Setting Living Room Trusses

So Mike (Mandy's dad) and Magoo brought the trusses today and got them set and installed. With the help of the regular framing crew they finished within about an 1 and a half.  Everything went smoothly just a few hiccups on the last one along the outside wall.  They needed to adjust the pockets to allow some room to place the drywall behind the truss.

Here are the trusses being built and measured out.

 Trusses loaded on the truck ready for delivery.

Setting truss #2 with #3 on stand by.  Mike is running the boom with Magoo providing help.











Truss #3 being set

Truss #3 coming down




All three trusses set, anchored and ready for some roofing members.  These trusses will support the LVL roof beam with supports the roof rafters.

Here is a 3-D look, looks pretty close to me.








Now we need to get just get the roof on the house.  Just looked at the weather report and it looks pretty good.

We Have Water

So we have water.  It was a bit deeper therefore more expensive than I was hoping for.  So they dug down 360ft and only got a 1.5gallon a minute.  So I asked them to dig a bit deeper hopefully finding more water.  They dug down to 420 and got 3.5 to 4 gallons a minute.  Still not what I was hoping for but the water came up to 25ft below the ground level so at least we got some capacity in the well ~500 gallons.  That should allow us to do whatever we need to do around the house (wash cloths, wash the car, ....) but any lawn irrigation will have to be limited.  Again not ideal but better than having a dry well.

Now we get to drill two more wells next week for the ground source heat pump system.  Thankfully they will only be 300ft deep each.  One good thing the HVAC contractor told me is that he was glad to see that we had hit granite on this well.  He explained to us on how the energy transfer was better in rock than in soil.  If they hit better water I might have them switch.   We'll see.

Framing Continues

Well, the weather has really changed for the better, low humidity and lower temperatures and the framing on the house continues.  It looks like the guys are moving to the second floor.

They have the installed the steel beam above the garage.  The steel beam actually came in cheaper than the LVL beam.  Bonus! because it is stronger than the LVL and will cut down on the deflection.

10 - 2x4, that should hold it!

A few more pictures.

Bonus Room and Bedroom Flooring

Bedroom Exterior Wall and Window

Kitchen looking into Living Room

Started Framing

Well the contractor and crew started framing the first floor last week and has been making some pretty good process.  Thank goodness Isaac stayed away hopefully we can keep dodging the hurricanes!

I am defiantly not use to the nine foot tall ceilings, they seem really high.  I hope I got the window heights correct.

Even Mikaela wanted to come and check out the new house. She was a little disappointed her room was not built yet...oh well, Rome was not built in a day.

I even got a smile from the approving wife :)  I think they have enough bracing, they remembered a structural engineer was checking their work.

Rough Grading

Well the rain finally gave us a break and the grading contractor got busy.  As you can see there was a lot of dirt moved around.  The framing and digging the well are next now that the big dirt piles are removed from the front yard.

Foundations Finished

Well, we discovered an error in the dimensions on the outside garage wall so we had to knock down the wall and move it over 16".  The move required a new footing and rebuilding the block wall.  Well that set us back a week.  Hopefully we'll start framing next week.

The grading contractor has been set back due to the rain we have been having but should show up Saturday to back fill and level out the lot. He did manage to get the waterproofing complete and the crawl space dirt smoothed out this past week.  


Sounds like the major roof trusses for the living room are complete and ready for delivery.  I'm ready to see those guys be set.

Welcome to our new house blog.  I will try to update this blog as we make decisions and move forward with our new house.

Foundation Walls:

So we finally got the OK from the bank and it did not take long for our contractor to start as he and the grading contractor have been waiting . The issues here was when the foundation was pouring, actually during the detached garage pour a heavy down pour came up.  

We will also have some serious grading around the house due to the orientation of the house and the fall of the lot.