Oh My!

It's amazing what can happen in a couple of weeks. I'll give details later.

Slow and Steady

This is what she looks like, still without any exterior framing work completed. I may have gotten hosed by the first guy who bid and was awarded the roof and framing contract. Guess I'll have to find someone else. And now there's 6" of snow to contend with.

In the mean time, we've been chuggin along with a bunch of necessary interior projects including prepping for electrical, interior framing and window framing. Getting the electrical service entrance ready required replacing siding at that exterior location. It had been torn off to accomodate new window and door openings, not to mention that the west face of the house gets the worst weather and was in pretty rough shape. To facilitate the electrical installation we had to trim out the area to receive the service entrance and disconnects and leave the remainder of the siding repair for later. Here it is under the tarp. Oh, and we replaced the siding with fiber cement from Menards, which definitely have some intricacies of its own.

On the interior, we continued to frame the middle walls back up with a new header to support the replaced floor framing for the bath above. The area below the header will allow the HVAC ductwork to run to the ceiling and connect to a bulkhead that will run the length of the house. As it becomes colder and colder, that will become the next priorty after getting the windows installed and rear of the house framed.

We bought the windows from an architectural sales rep for Capitol Windows. We've used the same windows with pretty good success at a local senior housing project. They are new construction, vinyl, double hung. We sized them to fit into the existing openings with a little extra rough framing in the existing holes, which allowed the new work to avoid messing with the existing headers. It might have been easier to use replacements, but the verdict is still out in my mind. I think there were too many bad sills to bother with trying to repair everything when I now know the openings are going to be weather tight and very insulated.

Here are the rough frames being put together on the floor.


And here they are installed in the openings.

It's really going to be great once the actual windows are in. Let's hope for a few warm days here at the end of December. Winter conditions suck.