections, they were not as tight as needed to maintain pressure.  Oh how happy I am.

Obstacles always gets in the way of my well laid plans.  The tub that I thought was perfect will not fit in the space that Bill allowed for one.  Unless one does not mind the toilet and tub touching.  Now we look for another one.

The doors are not deep enough for the openings which means trying to find a solution that everyone can live with.  Whatever we do for these patio/garden doors will have to be done for all outside doors because the foam is so thick.

I hope the doors we picked out for the other openings look nice.  It is not easy for Brian and I to go out and pick out six doors that we both like so when we did find them we ordered them right away.   This was at Lowes too.  When we went to pay for the doors the price had increased by 50. to 100. dollars a door.  That is a big spread when we were buying six doors.  Brian was great and asked why the difference and when he was told they had to be ordered in because they did not keep some of them in stock he was very firm about why would you have a price marked on the wall when you knew that would not be the price......etc.  The salesman did give us the lower price on everything but we had to fight for it.

I am hoping this gets closed in by next week but we will see.

The basement stairs may prove to be a problem since they are not 36 inches wide and the new code is that is the min. requirement.  Lisa the inspector was over and is going to see what can be done.  If nothing else we will close them up and use the old stairs and try to make the old ones wider.  That is a whole new adventure.

Ready for the concrete tomorrow.

This is still not deep enough for the ICF walls.

The new closet.

These stairs down will only be 31 inches so they would not pass inspection.

E/B

Here I am awake at 2am worried about concrete again.  It is so bloody annoying to have these delays be a constant part of the build.  And this is someone else's fault.  Brian was ready to test the in-floor heat on Monday but Bardons never delivered the part needed so Brian finally drove to some warehouse to pick it up.  It was sitting on the counter and did not make it to the three trucks that had made deliveries to Picton.
Then when he went to test the pressure yesterday it will not stay at one number so that means there is a leak somewhere.  If you look back at the photos of the tubing you'll see how hard it is going to be to find a leak in all that tubing.

We had wanted to pour concrete today because Friday Hydro comes to wire in the new service and disconnect the old.  That means we have to go into the dark basement and hook up all the old wiring to new.  While that is happening we have no power so pouring concrete is out of the question because it is a floor that needs to be power trowelled so no power no concrete on Friday and that means next week it is.

It also means I won't be going to our other house  to pack next week because we still won't be able to close up the kitchen area which means water pipes that will have to be checked to make sure they are not freezing.

Speaking of freezing lucky for us Evan was going past our other house and needed a washroom because I guess the temperature in the house was 13c.  We were able to call Brett from B.C.  Mechanical and he got out right away to fix the ground source heat beast.  It is always the same thing with that system, the fuse blows because the furnace filter gets dirty too quickly and the furnace has to work too hard.  It should not be dirty since no one goes in the house for long periods of time and there are no pets.

Mean while the windows continue to go in and the guys are not happy after Drew was here he really mucked up the yard so they are getting pretty muddy doing the windows.

The windows going in.

Master bedroom, look at the mud.

The problem sunroom

From inside the man cave.

Old fuse panel.

Such a rats nest mess.

This mess  drives Brian crazy.

Brians work.

Look at that new panel and wiring.  Nice and neat.

The new tub for the girls I know who like to have a nice deep tub for bathing in.  It will cover your knees for sure.

I just hope we get to close in that main floor soon.  PLEASE!!!!!!!

E/B

What a cold weekend for Brian and I.
We worked out in the sunroom to get the in-floor heat tubes down.  The wind was quite cold on Saturday so I blocked up a couple of the doorways to keep from freezing.  Even then our hands and feet were stiff by the time we finished.

The rolls of tube had to be held in the air and only let out a few feet at a time.  That was me hold the roll for about an hour and a half at a time while Brian tied it down. That took three rolls of tubing done in a very precise pattern.
It was so hard to work with because of the cold it did not go around the corner well.
The wire underneath was also pulled up because the tubing would not sit flat in the cold.
We just put in some rebar anchors we had sitting around.

It is still not hooked up and tested which is what we have to do before we can pour concrete.
Brian is waiting for Bardon to deliver some washers he needs that are special to this system.

Ah well progress has still been made.

Still open to the weather which results in pipes being frozen some mornings.

Who needs a stove anyway?

This is three separate sets of tubes.

It will make the sunroom one of our favourite places I think.

Still no idea on what windows we want to install.

E/B