More From Sept. 13-17

I will start this post with a little food item.

Rowan has really taken to cooking the camping way on our little propane portable burners. On the weekends she gets up and creates delicious egg scrambles with veggies and cheese. Our neighbors must be loving the yummy smells that constantly come from our house now that we do most of our cooking outside on the grill and in the garage. Explains why there are suddenly more dogs hanging around our house too! We are thinking we might have to put a walk-up-to-go window in the garage so we can make a little extra cash to help pay for our project. :o)

Rowan in the garage kitchen

Rowan in the basement cave kitchen.

Back to construction.........

Here is a photo of Sharron Baker, who owns/runs Baker Stonework. She will be in charge of the crew who will be constructing our new stone porch and extending the height of our wood fire chimney on the house. She is pictured here with her lead stone mason, Sam. Sam is like a cartoon character, kind of like a tortoise with a GREAT sense of humor. A good ole southern Indiana boy with a Kentucky-like accent. Can't wait to show you his work. We have been to a few sights around town to see what the Baker group can do, and their work is fantastic. It is really great working with Sharron as we are all open to being creative as we go along with the project. It's really exciting.

Insulating the new crawl space for the dining room.

The first floor joist goes up

So, it now looks like a bomb has gone off at our house. We know that will only get worse for the next few weeks as the rest of the demolition happens.

Here are the foundation pads for the stone posts on the porch. It's very exciting to finally see the footprint of the porch space. It is larger than we thought it would be which is great. We plan on spending lots of time out there.

Floor joists installed

Sub-floor being laid

Jim laid out the stud/cripple/window/door measurements on the 2x6 plates for the dining room walls. The boys will use this guide when framing the walls.

So, the guys again got an amazing amount accomplished this week (only the second week of construction). Because we have had no rain in weeks (and none forecast in the next 2 to 3 weeks) Jim said we are already ahead of schedule.

Will be exciting to see what happens next week.................

Week 2 - The Ups and Downs

Sept. 13-17

This week we made amazing progress. Things went up -The foundation blocks were all laid, gravel spread, many piles of dirt moved, the sub floor for the new dining room and entry laid and, The Downs - the interior walls and ceilings removed inside the house. The lack of rain is making it easy for us to be about 2 weeks ahead of schedule. Here are photos showing the transformation.....

Foundation blocks arrive

Jim begins the process of laying the foundation

A liquid membrane foundation sealant was applied to keep moisture from penetrating the block below ground level.

Drainage system installed along the new foundation

The gravel shooting truck is a gift from god. It is able to direct and shoot gravel into amazingly difficult areas to reach. Thank god, otherwise we would all be slinging it!

We still do have to spread the gravel out evenly throughout the crawl space by hand, which Josh is demonstrating here using a tool called a 'come along'.

UGH! And, that's all I have to say! You can imagine who will need to move this pile of gravel.

Jenni (second from left) and a few of the boys while shoveling piles of dirt and gravel over and around the new foundation

These boys just won't quit! They achieved knocking out the interior plaster walls/ceilings in the living room, old dining room and kitchen by mid-week. Dust masks required. Hack, cough, sneeze........ aaaaahh choooo! This is the magical moment when we will stop the ridiculous attempt to clean the part of the house we are trying to live in (even though we have that part of the house totally sealed off from construction. Yeah, right!). Good thing we both don't mind the camping experience.

Rob being eaten by the ceiling. Just imagining the no-seeum's crawling around up in there wants to make me run out of the room!

The living room ceiling that will soon be a vaulted ceiling once the new roof is installed

It's a foggy day in September for Steve INSIDE of our house!

ACK! There is a wall gone and I can see outside! No turning back...............and of course now it will rain!!!!

Stay tuned for sub floors..............HOW EXCITING! :o)

Our Moat and Other Things

Days 3 & 4

Y'all probably think all I have been doing is taking pictures of the guys working. Not so.

I am acting as the general contractor so have been very busy getting estimates, hiring sub contractors, ordering windows and doors, going over building details with our architect and builder, taking materials deliveries and writing checks (sigh) and trying to keep the flow of the project going smoothly. Not to mention I have been working on taking the inside of the house apart. Removing kitchen cabinets, hardware, trim, etc. in preparation for the removal of ceilings and walls. We will reuse any of the original 1953 door/window/mop board trim that we can (of course they no longer make the original trim). We are having more milled at Indiana Lumber to match the original.

School has started so Rowan is filling her role as Associate Dean for Research as well as running her lab and teaching. Yes, we call it bringing home the bacon :o) I am taking a small leave from actually going into the lab I manage until the house project is well under way. I do work remotely via computer a little every day as well.

This morning the tractor/backhoe arrived so the footers and crawl space can be dug. It's great to have a machine to do this heavy work, even though the guys will still be slinging their share of dirt with shovels too. The bucket on the front of the rig is a gift when it comes to moving the rest of the old foundation block and loading it into the big dump truck.

Digging the footers

Jim begins to fine tune the sides and bottom of the footer trench (we are now calling it our moat. It is so medieval! :o)

...and the rest of the guys get into the action too.

Jim uses a Transit (scope) to make sure the depth of the footers is exactly right and to code.

He looks through the Transit at the story pole that Rob is holding.

A story pole is basically a 2x4 that Jim marks all of the elevations on - bottom of footing, top of footing, block coursing, top of foundation, floor heights and grading. He will use this from beginning to end, as it gives the ability to locate any point at any time from any place on the building site when using his Transit. We will have our first inspection today, so all of this HAS to be exactly right.

Here is our Mr. Inspection Dude from the City of Bloomington. We passed with flying colors, so now it's on to pouring the concrete.

It wasn't 30 minutes after the inspector left and we heard the cement truck coming up the street. We are so lucky so far that this whole project has worked like a ballet - one thing just flows into the next thing (let's see how long THAT lasts! :o) I love it that the cement truck has polka-dots. I mentioned to Jim that it must be a female owned company and he said that it is!

The only female owned cement company in Indiana. How about that!

The guys wasted no time in getting the footers poured as there is a chance of rain this afternoon, and definitely by late tonight. Fingers crossed it won't be a gully-washer.

It is amazing how much the guys have accomplished in this short 4 day first week of the project.

All of the demolition of the porch and garage, insulation out of the attic, crawl space and footers dug and all of the concrete poured. Pretty impressive. We can't wait to see the progress that next week brings. Stay tuned............

Shake it, Shake it, Baby!

Day 2

So, if our neighbors really loved us yesterday, we expect they really, REALLY, are loving us this morning as the jack-hammering started at 7:25am!

Maybe our new student neighbor who is a DRUMMER will think twice about practicing his craft at midnight from here on out. :o) He does sound like a beginner, so our worker guys said maybe the sound of the jack hammer will teach him how to do a proper drum roll. Too funny! Luckily, our immediate neighbors are very excited to see the transformation of our house, so they will put up with the occasional bad day of noise coming from our property.

It is amazing how the shaking and noise from the jack hammer penetrates the house. The cats, bless their little hearts, are just not quite sure what is happening. First we moved all the furniture, walled off the doorways, moved their feeding location and have completely turned their world upside down. Now, it's like we are in the middle of a day long earth tremor. I finally took them down to the basement where the noise is more muffled. If they can just survive this day, it will be great. Hopefully, they won't start losing their hair because of stress (nothing worse than a bald cat. So unattractive and chilly as winter is approaching).

As the concrete porch and garage slab were being demo'd, a couple of the guys were set to the task of removing the many nails from the garage framing lumber.

A tremendous pile of broken concrete and old foundation block began to take form in the front yard. Because it freezes here in winter, the footers and foundation can't begin above 24 inches below grade, which means there is lots of old concrete to remove well below ground level.

To get the concrete loaded into the salvage truck, the guys had to build this long ramp. We are not quite sure how any of these guys will be able to move tomorrow morning after jacking out the concrete and then moving it by wheelbarrow load up the ramp. UGH! Don't try this at home.

So while all of the shaking and digging and destruction was going on at the front of the house, the insulation removal guys were sucking the old blow-in fiberglass out of the attic. You can see in the photo the big hose going up into the attic. Once the loose stuff was out, they removed the roll down stuff below that. This has to be one of the most horrible jobs in a remodel job, besides digging out a broken sewer line. YUCK! They hauled away around a dozen huge bags of insulation on a huge flatbed.

After only 2 days the dumpster is full. A sign of good progress. If they can keep up this pace, we will have that new roof on in no time. Fingers crossed it will be before the rains come.