This week, they put in the deck, which is the top of the basement on which the first floor will sit. I have two pictures for you. First the desk installation in progress from Friday, then the deck completed on Saturday morning.

We can now walk “into” the house and see what the view will look like from the first floor. If you are curious, here is the view. The river level is down from earlier in the year and the plants have not filled in the wet lands yet this season. That’s Daphne in the lower-right corner since today was another day of removing invasives.

No construction video this week. The first three days were boring since all the work was inside the basement. And the last two days were lost because the camera ran out of batteries.

Next week more back filling as they bring the ground back to its original level all around the house and finish putting in the foundation drain system. Then they will put in the basement support posts and start putting in the posts outside the house that will support the deck and porch.

We are getting close to having the house design finalized. One metric of how close we are is that it had been two weeks since the last time we moved a wall. Until yesterday. When selecting bathroom tiles, Daphne indicated that she did not want the second floor bathroom shower tiled, but would rather a nice looking fiberglass wall / floor combination. These are much easier to keep clean – no grout to attract mold.

Unfortunately, when picking out the shower assembly, we realized that the shower size had to be adjusted, which also meant that the bathroom needed to be rearranged to fix the new footprint of the shower. Here is the new second floor bathroom layout including elevations (side views).

Unfortunately, the redesign forced us to move the wall between the bathroom and the back bedroom’s closet, shrinking the closet slightly to make room for the larger shower. Hopefully, this will be the last wall change.

Meanwhile, they have started putting in the beams that will hold up the first floor. Here is how things looked mid-day on Wednesday.

Since this is a Wednesday, that means another meeting with the architect. From now on, we will meet on site with the architect and the builder. Right now, Daphne is attending remotely via iPad. In this picture you can see the architect showing one of the design documents to Daphne. The builder is in the white tee-shirt behind the architect.

The decision on what exterior door to use is not finalized. We decided to buy one of the doors we are are thinking of using. If we like it, we will buy three more. If we don’t like it, well, it will be installed as the basement door, hidden under the deck, either way.

We will play the same trick with the kitchen sink. We will buy one sink and faucet to make sure we like it. Either way, it will become the sink in the laundry room.

Anyway, work continues on the beams and soon they will put in the supports, but also drill and place the exterior supports for the deck and the porch. The framing should be completed in mid-June. Then the windows get installed and then the siding gets installed. Another round of back filling happens after the exterior supports are places, and then you will no longer see the orange panels (they will be entirely underground).

Correction on bathroom changes. Daphne pointed out that the main reason for the change was because the pre-fab shower assemblies only do three walls and the previous design had a fourth half-wall next to the sinks that you can see below. Also the pre-fab that Daphne has selected is not actually fiberglass, but stone.

First the the foundation. This week, the applied the seal coat, back filled some of the dirt and added more gravel to the foundation interior. I have a construction camera video of the action at the end of this post, but meanwhile here are three pictures.

This is the current foundation seen from the garage area. That is the location of the front stoop you can see on the right, and the opening for the basement door.

Here is the foundation seen from the river side. You can see the cut out for the basement windows and the opening for the basement door (which we will use to get down to the river as an alternative to the stairs planned on the north side of the deck).

It is now easy for me to actually go inside my basement to be. Here is an interior picture from the corner under the master bedroom. I assume the gravel will be eventually be covered by a concrete basement floor.

Meanwhile we spent another few hours removing invasives. While we were there, we checked to see how the newly planted trees were doing. Three of the four trees took and are doing well as you can see here. The four tree did not leaf out and will need to be replaced.

While I was there, I moved the construction camera back to its original tree so this weeks video will be the last side view for a while. You can see its new location below.

The wood gets delivered on Tuesday, which means that the house will start to get framed soon. Meanwhile, here is last weeks construction camera video showing the back filling, seal coating and addition of gravel. I skipped the surveyor activity which was boring.

Once we build the foundation, we needed to get the surveyors back to certify that it meets code. And here is the text from the certification.

And here is the map. Not shown is the wetlands setback line, but I am sure that we are far enough away from that line since the tightest dimension was the location of the stoop with respect to the road setback.

We are outside the flood plain zone (as planned) and four feet above the 100 year flood line. The stoop is one foot, four inches away from the setback line, which allows for an roof overhang and gutter without going over that line.

You will also notice that we have to worry about the height as well, which is measured from the lowest exposed point on the foundation (124.3 feet above sea level). Our plan is to be an inch or two below that maximum, which requires some slopped walls on the second floor (as discussed at the end of this story page: Taking Interior Design to the Next Level).

The garage foundation has not been rebuilt yet – it will have to go in the exact same spot, and then we will go through certification again.

I made a quick trip to the building site and took the following two images of the current foundation walls.

This first picture is the river side where the basement door will be placed. You can see that the block has been removed. You can also see a red line on the foundation on both walls, near the bottom of the opening. This red line is the top of where the seal coating will be applied later this week.

Here is another view, this time from the corner near the driveway. Once again you can see the red line for the seal coating. After the coating dries, we will back fill in the dirt to bring the ground level to approximately 4 inches above the red line. This will give you some sense of how much of the foundation you will actually see. That said the near side in this second image will be hidden by the deck.

Here is what the site looked like on April 19. The rectangular section in the foreground is where the front door and front stoop will be located. The notch in the center back will have basement windows. That wooden cutout in the foundation is reserved for the the back door, which will lead down to the river.

We visited the site this Saturday since it was a warm spring day (reaching 80 F). We spend 90 minutes continuing our invasive removal project. Here is Daphne pulling a plant.

After we worked for a while, we sat down by the river and ate lunch. Then we went kayaking on our new paddle boards. Unfortunately, I did not risk the camera on the river our first time out but we paddled south down the Sudbury River to Fairhaven Bay. It was around 1.2 miles each way. I will have to figure out how to take a camera and keep it dry because there are a lot of pretty houses along the river.

While we were on site, I went into the construction trailer. Here is a picture of the main table where you can see the construction set from the architect on the table and some plot layouts posted on the wall.

Also inside the trailer was a schedule for the next month or so. Here is what to expect:

• April 19th – Foundation sides complete
• April 21st – Foundation inspection
• April 22nd – First phase of back filling (put the dirt back)
• April 23rd-25th – Seal coat on the foundation walls
• April 28th – Lumber arrives
• May 12th – More back filling
• May 19th – Helical footings (for the deck and porch, I assume)
• May 19th – June 23rd – House framing

Here is the construction camera video for the week of April 14th. In this video you will see them installing the foundation forms, then pouring the foundation walls, and then removing the forms. I am sorry for the first few seconds of the video, the weather was not cooperating.

I made a quick visit to the property today and took the following pictures. These show the forms in place for the foundation pouring, which is scheduled to happen on Thursday afternoon (the day after this was posted).

The second image, which is the river side of the house, shows a cut out area where there will be a few basement windows. Not visible is the door opening, which has been reserved with an insert added inside the frames. Its right behind the horizontal boards you can see in the inner corner.

Meanwhile, today was yet another Wednesday session with the architect. We are almost done with these design sessions. This time there were no adjustments to the house at all – no walls moved, no windows got relocated, no ducts were rerouted. We did slightly move two plugs, but just two, and just a little.

One of the interesting things we did at this session was to look at the “sun study”, specifically for the game room. The architect has software where she models the house and then she can dial in a day of the year and time of day to see where the sun would come in, not including any trees (which were not modeled).

Here are two screen shots from the sun study of the game room. The first one shows morning light coming in from the east side. The second one shows afternoon light coming in from the south. Both for March 21 (so around the time of our March gaming party).

The light from the south is particularly welcome, especially in winter since it provides a sunny place to sit. Unfortunately, we expect most of the light to be blocked by the evergreen trees on the south side of the property.

Separately, we have in hand a proposal from the AV company for the internet, doorbells, entertainment systems and speakers. The proposal is very detailed, and very expensive and we are thinking about it.

We also have the proposal from the alarm company for the door alarms, security panel, motion detector, low temperature alarm, water alarm and all the fire and CO alarms (which get centrally wired into the control panel). The good news is that these are centrally powered as well. No batteries in the individual units to start chirping, and these units are much less likely to randomly fail and set off an alarm at 3am. Most of these are either required by code or strongly recommended by possible insurance companies.

Well that’s today’s update. Hopefully this weekend I will post the week’s construction camera video showing the foundation framing and pouring.

A construction trailer has been delivered. It has a small office and a storage room.

Meanwhile most of the week has been working on the layers under the foundation. This includes the supports, the french drain system, the radon remediation system (although we do not believe that there is any radon), and gravel that will be under the basement floor. At the end of the week, they started to deliver the forms that will be used to pour the cement for the basement.

Here is what it looked like on Saturday (after a mild late season snow fall).

And for your enjoyment, here is a spliced and trimmed video from the construction camera showing this weeks activity at high speed.

The actual pouring of the foundation will start the week after next, with the whole process taking 3-4 weeks. Keep in mind that this does not include the foundation under the garage or the pilings under the porch and deck.

We have always wanted to have a breezeway between the garage and the pantry door so we can go between the house and the garage without getting wet if it is raining or snowing. However, as I have mentioned before, the current garage (and the replacement garage we will be building) is “non-conforming” because it is too close to the road. Because it is non-conforming, if we were to attach the house to the garage, the entire house becomes non-conforming and we would require a special permit (which is not guaranteed).

In the past, we believe that we had to keep a 10 foot gap between the house and the garage to avoid a special permit. So we designed the house that way, and planned on adding a breezeway in five years, which we believe allowed for enough time to establish the house as existing, and thus circumventing the issue.

However, it seems that when we change our plans to tear down and rebuild the garage in place instead of preserving it, the rules changed. Or maybe just the building inspectors interpretation of the rules changed. I am not sure. That said, the new rule is that we only have to have a 1″ gap between the house and the garage to avoid a special permit. However, that includes a 1″ gap between the deck and the garage as well.

So our architect came up with a design for a breezeway that met the requirements. The design pictures are shown below, but before I get to that I will go right to the punch line – the building inspector approved these plans and they have been adding to the building permit. Woo hoo.

This is a side view of what we are proposing. The garage is on the left, the house is on the right and the flooring between the two is the end of the deck. I have highlighted in yellow where we will have a 1″ gap.

This is a cut view from same angle. Once again, the gap is in yellow. What you will notice is that there is an overhang on the garage which will overlap the breezeway. This means that any rain will have to blow in sideways in order to get into that gap. This is, of course, will not prevent a cascade of water, but make it much less likely. Also, since the breezeway can not be attached to the garage, it has to be supported with columns.

And here is an isometric view of the breezeway itself.

Some other notes. We had another Wednesday design meeting, and this one was relatively short at only 2 hours. We decided on the lighter color for the accents in the siding (see earlier post). We waffled a little but ultimately approved the windows that had been planned for a while. We agreed to use the pretty standard Zip-R siding solution (which goes under the actual siding), even though it was not clear whether it would reduce the ability of the house to withstand a brush fire.

Work on the foundation continues. They are installing the french drain system and also the radon reduction system. (We do not believe we have any radon, but it is trivial to install it now and add a fan in the attic later, if necessary, to complete the system.) They are also filling in the base with gravel, which will then be covered with waterproofing. After that, they will frame and then pour the actual foundation.

As work progresses, I hope to have pictures and construction videos so you can see the progress.