Dried In and Ready to Rock!

We’re finally dried in! Of course, the rain stopped 4 days ago… go figure! After much research, we decided to go with a 30 year, high definition Owens Corning (Oakridge) shingle in Driftwood color. I like the variation and the visual texture (it’s hard to see here; I’ll try to get a better picture of the finished product soon) — I’ve already settled on a mossy green for the body of the house so I think it will coordinate nicely! The picture here is of the roof prior to it being finished — I’ll post a completed view later today or tomorrow.

We’re on to plumbing now — it’s actually been progressing in fits and spurts over the past couple of days. Some framing changes need to be done so that it finishes smoothly but that shouldn’t be a big deal. In the daylight basement bathroom, in order to accomodate the drains and venting, we’re going to have to drop the ceiling along the tub/toilet/closet wall approximately 6″; we’re going to have to do something similar along the length of the back wall across the entire basement but since we’re starting with 9′ ceilings, that shouldn’t be a big deal.

The framing changes I requested for the basement bathroom are completed now.  It saved having to remove some existing framing and actually gives me more room for the dual sinks and the base cabinet between them on the plumbing wall now. So what if the door now opens into the main room rather than the hallway?! It makes it easier access for hubby’s wheelchair, too, so I’m thinking win-win!

Although we already have bids for virtually every sub necessary to complete our house, I feel compelled to revisit those that I have Emmett Lane’s (the other builder in our pod) referral on.  Our experience with the roofer has been outstanding AND saved us a pretty penny so I think we need to at least look at the other trades.  I know that it’s a potential concern using subs that Wayne’s not familiar with but I’m going to push on and at least do due diligence.  So this coming week, we’re moving on to mechanical, siding and electric bid requests and final proposal selections.

We’ve revamped the HVAC (mechanical) system from the originally designed heat pump backed up with a gas furnace to 2 gas furnaces (one per floor) and an AC system (1st floor focus only) and saved approximately $3000 in doing so. Not sure where the economies came from on this first bid but it will be interesting to see where Emmett’s guy and another company (which has been highly persistent in getting to bid) come in and how their quotes will differ.

Final framing (tub deck, fireplace box, window relocation, bath #2 door/wall(s) reconfigs) and exterior rear deck structure will be done in the next few days. The final 4 windows will be installed by the framers before they leave. Since the exterior doors have now arrived, they’ll also be installed by the framers too.

I had to finalize my updated cliqstudios.com cabinet order which changed to allow for a larger cooktop/cabinet and some additional molding as well as adding a drawer base unit to set between the dual sinks in the basement bathroom. What a pleasure it is working with Patty Green at cliqstudios! She redid my layouts, the cabinet “key” to give to installers and figured out that we could lose a piece of expensive siding.  I’ll be pulling the trigger shortly for  a delivery date of July 15. Can’t wait!

Also we’ll be ordering the elevator next week — 8-12 weeks for delivery is standard. I’d told the rep that I was having trouble getting to “happy” with a cab stain color (I’ll be doing that myself) to work with the white/beige accordian gates they offer as standard with this particular unit. Without my asking, he’s giving me an upgrade to smoked acrylic gates on either end of the cab at no charge — saves me about $600 so YAY!  And it looks super with either of the stain colors I’m considering!

I finally heard back from our subdivision’s developer regards taking our leftover structural fill — turns out that he was waiting to contact us until he had imported all the fill he had from several different job sites. THEN when he figured out that he still needed more, he called me. That was Thursday — his trucking company was already out there taking the fill he had on his lots and he wanted to be able to move ours starting Thursday too. When Jim and I went over yesterday at about 5 p.m., it looked like about half the dirt was gone but there’s still some left.  I’m basically paying $11/yard to have the fill removed, so $110 per 10-yard dump truck load — it’s basically covering truck time and about $10 to dump the stuff without regard to weight. We think there’s around 10-12 loads so hopefully we won’t exceed around $1500 to get rid of the stockpile. That will leave about $1K on excavation left in our budget that could be used to cover something else or just not be used at all.  Woohoo! Of course, we know we’re going to need some more fill around the rear of the house but we’re not sure how much — we’ll use fill from the kids’ excavation to do that when the time comes I guess.

Speaking of saving money, by using the subcontractors we got referrals on from Emmett, we saved over $3K on our roofing and are set to save approximately $2K on our siding labor. I can hardly wait to see what their other guys can come up with! It’s amazing how people who are well-employed by another builder in the area can cut costs when they want to stay that way! Also, since they know we were referred by the builder they’re already working with, they’re not likely to do us wrong because they know we’d go right back to that builder and make noise — that wouldn’t be good for them!  But it surely appears to be good for us! 🙂