What You Don't Want to Know About Building a House

I have stopped posting construction updates. I have the best intentions to go out everyday and take some new photos but yet I don't. I would love to post the updates so that you can see that our living room is done, the garage is done, we are done with ALL of the floor trusses. We are so close to putting the roof on. But yet I have no desire to take those pictures.

We started this project 4 months ago. In those 4 long months we have gotten so much accomplished but it just never seems to be enough. There is always more to do tomorrow or you don't get done what you thought you were going to get done that day because it decided to blizzard or the truss supplier made your floor trusses a foot too long.  There is always something. You can try to prepare yourself for this adventure and tell yourself that there are going to be delays, that there are going to be frustrating days, that it is going to take longer than you think it will, but it is just not possible. It is not possible to truly understand what this is like. Even if you are carpenter by trade, until you throw your heart and soul into building a house that will become your home you will never truly know what lies ahead.

We are about two weeks away from having the framing complete. The house will be closed up. This will be a celebratory day for us. The bulk of our work is over. However, a new chapter in the construction process is just beginning. In a way I feel like we are going to be starting all over again. We are done with the outside, the shell, of our home but we are just beginning on the inside. The outside brought challenges that we never thought we'd face just as I am sure the inside will. The work will no longer be up to us. We will need to depend on trades and their schedules. That in and of itself will be a new challenge for us. In some ways it will be a relief because our daily lives will return and will have some resemblance to what they were before we started this. In others it will be frustrating to lose what little control we have right now. Even though we seem to be so far away from the end I try to remind myself that everyday we are one step closer to the end of this journey.

When you put your own blood, sweat, and tears into something you gain this amazing appreciation for it. A certain respect for it. This is how we want to feel about our home. That is why we are putting ourselves through this process. In the end I have no doubt that it will be all worth it. It will be an amazing life adventure that we will be glad that we went through. Until then, I am so unbelievably overwhelmed.

Maybe tomorrow I will take those photos.

Backfilling

We have almost finished backfilling (replacing the dirt that we took out during excavating). We originally thought that backfilling was going to take quite awhile. It ended up only taking 3 days! Yay for finishing something early!
We still need to rent a roller tamper (which should be coming today) to tamp the top of the living room and the garage. Once that is done we need to top both floors with a crush (sand/gravel mix) and then we have some piles (structural support) to put in and we can put the living room floor on and move ahead with framing.

The house after backfilling:

Main Floor Walls

While we were waiting for the issue with our foundation panels to be resolved we worked on framing in the main floor. I have good news on both the main floor walls and the foundation panels. We are finished the main floor walls and we finished putting up the rest of the foundation panels yesterday! Yay!

We had our foundation inspection this morning and we can now go ahead with the backfilling! Hopefully, if all goes well, we will be finished with backfilling early next week and then we can move onto framing the rest of the house.

Main floor walls (front of the house)

Main floor interior walls

This and That

Apparently I am a bad blogger. I don't seem to have time to write new posts lately. I guess running a business and building a house will do that to a person!

We have gotten a bit done in the last little while:

1.We have the water line and the electrical run to the house.
2.We have laid and covered the weeping tile with gravel. For anyone who doesn't know, Weeping tile is a corrugated, perforated plastic tube that runs around the perimeter of your basement. It is designed to gather any water that is in the soil around your house (from rain, etc) and take it into the sump pit (the sump pump will later pump the water out) so that the excess water doesn't just run into your basement.
2.We have attached the peel and stick water proofing to the outside of the foundation. Waterproofing is a thick plastic membrane that is plastic on the front and the back is sticky. You apply to the outside of your foundation so that any water will just run down the outside of your foundation and into the weeping tile. ( I am sure there is a more technical explanation but that's the best that I can do.)
3. The sump pit hole has been dug and the sump pit hooked up to the weeping tile.
4. The main floor trusses are all up.
5. The main floor subfloor is on.
6. Almost all of the main floor exterior walls are up. I should have some wall pictures to post in a couple of days!
7. We have resolved our foundation wall issues from my last post and should be receiving our new panels today.

Next week we are planning on having our foundation inspection and backfilling. Hopefully we should be able to see a lot of progress then. There are so many things that we just can't do until we backfill.

I don't have pictures of a lot of the stuff we have done recently (pictures of electrical wires, or gravel piles really aren't all that exciting) but here is one of the first couple of trusses we put up:

There really isn't an opening in our basement like this picture shows,
we just left a panel out so that we could get in easier.
It's all closed up now though! 

Foundation Walls

Typically in Canada foundation walls are constructed out of an 8"concrete wall with a 2x4 wood framed wall on the inside to allow for insulation (you put the insulation in the 2x4 wall). We decided to try out a relatively new product which we thought for a little extra money would save us a bunch of time. It didn't.

As of right now we aren't overly impressed with the company so I am unsure if I want to the use their name yet or not but the product is basically pre-cut panels that are made specifically to your plans. The panels are constructed out of steel studs and styrofoam. The installation method is pretty simple (in theory), you attach a metal track to the top of your footing and then screw in the  panels to the track and then attach another track along the top of the panels and then attach a wood sill plate to the top of that track so that you can later attach your wood framed walls. The company claimed that you can install a full basement in 3 days with a crew of 3 guys with little to no construction experience. Now in the company's defence they could possibly mean a 4 sided house with 4 corners. Our house is a 5 level split with 27 corners (our foundation has 2 different levels). It took us 2-3 (at times) experienced men with some help from my mom and myself about 2 weeks to get our foundation up.

Some of this delay is due to our house plan, we will take total responsibility for this. We love our house plan and feel that it's work a few extra headaches. Some of it however is due to errors on behalf of the company. I don't want to get into in great detail but basically 10% of our order was messed up. Either the panels were not built correctly, or the were too short, or not wide enough, or they were missing all together. We notified the company that these panels were wrong. They remade the panels quickly and our sales rep delivered them himself. Great, things are going good. We go to put on the new, fixed panels, and they are still wrong. We contact the company to inform them of the new mistakes and as of right now they seem to be refusing to remake the panels to the correct size. Hopefully I will have an update on this soon.

Some pictures of our basement going up:

Panel delivery - that's a lot of styrofoam! 

First wall going up

Wall sitting in the 'track'

the 'track' on the footing

Pouring Concrete

The footing forms are done so the next step is to pour the concrete. Essentially we are filling the forms that we built with concrete. Before the concrete trucks come we have to lay and tie all the rebar. Rebar is basically long metal rods that are used in concrete to provide structural support. When building footings you run rebar all long the inside of your footing form. Depending on the type of construction an engineer may specify the amount and type/size of rebar required. We needed 3 15M rods in our footings. Because rebar comes as long rods you have to cut and bend them to suit the shape of your footing/your house. Everywhere that the rebar overlaps you have to tie the pieces together with a rebar tie (a metal twist tie).

I don't have pictures of our rebar because I was busy tying the rebar but here is an internet photo of what rebar in the footing looks like:

After we were done cutting, bending, laying, and tying all of the rebar we could pour the concrete. I was dreading this step. I was so not looking forward to working with concrete. Luckily I didn't have to. The brother in law came up to help for a few days and he he got here just in time to help pour the concrete. 

The concrete got poured fairly quickly and now we just have to wait for it to cure for 72 hours and then we can start putting up the foundation walls. 

Footings...grrr

For those of you who don't know, footings are essentially the support system of your house. They help transfer the load of the walls and structure of your house above into the soil below. In our case they are a concrete 'track' that run around the perimeter of our house. The walls of your house sit on the footings and obviously your roof sits on the walls. So basically if you screw up your footing, you screw up your house. In order to construct your footings you first have to build forms out of wood and then fill the forms with concrete and then remove the forms. You should then have a nice, level and square base to construct your house on. After reading/writing that I am not entirely sure why the husband and I decided to attempt these ourselves, but we did. And let me tell you, it wasn't fun. Ok, maybe for about the first 30 seconds.

In my opinion footings are the most frustrating and finicky part of the construction process. You have to get them just right or it will affect the rest of your house. This was one situation where it is a good thing that the husband is such a perfectionist. There were so many times through out the past few days where I was ready to just throw in the towel and say "who cares if the footings aren't square!" (That would have been really bad, by the way) but the husband, no matter how frustrated we got and how many hammers were thrown, stuck to his guns to make these footings, our house, the best that he possibly could. 

Outside of the footing is complete! 

Over a month later...

we have barely got started. We officially got up here on July 25th. It feels like it has done nothing but rain since July 25th.

So far we have mowed the acreage, cleaned up the old house that was on the lot, cleared some trees, staked out, ATCO installed our brand new power pole, and we've excavated (well, technically Dave the excavator did the excavating).

We just got started on the forms for the footings but guess what? It started raining.  Shocker! Hopefully this weekend we will get the forms done (who doesn't want to spend their long weekend building forms?).

And for your viewing pleasure, some construction shots:

Getting Started...Finally

Ok, so here's the deal:

We had to sell this:

So that we could move here:

And build this:

While living in this:

Things are bound to get interesting!

July 24th is the day. The day that we are making the 10hr trek up North aka The Arctic (Ok, so it's not really The Arctic but it's up north and it bugs the husband when I call it that so it works for me!). We are busy packing up our house and getting things in order so that we can get started on construction ASAP.
Hopefully next time I'll actually have a construction update!

That's all for now!