So after much frantic calling and meeting, we’ve lined up a general contractor and the truss delivery. Signed contracts. Handed over large scads of cash (in cheque form). And…the new roof should be going on starting the 11th Dec. With that looming deadline we’ve kicked things into high gear…
Myself, Kathryn and Liz have been hard at work gutting the inside – there is now virtually nothing left except a 904 sq ft toilet. All the ceiling is down, all the internal walls have gone, all the insulation is gone… Nearly all the wiring is out – there’s a few straggly strands, but nothing above wall height. This afternoon we stripped the shingles off half the roof (except for a teeny bit around the satellite dish – which we need the socket set to remove before we can take off the shingles) and we took down the car port.
On Thursday plan is – remove the other half of the shingles. That’s a more tricky side because that’s where the weatherhead is.
Unfortuantely, our electrician can’t get in before the 18th Dec – so he’s going to be in on that morning moving that and we’ll then need to quickly replace one section of plywood before they dry in. The roofing contractor should, hopefully, be there to dry in the roof on the 18th, also. Then coming back a week or two later to put on the metal roof.
We’ve also finally ordered the windows and doors (except the front door). This turned into a bit of a journey with us having to change the spec on the window sizes twice – the person I was originally getting the quote from leaving the company – and having to get our drawings approved again after tweaking the window sizes. First up, Kathryn realized that the kitchen window was too tall and would stop below the level of the work surface (bad). Then our window person (the second one) realized that our two egress windows would not meet egress requirements (insufficient clear glass space). Still, it was eventually done.
In other housey news we have gas! They fitted the wrong meter, then came back and fitted the right one. I’m sure our neighbours loved the 2 days of stop/go traffic on the street, but I have to admit, the end result is pretty invisible.
We’ve also got a trench in the garden to what was intended to be a dry well, but is currently a very wet well. We’re going to do some more experimental digging to see if we can turn it into a dry well by getting through the clay layer, but it may be that the clay layer is too thick. In which case it’ll just all have to drain into the road, which’d not be ideal.
Uh, I think that’s it….
I do have a bid lined up for supplying the kit for our heating / hot water system, and the rest of it I think is just us going round to various building supplies places and forking out cash… Oh, and me learning how to plaster on drywall, not on lath. And then a lot of plastering. Oh dear god the amount of plastering…
But for the moment, it’s fingers crossed time until a few weeks from now when hopefully we get a new roof :)
(No pictures today, because Flickr is broken on my computer).
