Construction Update: a Ditch, a Deck and Two Doors

This will be a longish post, so I apologize in advance.

We had not been to the house for over a week and when we got there for our Wednesday meeting, the driveway and yard in front of the garage was all torn up. This was expected, since they are laying conduits between the road, the house and the garage.

Here is the view from the street. The ladder is leaning on the utility pole. Power and internet cables will be buried after coming off the pole.

And here is the view from the front yard.

They will continue adding conduits for a few more days, and then next week, after an inspection, they will bury the conduits in concrete and backfill the sand. But for now, there is no easy access into the garage or even onto the deck from the front.

Speaking of the deck, last week they worked on framing of the deck. Here is a side view of the deck. Notice that the corner is not square, because if it was square then we would be over the 50 foot wetlands setback. Also, the stairs are not in place yet.

This past week, the construction camera was positioned to show the work on the deck. Here is the work (I removed most of the boring parts).

Now that the deck framing is in place, you can see that the passage to the basement door goes under the deck without a lot of headroom. Daphne is used for scale.

Now that you have watched the video, go back and look at what happens just after the 1:00 mark. You should see them finally mount the french door from the living room onto the deck (and a little later, in the background, the french door onto the porch).

Here is the view of the living room french door. Its clouded because there is still a protective film on the door.

And here is the french door in the game room that leads out to the porch.

If you scroll up and look at the deck side-view picture, you may (but probably not) notice something missing in the foreground. (Go ahead and look, I will wait).

Its turns out that we had a rain storm over the weekend and without gutters, we got a lot of water undercutting the concrete pad that was poured for the heat exchangers. The crew had to remove the pad, build a packed gravel foundation, and then they will re-pour the pad next week. Here is a brief construction video of the work.

That takes us to the interior of the house. This past week has all been about putting in the duct work.

As part of placing the ducts, the installers had to make some small changes, mostly to work around the joists and in one case the plumbing. Here is a layout of the first floor showing the changes that we had to approve (in red and yellow).

For example, we would review changes like this (which is from the east wall of game room).

Or adjustments like this, which is the corner of the game room. On the other side of that wall (to the left) we also adjusted the vent, but in the case we moved it from being closer to the bathroom, to actually being in the wall facing the hall.

The air return vent in the front hall (outline shown below), which was planned on being under a shelf, was increased in size. Because of that we made a more drastic change. Instead of having a floor vent under a floating shelf, we decided to actually have a cabinet that goes down to the floor and to have the vent come out in the front of the cabinet (so that it turns 90 degrees inside an otherwise empty cabinet.

With this proposed change, we then noticed a cosmetic problem. The laundry room door opening (left side in the picture) and the closet door opening did not align, which would be more apparent with a cabinet. So we decided to shrink the closet door to align the openings. Does this quality as “moving a wall”? You decide.

None of the other changes were problematic for us. We did move the vent near my computer a few inches closer to my desk, which hopefully will not be a problem for my rolling chair. And we made the vent in the master bedroom wider, so we had to quickly measure the bedside tables to make sure everything still fit.

I will also leave you with this picture. This is the attic area above the second floor front bedroom and family room. This space will be filled with air handling units soon.

For the rest of this week and first half of next week, they will be working on the trench and conduits. I have moved the construction camera to pick up the action.

Once the trench is filled in, and we can access the garage again, we will store the siding in the garage and the week after next the siding will be installed, starting in the back (river side). I will move the construction camera again in a week and a half to catch that action.

Inside, duct work continues and once the conduits are done, electrical work will start.

Days since we moved a wall: 57, unless you count shrinking the closet door opening, then 0.