Month: August 2018

It Just Needs Assembly

This week our general contractor jumped in and really took control of what was going on at the house. He pulled laborers off other jobs and got everything finished up to pour the basement floor so that they can frame starting on Monday.

This included fixing some previous work. Most importantly of which was pouring a footing, the previous subcontractor had simply missed. Glad it got fixed, but seriously, ugh!

It was also discovered this week that the engineer thought the trusses in the basement ceiling ran the other direction so the contractor would have to get with the engineer again to figure that out.

The moral of today’s story though is that we have a basement floor and a huge order of lumber (it’s seriously EVERYWHERE).  Next week, we should start seeing the house really come together- it literally just needs to be assembled. Thank goodness!!

The contractor called me late Friday and wants to have a meeting next week to have a little bit of a project reset, review budgets, timelines, etc. I’m happy that’s going to happen because I feel a little paralyzed in making decisions right now because I don’t know where we are with the money. We’ve tried to put the emphasis on space, not finishes throughout the house, and been smart about the budget, but since we aren’t the ones writing the checks so it’s a bit of a black box right now. It’s all overseen by the lender, so it’s not out of control, it’s just not in our control which causes some anxiety. The lender also called this week and I asked if I could see all the details on the money that went out so far, but I haven’t heard back.

I’m hoping that between the contractor meeting and seeing actual walls next week it will be a turning point. Fingers crossed.

Trixie is getting much more mobile and interested in exploring.  If we can survive 4 more months in a trailer with her we will deserve a new house! I cannot wait for her and Darwin to start running up and down the halls. I will threaten them over and over that if they don’t behave we are moving back to the trailer.

A few other things have been happening around the house that I haven’t included in my updates. First, the neighbors across the street listed their house a few weeks ago. It’s been funny to watch people look at it and stare at our disaster across the street. I’m hoping a young family might move in over there as we haven’t had the best experience with the current neighbors. Sorry for living in the front yard in a trailer while you are trying to sell your house!

We also haven’t had a big power problem in a few weeks. Occasionally, the fan will kick on and off, but nothing like before, so that’s good. Other than that the biggest issue with the trailer is that Darwin found a big spider outside the window.

There was a huge rainstorm this week and it was the first time we really got to see how leaky the detached garage is when it pours for more than a short time. Our entire house is stored out there. We knew there were some leaks and everything is tarped and the water didn’t seem to be enough to cause an issue. There is a gap under the garage door that also lets a bunch of water in, but fortunately, we put everything in that area up on blocks and it stayed pretty dry. The rain also caved the dirt pile in on one side and now we can’t get into the chicken coop. Fortunately, Mike had thought it might happen and pulled one of their feeders out last week, but it’s not very convenient and the dirt doesn’t seem to be moving any time soon.

There have also been some house decisions we are working on making. Specifically granite, backsplash, lighting, cabinet knobs, and paint. These are really the only things left to pick and the hardest to coordinate. I’m excited though. We are going to have things like a patio fan and our master bedroom has a walk out to the patio. We will have a master bedroom. I will have a closet. Holy hell, this new house is going to be AMAZING!  Mike and I have put so much time and thought into it that it will be fun to see it when it’s real. The tides are turning.

 

Two Toddlers, Two Months In

I told my husband that we are now officially living in a trailer with two toddlers. He said that sounds like a horrible idea and he isn’t sure why we ever thought it was a good idea. A baby and a toddler seemed not so bad. Two toddlers sounds like a circus. It mostly is, but honestly it still really isn’t that bad.

Here’s the thing, we are somehow both pretty easy going about the situation. Those that know me (especially at work) are probably thinking (or even expressing out loud) BULLSHIT, but it’s true. I’ve never been afraid of dirt, camping, port-a-potties, bugs, etc. Having kids has taught me that I am never actually in control of any situation anymore so there’s no need to try so hard to be 100% in control. Those two combined have somehow translated into living in a trailer and not having once thought “what the hell were we thinking, we have got to get out of here!”

I keep getting asked how many times I have just burst into tears and there was really only one time on my way to work this week that I was so frustrated about the situation that I cried. Then I got to work and there was enough other issues popping up that I just compartmentalized it and focused on those issues. Work has been a good distraction to chaos at home.

My husband told me that this blog is sad. I asked him if he thought it wasn’t sad or if I was making it more sad than it was and he said no, it’s just clear how frustrated we are, which is true.

We are two months in and they finished pouring the foundation yesterday. This is exciting, but the sloppiness of some of the work just pissed me off. It’s not like this is a small project and a few thousand dollars, it’s a huge investment and it’s a home for our family that I hope to stay in and make memories in until the kids move out.

On Monday, I got a call from the contractor that they officially put the subcontractor on notice that he needed to be done by Wednesday or would get charged a daily penalty. This naturally lead to some nasty phone calls between the two and my contractor called me just to make sure I was aware and to ease some frustration about the pace of work.

They sped up their work and they did some things that were down-right sloppy and they continue to damage all sort of things on our property in the process including caving in the street at the water meter, running over and knocking loose some curbing around flower beds, and my personal favorite, damaging our walnut tree to badly with the excavator that a huge branch came down in last night’s storm. This is sarcasm for those wondering.

I’d post pictures of the foundation, but I will be honest that I don’t want to because I don’t need anyone else’s opinion that it’s not good work. We already know.

The result of this work was a very frank and forward email to our contractor basically saying we expected more and are overall disappointed. Our contractor responded well to this and sent us a very reassuring email that they will work to make it right and address any issues.

So here we stand with a foundation that is almost finished and a laundry list of issues that need to be addressed and a long list of repairs to make as a result. It’s sad and frustrating, but I am hoping this is the bottom of the barrel and it’s only up from here.

I initially hesitated in starting this blog for this exact reason which is that I expected there to be super crappy parts of this project and sharing them all isn’t exactly fun, but it’s honest. I’m pretty sure this process will be like pregnancy and childbirth where you forget just how shitty it was later and when people ask you about it you tell them it wasn’t that bad even though it was awful. At least I have this blog to show them and it’s not as graphic as a child birth video!

 

 

 

 

Need Door —->

There’s been lots of progress at the house this week, but instead of being excited I have been mostly annoyed with the lack of attention to detail. It’s all getting done, it’s all passing inspection, but it would be twice as fast if it was done right the first time.

I won’t go into all the details, but one of the biggest issues is that they left all the windows and doors out of the foundation rebar. My contractor caught it pretty quickly, but when I stopped by the house at lunch the other day I noticed they were leaving out a window where they had a form and had to point it out and they had to redo the entire section. It’s truly a blessing and a curse that we are there.

They’ve also made way for new plumbing into the addition by cutting out the basement concrete.

Lola isn’t concerned about waiting for the addition to be complete, she has already moved back in. I find her lounging down there often.

The forms are mostly up on the south side so now all we need is a little concrete. Or a lot of concrete. 

This will eventually be the stairwell down to the new outside entrance to the basement. We don’t intend to finish it as a mother-in-law now, but it will be nice to have it as an option in the future. For resale it’s also a valuable part of the addition since many people run businesses out of their houses down where we are since the lots are large.

In order to not have to remove part of the existing patio, they’ve used cinder block on part of the foundation. It is not my favorite solution and it looks terrible, but I’ve been promised it is not only structurally sound, I won’t be able to see any of it when we are done. Notice that this side of the house also has no windows… it should have 2 down there in the foundation.

This is our third dumpster, or maybe even the fourth. The lawn is still littered with things that will need to get hauled out like window wells that were ripped out and some of the demo is still not done on the inside. It’s an amazingly large amount of material that is being taken out even with reusing as much as we can.

My lawn is dead, my entire yard is a pile of dirt. This is a summer I want to forget in terms of enjoying our house, yard, and lot. I feel the worst for our poor dog who is used to roaming around, chasing chickens, and harassing goats through the back fence. This, too, shall pass Luna- I promise!

 

How are you surviving without a kitchen?

This photo pretty much sums it up right now- a grill and a fridge. If you recall from my posts in June, the fridge went out the week we moved out of the house so Mike and his dad picked up this old gem at the used appliance store for $75 to get us by. It’s in the detached garage just outside the trailer and we keep most of our food in there. It’s not a hassle most of the time, but it does require going outside and opening the garage a few times a day.

As far as cooking, it is WAY too hot to cook in the trailer and the kitchen is super tiny. These things are designed with the assumption that you will be doing some or all of your cooking outside most of the time. On top of that, we only keep the A/C on in the trailer when we are around and it takes a while to cool off in the evening, so there is no way this time of year we will turn anything on inside that involves more heat. We use the grill as a grill and also as a makeshift oven. And let’s be honest, by “we” I mean Mike. Sometimes I microwave things and call it cooking, but Mike is an amazing cook and likes doing it so over the course of our relationship I have become completely useless in the kitchen. I used to feed myself and be a decent cook when I was single, now I can barely make a quesadilla. When I do, I end up with 3rd degree burns. Seriously. I burnt my knee taking pre-made cinnamon rolls out of the oven at the lake house a few weeks ago. My knee.

Anyway, the grill as an oven works decently well. It really means that Mike isn’t cooking we are basically warming things up at this point. We have virtually no countertop inside and outside is hella dusty and hot and smoky so if it comes prepackaged it is right up our alley. We’ve had a few failures like the night he tried to make Pasta Roni in a pan on the grill, but overall it isn’t so bad. I am definitely looking forward to him having an amazing kitchen when we are done. Him and I went an entire year without repeating a single meal once and I would LOVE to do that again. It was a fun challenge and right now it’s a challenge, but not much fun at all.

 

 

“It Looks Like A Bomb Went Off”

I’m at the laundromat again which means you all get another update. I like this place more than I should and today it’s completely empty which makes me like it even more.

Our contractor stopped by to leave a check for on of his subs right after my last post. It was the first time we’d talked to him in a little while. He said this project was taking much longer than expected. Not what we wanted to hear, but not unexpected. They told us up front that demo and getting the foundation in was going to be something they wouldn’t even put a timeline on because it was so hard to find subcontractors to do it, much less get them scheduled. He also said, “It looks like a bomb went off here.” Again, not exactly what you want to hear as the homeowner, but again, not unexpected. It validated how I’m feeling lately that the house is truly a total disaster and I’m not just hypersensitive.

He answered a few of my other questions and we talked about a few things that aren’t on the plans that we needed addressed so he asked me to write them on the plans.

Let’s talk about these plans for a second. These plans are the builder plans and there are a few sets of them. One they keep back at the office and one that stays at our house, the Field Set. It’s the Bible of the project. I love these plans and I have every intention of keeping them when we are done- assuming someone doesn’t accidentally throw them away. It’s fun to see all the notes on them, the dirty hand prints, and the wear and tear.

The contractor asked me to draw on the plans exactly were the plumbing that was left off the plan goes in the basement. This plumbing is for a kitchen that we could potentially put in later as a mother-in-law apartment, but don’t plan on finishing now. This is more nerve wracking than I can explain. Based on where I put it, it will be exactly there because the plumber will come in and do EXACTLY what I write. I got our my ruler, my pencil, and quadruple checked my math.

This was actually a good exercise because it got Mike and I looking at the lighting schematics and realizing that there are a few things that got left off of those as well. Looking at the plans and realizing that is what this place is going to be in a few months makes me excited. Even if every time we look at them we seem to find one more thing that got left off or end up with 10 more questions.

The other thing that is exciting to see if the building up of things, not just the tearing down of things. It’s emotionally more satisfying than anything. It feels like a sign that this place is going to actually get finished at some point. I don’t think I’ll Be super excited until the framing is done, but it’s weird to look at the foundation starting to come together and realize those are actual walls and they enclosed space that will soon be our home. The foundation rebar is in so forma should be in early next week. I’m really hoping by next weekend we have a foundation!

There are lots of goofy, quirky, and sometimes frustrating stories that go along with having crews at the house all the time. We never really know when to expect them so occasionally I’ll be chasing cats in my pajamas and they’ll roll in or I’ll find them sleeping in their van while parked directly in front of our fire hydrant while they wait for their boss to arrive.

One of the crews has this van that needs a jump every day. We’ve jumped them, my in-laws have jumped them, and they’ve used our jump box a few times. Yesterday they took the jump box with them and went to another job. Annoying. Especially when Mike realized his own truck wouldn’t start and he needed it to go get hay.

We asked the two teenage boys that were at the house working about it and he said the other crew would be there “soon” and bring the box. This was around 6. This van was also the guys ride so we knew they’d be back eventually.

They finished up the work they could do alone and waited. I talked to them around 7 and offered them some water as it was clear they didn’t really have anything with them. I also made sure they had power for their phones.

Around 9 we finally offered them a ride home. They said they couldn’t leave the tools or they would be in trouble. I felt bad. It’s hard to be terribly hospitable when you are living in a trailer. We didn’t even cook dinner last night to offer them something and don’t have a lot of food around right now as we were on vacation last week and have yet to go shopping. We fed kids their food last night and split a bag of pretzels for “dinner” because that’s just how the night worked out.

Finally, right around 10 and well after dark, the guys pulled in with the van, the jumpbox, and seats for the guys. I was happy, annoyed, and glad I could go to bed without worrying about them. Until this morning when I looked in the hole out back and saw that they just discarded all the empty water bottles I’d given them without even throwing them away in the dumpster. Then I was mostly just annoyed as shit.

I’ll still offer them water if it happens again, but I’ll probably point out to them that the courteous thing to do would be to thank me by not using my new house as a dumpster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Concrete Cutting, Inspections, Loan Draws, Footings, and Power Woes

It’s been a few weeks since I updated and it was, frankly, because work was happening at a snail’s pace and it was super frustrating to stare at the same house with the same progress day after day.

There seemed to be some confusion or communication issues that resulted in the concrete cutter being delayed which basically kept everything else from progressing. The concrete cutter was needed to remove the existing foundation walls. Fortunately, when it finally happened my in-laws were at the house checking in on things and caught a video of the last wall coming out. The 2x6s that you see are a temporary wall that is literally holding up the house since they cut out the foundation wall. There is also a closet wall that they left in place for now to bear some of the load. I am now afraid to walk into the house for fear the entire thing will come down. It’s a little freaky to look at the house in this condition.

Once the walls were out, they worked on getting the footings in place and the city came out to do an inspection yesterday. Mike got a call from the contractor asking if we were ever in contact with the engineer or if the engineer worked with the architect. After answering some of the questions Mike asked why they needed to know and it turns out we failed inspection because of the size of rebar used.

If this had happened a few weeks ago, I would have been on the phone tracking everything and everyone down, but I’ve almost become desensitized to “today’s issue” already and finally last night just asked Mike to text the contractor to see if he got it resolved or not. He said they did, but we didn’t even ask what the resolution was exactly. I’ve also started to become desensitized to seeing things I didn’t expect to get ruined to be ruined. There are parts of the fence I didn’t expect to see ripped out and also fence posts the crews have backed into that would have been upsetting at first, but now it’s just adding to the list of things that we’ll just figure out as we go.

We had another inspection scheduled for today at 12:30 and we must have passed because when I got home today we had footings in place.

When I got home there was also an inspector at the from the construction loan company. The way our construction loan works is that there are several loan draws and the inspector comes out at each draw to make sure the work that the contractor says has been done is actually done and acceptable. He seemed very nice and asked me some questions about the temporary power and work being done. I’m anxious to see the details of the first draw because it will be the first time I start seeing how the bid compares to actual amounts spent.

We also started having some power issues this week on the trailer. We noticed that our phones were suddenly losing power when charging at night, like the power is almost cycling high and low. It was noticeable because my phone vibrates each time it gets plugged in and it was vibrating every few seconds. We also noticed that the fans run at high speed then for a second seem to run at a lower speed before picking back up. This has happened a few times that we’ve noticed and then last night the power went completely out for a few seconds. I remember Mike getting up and walking around, but I was so exhausted I remember nothing other than that. It came back on and seemed fine for the rest of the night.

A coworker of mine recommended a mobile RV repair guy when he found out we were embarking on this journey and I called him this morning. The soonest he can come out is next week. I had no idea there were mobile RV repair men until just a few months ago, but I’m thankful for them right now because the thought of having to take the trailer to the “shop” for a few days is daunting. I would have to pack it up so that stuff wasn’t flying everywhere when we moved it and then also get us moved out for a few days- instead, he’ll come to us!

In the middle of all of this, the baby turned 1 yesterday! I am not sure how it’s been a year. She is teething like crazy and super grouchy at night when she is sleeping. As a result, so she often ends up in our little trailer queen size bed with us. I don’t mind the extra snuggles during this period of total chaos. Except when she open hand slaps me in the face to see if I am awake.