Countdown to opening day is on...

      With 8 days to go til the first guests, everyone is working long hours to wrap up still a lot of details, well more than details...major stuff, but my gallant workers assure me the important stuff will be done.
     Here is my 3D shingle art I installed at a terrifying height (for me) I really didn't need the wind to come up while I was clinging like a scared monkey to the scaffolding...so glad that is behind me now.

I love cedar, the smell, the feel of a finely sanded board, the beautiful grain. Here I was glueing up and biscuit joining some sturdy cedar planks to make a bench for the mudroom entry.

The sprayfoam guy has come and done the insulation in the cathedral ceiling. he wasn't thrilled to find the strapping in the way, but it's finished now and this week all the ceiling sheetrock went up.                     


Below is the bench top with a coat of light gel stain.
 It brings out the pretty grain nicely.

Here's Jim working on the second layer of crackfill on the ceiling. He has made a very neat bridge between the old and new ceilings , building the join up with shims , wood , and sheetrock so that each side is even and matching.

Andrew has finished the deck railings and the ceiling of the covered part of the deck.

These are the skylight wells in the deck ceiling, all finished.

The Eco-Heat guys were back today and installed the air exchanger and the 3 mini-splits for heat from the heat pump. Due to the torrential rains today, they will be back tomorrow to do the outside installation.

Earlier this week Johnny was back with the backhoe to put in more drainage. Now there are 2 drainpipes out the front and 3 out the side, which were put to the test today with a huge deluge. There are a lot of springs and a lot of water coming down off the hill behind us.

Andrew is working on a tricky job of joining  the new subfloor to the not quite level old subfloor, in preparation for the hardwood flooring in a few days.











The windows are beginning to get trimmed out, love the deep windowsills with these ICF walls !

The end is in sight !

Well lots has happened in the last couple of weeks. Two inches of that excess gravel got shoveled out of the basement and then the dirt was covered with vapor barrier and a double layer of insulating foam
  slabs. Because the ground is full of springs we previously laid perforated pipe around the inside perimeter of the footings, leading to a plastic tank, which will house a sump pump, just in case any water finds it's way under the floor.

In a few days the concrete guys came and got to work

A lot of heavy wheelbarrow work... and  now we have a  basement floor.

                    

 

The back door in the old part of the house came out...

and was re-hung as the inner mud room door.

The hole got framed in and I have insulated and sheetrocked it as the new home for the fridge.

 Here Ben was framing in an entry closet, and next he is working on strapping the ceiling.

Jean-Marc is wiring, using an electric chainsaw to cut into the ICF foam to make channels for the wires. There are special plastic electrical boxes made for this purpose.

Not much left of the original cottage front...Here Wayne has built a temporary wall under the loft floor to hold things steady while a beam and posts are constructed to carry the load.

The heating and ventilation guys are hard at work running pipes and ducts every which way. All this behind the walls stuff has to go in before the sheetrock can go on. The basement walls are studded up and the stairway is in. the HVAC guys will install their stuff in the mechanical room in the back corner.

Today the whole upstairs was sheetrocked, minus the cathedral ceiling. The sprayfoam guy will come wednesday to spray R24 between the trusses, and then that can be sheetrocked. Tomorrow the basement, must remember my camera, that little bathroom with the shocking color turned out really nice !

Goodbye to the old house front..

So glad to see this going and the space opening up to join the new living room! The floor framing of the kitchen ceiling and loft area all rests on the wall framing that surrounds the old front door, which in turn is supported by the old basement wall, which we tied in to the new ICF basement wall last fall. So something creative will have to happen to safely offer support with a minimum of the old wall having to be kept. A lot of this project we kind of figure out and make up as we go...

Here Ben is working on the partition wall between the living room and new front bedroom and studying how to install double pocket doors.

Ta-da ! I love these doors, they travel whisper quiet and so smooth. I also love them because they were such a bargain at the Re-Store, bevelled glass and frosty designs. All I had to do was paint them, that was last fall, seems like eons ago.

I've been working on crackfill and paint in the 2 old bedrooms that have become one bedroom, and fiddley jobs like filling in the raggety holes left in the hardwood floor where the wall framing once was.

And when I opened this can of paint for the little bathroom it was definitely a "What was I thinking" moment. Hoping when the toilet and vanity move in there, it won't be as awful..

It was a nasty surprise to find the basement floor gravel was 2 inches to high to accomodate the under slab foam insulation and we had to cancel the pour that was to happen a few days ago. It was right last fall, levelled off to a chalk line all around the footing. But over the winter the frost heaved up the compacted gravel , so we had to hire this guy to shovel it out. Eventually we found the buried chalk line marks. Never never build in a Canadian winter !! The concrete pour is now scheduled for next monday.

Ben is tackling the shingling between other jobs.
Here he has started on the band of pointy shingles that will encircle the house. It seems so long ago I was cutting these on the table saw.









I really like the look of this...

Weather is now officially closed out..

Last of the windows going in..Heights make me really nervous, even when I'm safely on the ground looking up.

Heavy heavy windows, but they had a good system for getting them up in place, one platform at a time.

Big relief to get the last one in. No lifters and no windows fell.

There's the cedar brackets I made last fall, Ben has them in place over the basement door.

Trying out the trim boards..There will be a band of white topped by a thin blue/green strip circling the house between the basement and main floor.

Windows going in..

Great ! The windows are going in! We'll soon be able to close out the wind and enjoy the sun streaming in. Today was a good day, I went into Saint John to track down a sale on semi transparent blinds and found a 40% off sale PLUS buy two , get one free, so I saved a bundle and I am a happy camper.
Ben will have the asphalt roof shingles finished tomorrow on the last side of the main roof, so things are moving right along.

The new little bathroom is now sheetrocked,  and the new pantry is having it's crackfill layered on readied for sanding and maybe painting over the weekend.










 Probably my least favorite job...SO time consuming.
This is the pantry with the trap door to the basement.

We'll soon have the weather shut out...

All the roof sheathing is now on and we were pleasantly surprised at how neatly and painlessly the roof sections fitted together without any problem. That left corner post and beam that look redundant at this point will eventually support a pergola for grapes or kiwis.







                                

          Kents brought the roofing supplies out
         on their boom truck         
         which allowed all those heavy bundles
        of asphalt shingles
        to be lifted up to be ready to work with
on the roof.

First the skylights had to go in on the porch roof. This is to allow more light into the bedroom behind the deck and will be nice for the deck also. After all the fiddley waterproofing was done, the rest of that roof section and valley were shingled pretty quickly.

    On the back side of the wing bedroom Ben is figuring out the best way to seal the new and old roof together.                                 

Well Spring has finally shown up...sort of...here and there...

The ice storm was much worse than the one at Christmas, our yard was littered with big branches from the linden trees and we lost a huge old spruce and most of the old willows came crashing down. It was several hours work with a chain saw guy to get it all chunked up for firewood.

The indoor work is coming along, where the wall between the 2 bedrooms is now gone and the stud walls in place for the new bathroom and pantry. This (left) is the pantry space, and below is the new half bathroom to the right. The missing strip in the floor is where the wall used to be, but we can patch in some oak flooring .

Outside this week is more foggy, rainy blah weather but the guys are on the roof anyway.
More of the roof and mud room is covered and today they are framing up and covering the deck roof.

Today I am working on the shelving that will go in the pantry.

I love my biscuit joiner ! The shelving unit will have a fixed shelf in the middle and 3 or 4 movable shelves on pegs. This is one of  2 units. The next step is a pine face frame.