Progress

The concrete cured, the weather started cooperating and the construction pushed on.

 

I can't believe how small the footprint looked once we were able to really take a good look.  They even added extra footage around the back side perimeter.  I don't feel like it's that small anymore.  Cleaning and running from room to room today makes me recall this silly thought and I surely do not think it's so small anymore!

It's easy to smile when you see progress!

Even though the weather was improving, the days were still short.  A lot of our photos were taken after we got off work.  We would run home and change clothes, grab the kids and take the short drive to the farm.   The construction site must have been buzzing all day!  These framed walls came together quickly!






Timmy measuring window & door openings

The fresh cut wood smelled so good! 

The last house we had built was a cookie cutter home & I didn't get a whole lot of saying on anything custom.  I couldn't really even be there too much during the construction phase.

The old house didn't require much thought from me.  I had to choose from a handful of floor coverings, didn't get to choose any door knobs, they came with what they came with.  It did have a few different "upgrade options" such as a jetted tub, vaulted ceiling in master and maple cabinets, but there was absolutely no changing doors, windows or walls. 

This time around was so very different, we were choosing everything right down to the nails & screws that went into these studs.  It's fun to design from the ground up!

The quality of this lumber was so much better than anything I saw on my previous house.  This house is 100 times better as far as quality goes!



Our daughter, MiKayla, standing where the back porch will be.



Look at the sad lonley tree off to the right of this picture.  It's the last survivor.  Eight trees that towered about 100 feet were cut down from the front of the property.  This tree never saw the light of day when the other trees had their leaves!  I'm really looking forward to see how it comes along now that it has plenty of room for its roots and plenty of air & sunshine to fill it's limbs!

I am looking forward to showing how the house and property look today.





Getting Ready for the Concrete.



   February was dedicated to the prepping for the concrete pours. 

Once the garage was poured and cured, we were ready for the wire mesh to be laid down over the insulation.  The wire mesh is what we tied the PEX tubing down to.  This was a very long couple of days.  February was not very warm and the tubing was not very flexible due to the chill in the air.  We were very fortunate that the winds weren't blowing & the rain wasn't coming down.  It took about 3 days of intense labor to string out and tie down the tubing.  My body was pretty sore and I was thinking it would have been nice to pay a crew to do it.  The cost savings were too large to pay someone else to do something we were capable of.  The most important thing here was to make sure we left enough spacing where there would be walls installed.  Now we were starting to see the downstairs layout.  That was very nice.

Petie was working on helping us get some tubing and bringing the wire tie downs for me to attach.  It's wonderful when the kids help out!  I know it's not a lot of fun, because they have to wait around quite a bit waiting for their next task and that surely can get boring. 

Once all the PEX tubing was laid & attached, the supply and returns were attached and the system was pressurized with air.  We crossed our fingers that it would hold the pressure so we could schedule the concrete pour.

The concrete pour was very intense.  Seeing all this piping and conduit being embedded was a little scary to me.  Was it good enough?  Did we pick the right spot for all walls, the toilets, the washer and all the drains?  Speaking of drains, I sure wish I would have thought to have one placed in the mud-room.  That just wasn't thought of until well after the walls went up.





Here you can see the master bathroom. 

 

The concrete finish was super!  Then the guys did a floating trowel and made the concrete as smooth as possible.  The used a hard trowel to "burn" in darkness into the concrete.  The hope is that it will resemble marble once it is complete.  We chose to do natural concrete, without stain.  We did not add any color into the concrete mixture, just relied on the guys to apply the hard trowel until the creamy concrete had dark areas.



What a beautiful sunset shining across the freshly finished slab foundation!

Day 2 of the concrete pour consisted of pouring the shower.  I had this fabulous idea of just having a concrete shower floor and hand-seeding rocks into the concrete mixture.  That did not go so well.  Many factors probably played into the failure here.  The concrete they used had a lot of aggregate in it.  It was the same batch that they were using for the porches that would be exposed aggregate.

Me and one of the concrete guys hand-seeding rocks for the shower floor.

 As we were planting the rocks into the concrete, it started to get hard...and fast.  (duh)  Well, I had never realized just how fast it gets set until this day.  Just minutes into seeding these rocks, we had about 5 other guys helping to get these rocks in.  Problem with that?  Well, no one did it the same.  The crew did not really speak too much English, so it was difficult to understand or communicate too thoroughly.  Once I looked at our completed job, I realized that the concrete was rising, kind of like a cake.  Some people pushed these rocks too far in the concrete and the concrete seemed to just swallow them up.  Some rocks laid on top, and looked smooth, others were shifting.  The guys grabbed trowels and started beating the rocks down into the concrete and that created even more rising.  The creamy concrete started rising and brought up the smaller aggregate from within the concrete.  I was assured that once the acid wash was complete, it would all be OK.



You can see the "rising" affect and how it changed the slopes.



We had the drain installed in the far right corner of the shower. The shower floor needed to slope a few different ways.  The water needed to stay away from pooling along the walls and also head down toward the drain.  The rising of the concrete put the floor above where the walls would start.  Also, the pushing of the rocks into the concrete really upset all the proper angles.  We stood back, shook our heads as they sprayed the acid and let it sit.  The next step was to wait for it to set and be pressure washed to expose the rocks.



The dreaded gravel shower floor.



As you can see from the picture above, there were a lot of little rocks that made quite an appearance.  The slopes weren't good and that meant we had to have the concrete chiseled out.  The problems apparent to me were that within this shower floor there was PEX tubing.  So yes, we had to have the concrete removed carefully as to avoid damaging any tubing.  We felt very lucky to go without incident.  There was one section of the tube that was crushed a bit, but not gouged.  The pressure gauge was still at 20 psi.  We were thankful for that.



The beginning.

Tim & I "out back"

This is the beginning of my blog.  I am not sure if anyone will read it, but I'll post lots of pictures!  Someone might need some information I may have, right?  My plan for this blog is just writing my thoughts and sharing my days of being a wife and a mother.

To begin this blog, I would like to dig into the archives of the last 2 years.  My husband Tim & I have been building a home on about 2.5 acres.  We got final occupancy in January of this year. 


Over the past year I've kept a photo journal of our home building project.  It's a lot of fun to go back and remember how far we've come!  At the time, it was pretty stressful and a whole lot of hard work, but now it seems like the right time to put it all togther.


The land had an existing house that was built in 1955.  The house was extremely small and had been added on little by little over the years.   We had to completely demolish the little rambler to make way for our new home. 


There were so many trees that had been neglected over the years, so we worked hard on clearing some out and trimming up others so they would become strong and healthy.  The front property is lined with 100 ft. pine trees and offers a nice background to our house.  It's not very often a property for a new home has big trees in our desert region.

Walnut tree on the East end of the property.



1955 Rambler and Pine Trees



I have been lucky enough to learn a lot by reading blogs and found a million and one wonderful pictures.  Doing a completely custom home was very fun and rewarding, but I will not deny I had moments where I stood there in tears.  There were so many decisions & no one to make them but you, and I wouldn't want it any other way.  With you being the creator, that means that every mistake with the design, yep, that's yours too.  You get to explain it to anyone who actually notices it.  I found that all those hard decisions were mine and Tim's and they seemed so critical and difficult.  No one walking through our house probably would have even noticed.  But we noticed and we thought long and hard about all kinds of things. 

It was hard to draw something up that we had never walked through or seen.  Many of our ideas weren't easily found and it was tough to picture what these sketches would look like from the drawing board to the real deal.  Maybe I have some useful information of what we did that will be useful for someone else.

Here are some of the earlier drawings.  The two I found without actually showing the final product are below.  I literally have hundreds of different drawings.  We used Chief Architect & used Paint when we just wanted to try and draw thoughts out.

Front Elevation Drawing - Final (very close)




Rear Elevation - Finalized (so we thought)

We knew that we wanted the house to be around the 3000 sf range.  Our plans included the master bedroom suite on the main floor, 3 bedrooms, an office, a media room and 2.5
baths.  The plans also were to have a 2-story great room, mud room, gourmet kitchen, Anderson doors, Milgard windows, and no carpets. 


The outside came together quickly and we happy with the drawings.  Filling in the space of that shell, that was a hole other story!  We knew fairly early on of where the rooms were going to be.  We wanted a master suite that was it's own "wing".  We didn't put any of the 2nd story over the master suite.  We wanted the kids to be able to be in the media room and their rooms without having to worry about the noise over ours.  So things started falling in place.


Living on a farm, we know there will be lots of dirty feet and shoes!  We decided to do concrete floors with PEX tube piping that would keep us nice & warm.  We had a hard time deciding what to do with the concrete floors.  Did we want them stamped?  Stained concrete? 


There were so many choices, and there were not a lot of people who did specialty concrete in our area.  One thing we learned REAL quick was that if you are going to have solid concrete slab floors done, it's extremely important to have a crew that can make that finish nice and level.  The first thing they poured was the garage, so we got a real good idea of how their finish work was.  It was absolutely perfect.

Kitchen & Dining area

When they are coming to pour concrete, you have to make sure all of your electrical and plumbing inspections are complete.  Once all your piping is embedded, the only way to inspect or repair is to tear that concrete up.  We documented all conduit & PEX tubing with a lot of pictures, and yes, we did rely on those pictures later on in the building process.


Well, there you have it.  The beginning.  :)  Up Next.....Finished Concrete & Interior Plan.