Framing complete!

The framing of our house was completed this past week (minus a few small details which must wait for scaffolding). You can see a complete album of photos, but here are a few choice images.





We were also able to get up on the roof and see the views from the top. They are indeed great! We can see the Olympic mountains, the Ballard bridge and port, and the Puget Sound. The mountain tops are obscured by clouds in the images below, but you can get the picture. The second image is a panorama of the whole thing; it's a big image so the details are small. As usual, it's more impressive in person.





Unfortunately, the very best views are out on the cantilever, where we weren't originally planning to have deck. Now we are considering adding some more deck out on the cantilever, though the cost could be substantial. Here are some images of the roof as it stands now.

The cantilever part:


The current deck area (with part blocked out for skylights and an in-line blower for the cooktop hood):


Also, it looks like the construction rock stars at Logan's are coming in under budget in a few areas, so we might have a little room to upgrade. Probably the extra deck area and railings will blow any extra funds, but other possibilities include upgrading the insulation and/or adding some exterior motorized shades for the third floor. I'd love to upgrade the insulation, but the options are dizzying (open or closed cell spray foam, blown-in cellulose, flash and batt, or extra airtightness like the "advanced drywall approach"), and the bids are coming in high.

One slightly unfortunate turn of events is the location of the electrical meter, which is visible at the front of the house. We didn't want it along the entryway to the front door, which isn't that wide to begin with, and code didn't allow us to put it behind the front door. So, we did what we had to do.

It poured rain this last weekend before they managed to get the roof on, so the images show some water. We spent an hour each day this past weekend brushing water out, but the roof is going on today so that phase should be over. Plumbing and electrical rough-ins are in progress! Pretty soon I'll start listing some of our finish choices.

Third level floor is up

A quick update with some pictures of the floor of our third level.




We were able to stand on the third floor, which will contain our living & dining room and kitchen, and see the views. They are more screened than we had hoped, but still very open feeling (felt a bit like a tree house). The roof-top deck will more likely have killer views. Here is a panorama of the views (stitched using my own technology shipped in Adobe Photoshop), and a close-up of the Ballard bridge that can been seen from a corner of our living room (unfortunately captured on a cloudy day).

Holy cantilever!

This past Tuesday Logan's Hammer shut down the street, brought in a big crane, and placed the large steel and wood beams that support the cantilevered third floor.



The first two floors, plus the support beams of the third floor, are mostly framed up! Here are a couple good images of the gravity defiance:





And the overall framing status:



It was pretty surreal to walk through some of the rooms and feel their size! Everything seems just the right size; not too small, but not big enough to waste space/money. I guess that's the benefit of working with experienced architects. You can see more framing pictures in the web gallery.

Framing Starts!

Our house is going up fast. These photos are from 8/10/2010 and show the state after the first day of framing, but today I actually walked through the first 2 floors of our house! Photos of that next week.

The first photo shows the front concrete walls with our house number. The stairs will be poured to the right of this wall towards the end of construction, to avoid finish damage. As you can see, this area of concrete is quite different from the rendering above; it was redesigned both during permitting and again after the grade surprise. I think the new wall and straight-run staircase is an improvement. There will be plants in the area in front of the house numbers.



The stairs will run straight up the incline in this photo.



Here's a good shoot of the rest of the first-floor framing. So far so good!

Concrete floors!

This post is already out of date, I'm afraid, my blogging isn't keeping up with construction! But for the last week or so we've had the slab of our ground floor!




There is radiant heat tubing in the floor, as well, but I was out of town and couldn't get the images before they were covered. You can see the end of the pex tubes, though.


I'll post more photos, soon, but they've already poured all the other site walls, and framing starts Monday!

Concrete walls!

The house earthwork and foundation are progressing well. Below is one image of our new concrete walls, and you can also visit a full web gallery of photos.



These photos are actually 10 days old, as I've just been too busy to post them! I'll take new photos at the end of the week to show the additional progress.

On the news front, the surprisingly different grade than the survey indicated continues to challenge us, though our team has been great at adapting to the situation and making lemonade from lemons. We've changed the site plan a bit by removing retaining walls along the west side of the property, and adding one to the east side. We also are going to use some of the rocks from the rockery at the front of the property to create a new rockery wall in our backyard. The rocks will retain the grade change along the north property line, so that we can still have a level backyard.

Finally, with the change to expand the basement level there was a miscommunication, and a bit of extra wall was poured full-height that wasn't originally intended to be full height (in the upper-right corner of the above photograph). However, given the grade along this area of the property, our architect felt it was a lucky accident since some sort of wall is needed in that area to retain the taller grade, anyways. So, he did some small modifications to the laundry/storage area to incorporate it, and we're happy with the new design. I will post the new floorplan early next week.

One more surprise is that when we unearthed the sewer out line, we found that it was 3' higher than the slab level. This means $900 will need to be spent on a sewage pump and installation, since gravity won't pull water up from basement fixtures. We've now spent about 25% of our contingency budget; apparently most of the surprises occur during this phase of construction, however, so I've been assured we're doing well on budget. The next stage is to pour the slab with radiant heat, and create the retaining walls and hardscape along the south and east sides of the property.

We have a big hole and footers!

We broke ground on July 29, 2010, and there has already been lots of progress and surprises. First thing's first; here is the state of the lot after about one day of digging.

And here are pictures as of today, July 8. The footers are poured, and the outline of the building foundation has been poured, as well. For the first time, we can see the shape of the building on the lot!


A full web album can be seen here.

Now on to the surprises. On the positive side, we were able to recover a significant amount of storage space in the mechanical room in the northeast corner of the building. We originally stepped the foundation in this area to avoid the permitting issues of cutting too deep along the property line. However, our geotech PanGeo was able to make the call in the field that the soil could handle a straight cut, which is easier to do and gave us more storage space!

On the negative side, the survey was surprisingly off, and the slope of the lot was more than expected. This photo includes a person, which gives a good height reference of how deep we dug at the back of the lot.

There are a number of consequences:
* More dirt had to be dug out.
* The change in grade from our entryway to the neighboring property is more than expected. This means we need to do more than planned to manage the grade, and depending on the cost, we're considering pouring a concrete retaining wall on the east side.
* The window in the studio/office will have to start higher than expected to be above grade, so it will be just two feet tall ending at the ceiling. This means it won't be an egress window, so the office can never be considered a bedroom.
* The foundation is lower than we visualized when originally looking at the lot, so the view from the third floor might be more screened than expected.
* The driveway will be more tilted than expected. Because of this, permeable pavers won't work as well, and we have to switch to a poured driveway that can be more carefully contoured.

All of this is handleable, though, and Logan's Hammer and our architect are being great in adapting to the changing conditions.

Finally, I plan to include all of my product choices in this blog, so here is the first that will be installed. We needed four recessed outdoor lights to be installed in the concrete stairs. I ordered this very simple, inexpensive black light from lightingdirect.com, with the added benefit of 12% Bing cashback! I'm going to try and order as much as possible before the Bing cashback program ends July 30.