Day 45 - Leach field

Sunday and still no rest. My excavator and I (and 1 other guy) dug and installed 800 feet of leach line for the septic system. Took about 5.5 hours but felt more like 12. Too tired and dehydrated to think to take a picture apparently. Will try to get one later this week.


But here is how the house currently looks. 1 or 2 more days and all stonework should be done.

Day 44 - Saturday, June 29

For the past couple days we have had a drywall guy that comes in after the hanging is done and starts taping and mudding over nails and screws. He will work over the course of a week or so doing his part. Upon taping the ceiling in the great room, it became very evident we had a sagging truss which was leaving a very noticeable bulge in our ceiling. This morning I went down and with the help of the drywall guy, we managed to raise the truss up to make the bulge much less noticeable. He propped the ceiling from below and I was the sap that crawled up in the attic (of course they just blew the insulation yesterday morning to make it a real pain) and using a 2x6, we braced the the truss to keep it lifted. Seemed to work.

Later, my excavator came and did a few things. One of which was scraping mud from yet another downpour off the main road. After he left, I had the pleasure of watching what he had done fail when - you guessed it - yet another downpour blew through. Seems like a daily event down there. So out I went in the rain with my mattock and shovel to manually divert the diversion ditch my excavator had tried to make. Not his fault. Just merciless rain for weeks and weeks.

Day 43 - more stonework

Drywall is hung except for a couple sheets that they were apparently short. The floor mess is all cleaned up. Stone guys got more stone up today. Looking good.

Day 41 - 2nd day of drywall hanging.

As of this afternoon, most of the drywall is up. One of the guys was going around zipping in screws in the middle areas of the drywall sheets (called "the field"). They nail the perimeter. Would be much happier if they used screws everywhere to avoid future nail pops but can't control that. Was disappointed to see entire sheets with only 6 to 8 screws total in them. Very poor in many places as evidenced by several places where it looks good with many screws in. Will address with FM.

Stone guys starting to add stone veneer. Looks good so far.


On the way down to see the house we saw this van in front of us. Gotta love a Star Wars geek right Rodney?

 standing in dining room looking across foyer to living room (Office). Arches turned out good so far.

Day 40 - Drywall start

Drywall started today. What a mess! Our dumpster is full which doesn't help all the trash pieces of drywall laying around the house. But it's supposed to be messy right now. Interesting to see what a difference it makes as it closes off spaces from one another after being used to seeing from one end of the house to the other through studs. We did catch 1 problem where they completely drywalled over a light switch box and didn't cut it back out. Notifying our field manager tonight about that.

Stone guys are getting ready to face the house. Skids of the veneer are on site now as well as a pile of sand mix for their mortar.

Excavator buried a pipe from the septic tank to our  field across the road (under) and is ready to install the leach lines.

Thanks to Blog viewers

Just checked my Blog stats today and see I'm at 4,450 page views since starting the blog. That seems like a lot to me. Thanks to everyone who has been following our progress to date. I will continue to try to be both informative and (when possible) entertaining to keep you reading! Thank you everyone!

Day 38 - Getting tanked!

Our excavator was taking advantage of some rare dry weather this Saturday and came out while we were working in the house on the new arches. He was able to dig the pit for our septic tank and trench from the water hookup to the house. This weekend was miserably hot. I mean miserably!

 Trench for Water Line. Sewer line is already buried on the other side of the electric meter.

 Digging pit for septic tank.

 Pit ready to go. Just need to get tanked.

 And here it is. All 1500 gallons capacity of it.

 Bigger and deeper than it looks from the photo.

 So stinking hot we tried out as a swimming pool first.

Labor laws still exist?

I mentioned in an earlier post how young many of the subcontractors' workers are.
I was a bit shocked, and concerned, when I saw this one building our house!

Special guests

We've had some special guests lately.
Thanks to those who've been able to come see our build project recently. Wish I had thought to get pics with everyone!

Tisha, always a pleasure to see you and your old man. Now you know where your margarita room will be.

Rich, Kim, and Donovan - glad you could make it down in such hot weather.

Lynn and Brian - absolutely thrilled to see you both! We love you guys!

Day 36 - Siding and Excavating

For the past week we've been doing projects that need done prior to drywall. Mostly additional wiring in the garage since I hope to use it as a base for a hostile takeover of the planet. That requires a lot of juice.

Today the siding crew showed. All in all they did a good job and with only 4 guys, did the entire job in 1 day. That's impressive. They didn't go around at the end and straighten out the drip rail they crushed with their ladders and some of the corner flashing was bent up pretty bad. A few of the nails in the fascia flashing were bent over instead of pulled and new nails put in but my field manager has been informed and will check all this out. Again, over all they did a good job and the place is starting to look like a real house.

 Now we're getting fancy! Chairs and everything!

 I wonder what would happen if I just touched...BZZZTTT!

So someone that rhymes with  "My Wife"  had the magical idea to change the front foyer pillars into closed archways to match the sun room arch. (I may have contributed to the idea :) This required additional framing so the drywall guys will have what they need to tack their drywall to. It also required a rewire of 4 switches controlling the lights on the front porch, the foyer light, and the dining room light. I did the rewire and Buddy Bill stood there and watched as evidenced by the pic below.

Now that I've had my fun, I will admit Bill got hosed today by doing all the framing work himself while I went from fire to fire with some issues concerning the subs working there today. I did get the wiring moved but I wish I had been a greater help with the framing. So thank you Bill. You'll have a special place in Heaven when you get there. In the meantime, you'll have a room at our house anytime you need one!

Shaker shingles going on upper part of garage. The finished look is great. And the color matches the shutters on the front.

 Sorting out a problem with the water meter location. Sure wish I had the shade of that old pine tree right about now.

Bill inspecting our water meter location. That hole was about 5' deep and the photo only looks about knee high.

 Back finished.