Building a stick frame house in the woods in 90 days

[Mike_Kanzer]

I assume you are using propane for the generator fuel? I have a standby generator that runs off propane. We put in a buried 500 gallon tank for the propane. We have had it 3 years and had a 3 day outage last year after remnants of a tropical storm took out power lines. The house really looks nice and the setting it is in is really nice.
-Mike

 

[dhagood]

I like tile; but are you planning on doing anything to dampen the sound? All those hard surfaces are just going to transmit sound (noise) all over the place.

does the ditra underlayment for the tile have any sound deadening properties? i understand mjncad is mostly talking about sound reflection off all the hard surfaces, but walking on the tile can be very noisy as well.

 

[mjncad]

mjncad, yes, there will be area rugs in a lot of areas over the tile. Mom got some really nice ones!

Day 115


Breaker panel is just about done. They ran out of 20A breakers (in the open space in the middle), and 15A breakers (at the very bottom)

Now that is a clean breaker panel! :thumbsup:

Although I'm not a fan of area rugs as I consider them a tripping hazard; I assume you have some sort of method to keep the things from slip-sliding all over the place. Don't get me wrong, I've seen numerous area rugs that I like the design of; but I didn't get them for the tripping hazard issue.

 

[pacerron]

Is the freon tubing too short to route over the beam and down to the unit? Having it strapped under the waste pipe doesn't look good and may set up strange vibrations.
The tubing usually isn't pre-charged, so if it could be moved prior to them starting up the unit it would be easy to fix .
Is the unit sized to handle the basement as well? I don't see any pipes or even closeable grids in the hot trunk line for the basement.
Ron

 

[kevin37b]

Should have had that landscaper do the HW floors and the rest of the finish work .

 

[forgeblast]

I was wondering what size is each unit of the 6x6 stairs that they built? Are they going to pour and stamp in there also or just gravel it?

 

[pacerron]

Doesn't Virginia require hard wired smoke detectors in new construction?

Whether they do or not, now would be a good time to do it, before the cellulose insulation is blown into the ceiling.

The interconnection, so that if one goes off they all go off is a great improvement over the old single area type.

Is your mom still agile enough to climb out the bedroom window and drop to the ground in the terraced 6 x 6 area?

I'm thinking a short set of steps from the deck right outside her bedroom sliding glass door to the terraced ground area would be a lot safer than
having to run all the way around the deck to the other side to get away from the house.

With only 12 days till move in, safety aspects should be brought to the top of the list.
Ron

 

[FairfaxStu]

Doesn't Virginia require hard wired smoke detectors in new construction?
Whether they do or not, now would be a good time to do it, before the cellulose insulation is blown into the ceiling.
Ron

I think it does. As a part of my addition, they went in and installed hard wired units in every bedroom and in the hallways. I can assure you they work. Was pan frying a steak last night and all 7 of them went off. I was able to ignore them but my cat, Buford, was less than pleased.
-Stu

 

[hr3]

A question on the generator your installing,,, Don't you think your kinda close to the meter and transfer switch.. NEC, want's 3' in front of them ,, Art. 310.26 in the book.. and I thought that Onan wants 5' from the building.. ???

 

[pclausen]

Landing at the top of the stairs is completed except for one piece of 2x6. Each step is 18" deep. They will dig out the dirt to 2" down, then lay down black plastic and cover with pea gravel.

They also made good progress on the "flower boxes" or whatever you want to call them between the stairs and the deck

Grass is starting to come in. They are calling for showers on and off all weekend, so that will be good.

Here's a shot of my barrier to keep the service vehicles from driving on the lawn. Seems to be working pretty good so far. Wish I had done that from the get go.

Started connecting the generator this evening. Need to make another trip to Lowe's in the am for some more conduit. For some reason the generator has 1/2" and 1 1/4" conduit cutouts, and the transfer switch has 3/4" and 1 1/2" (which ended up becoming a 2" hole when I tried to knock out just the 1 1/2" center piece). Also, the exits from the generator are at an odd angle, so I had to heat up those 2 elbows to take about 15 degrees out of each one.

Btw, the unit is 3' from the wall, and over 5' from the windows, as per the installation instructions.

1st exterior light installed. They will all be of this type.

I hate the exterior outlets. I'm going to have them redo them.

They should be recessed (and be metal), like the ones I have on my house. Here's a shot of one of them

The cabinets all arrived. Hopefully they will be ok in the humid environment today and through the weekend...

At least some are inside the house (which still has no HVAC)

They cleaned up the tile floors, but since the cabinets will be installed tomorrow and probably into Sunday, the grout won't be done until Monday more than likely.

I took some more pics of the master bedroom. Here's a shot looking at where they started

Things are lined up at the slider

But not with the wall to the right of it. They should have realized something was wrong at this point instead of just keep going... So the wall was probably about straight, but the slider was not square

Guest bedroom was pretty close. This one can easily be hidden with a threshold I think.

There are hardwired smoke detectors in all the bedrooms and hallways.

I agree that the line-set to the coil does not look very good. It has not been charged yet, but I don't the line-set is long enough, which is probably why they did what they did. I'll take a closer look tomorrow to see if there are any other options short of replacing the whole thing. I don't know that it would be a good idea to sweat an extension onto it.