Now working inside and outside

Work aimed at building the basic structure of the home (foundation, drainage, roof, electrical, and rough plumbing) is ending and effort is now turning to finishes. So, the home is starting to look ever-so-slightly finished. Here is a picture of the home from the street taken today.

A lot of work was done on grading the front area and building retaining walls out of large boulders to accommodate the level change from the front door to the basement door. The picture below is a close-up of some of the retaining walls as they are being built. Once we have a complete landscaping plan, there will be more tweaking of rocks (mostly smaller ones), but these walls set up the basic contours and help with drainage.

Insulation

We decided to use 3 types of insulation: closed-cell foam on the "rim joist" and in selected ceiling areas where ventilation was not possible; blown-in L77 pink fiberglass on the exterior walls; and traditional insulation batts on the basement walls and to provide sound insulation between the two levels and between selected rooms. Photos follow.

This pink stuff is the L77 blown fiberglass, held up by netting (which is hard to see in these photos) stapled to the framing. Seems like a great product. Some recommended using cellulose, but many recommended against it. The biggest problem that I heard is that cellulose settles over time. Spraying closed-cell foam on the exterior walls wasn't even remotely cost-effective.

The builder did a good job sealing cracks that would cause air leakage. Notice the hole at the top of the picture. This is where they poked a hole in the netting to spray in the insulation.

Below is a photo in the basement showing how we've insulated between levels and between rooms using traditional batts.

Exterior Stone

The exterior stone looks great. Below are a few shots to give you an idea of what it looks like before the mortar is added. The basic gray mortar will be colored a bit to make it more of a soft gray-tan. This shot is looking into our Great Room. The wood soffit overhang at the top of the photo is larger than I expected, and provides a nice "mountain contemporary" look.

This next photo shows the front of the house, looking from the front door toward the road. Many of the stones need to be cut to get them to fit. This is a hard job and a LOT of work. There is a big crew working on it, and we are very happy with the results.

Below is a photo of the covered patio area in the back of the house.

Below is Tricia's studio window and our garage. Although you can't really see it with this photo, shingles now cover the entire roof.

Drywall

Drywall hanging is now underway in earnest. The installers say the drywall will be hung by Saturday. This is seems ambitious. After the drywall is hung, the sub needs to apply tape, mud, and hand trowel the finish. We probably have another couple of weeks until we are really finished with drywall. Below is the Great Room with partial drywall.

Drainage

One issue of the house design was that the door from the garage to the backyard was too low for the surrounding ground, causing drainage issues. In the end, we put in a 6" drainage pipe in a small concrete well near the door and are running it for about 80' to pull water away from the house. The other option--and this is how we started--was to dig a drainage trench in the middle of the back yard. I don't have any photos of the various states of the back yard, but trust me when I tell you that it was problematic. Fortunately, the excavation sub suggested putting in the 6" pipe and the yard now looks MUCH better.

Next Steps

Among the upcoming items are the following:

• Staining the exterior wood
• Installing gutters
• Installing tile and cabinets
• Getting the hardwood in the house to dry prior to installing
• Painting the interior--I'm getting ahead of myself