New Home Construction

[bmac]

So, tomorrow, the framers should finish everything on the main floor that was started today and the garage floor slab should be poured. The framers won't work at my house on Wednesday because they have to go elsewhere to (as the framing crew chief says) "set some winders". That would be windows for you non-southerners.

We did have to do a little scuffling today. We have been concerned about the size of some rooms since they completed the layout last week. We reviewed our floorplan with some friends over the weekend and received some good suggestions.

Of course, we don't know squat about building. So, I met the crew out there at 7:30 this morning to tell them some of the changes and to put the brakes on some areas to be framed today until we had some of the alterations checked out by the kitchen cabinet man.

In the meantime, my wife screamed down to the cabinet shop once they opened and reviewed our ideas with him. He re-drew the kitchen layout and we were back to the house by 11:30 to give the changes to the framers. By this evening, all of the changes in the framing had been made. We are glad we caught these problems early.

And just to top it all off, today was the first day of school for our kids so we got to mix in that fun with all of the other stuff. It was a good day.

Thanks for taking an interest in this project. Feel free to ask questions or make suggestions.

 

[EddieWalker]

What were the problems that you found, and what did you do to fix them?

Eddie

 

[Jagmandave]

Coming along nicely, you won't believe how quickly they get this closed in and looking like a house, and how long it takes to go from there to a liveable home. It's encouraging to see your progress, keep us up to date.........

 

[bmac]

Eddie,

The problems were essentially with space allocation. One relatively minor issue was that the architect had 2 coat closets in a hallway that took space from the living room and made the living room an odd shape. We eliminated the closets and will use hall trees in the foyer for guests coats when needed.

Another design problem was a powder room that was too small. The builder wasn't even sure if it would accomodate a toilet and a pedestal sink. So, we narrowed a hallway leading to the master bedroom to make the powder room larger. The design called for built-in book case the length of this hallway so by eliminating the bookcase we freed up space for the powder room (I don't know why we don't just call it a half bath or something else - I doubt there will be any powder in there). In any event, the hallway is still 4 ft wide which is fine.

The thing that concerned us the most was the size of the kitchen. It is small with not much counter space or cabinets. While these limitations help with the budget (fewer cabinets + less $), we wondered if it would be functional for us. We have a small kitchen now and my wife hates it.

Adjacent to one wall in the kitchen is a walk-in pantry that was wide enough to put a stand-alone freezer in there. By moving the freezer to the mudroom (which is the entry way from the garage), we were able to enlarge the kitchen by 30" at the expense of the pantry. This doesn't seem like much, but I think it is going to make a significant difference (more cabinets and counter space = happy wife).

As I've mentioned before, our architect is MIA and we are having to sort out these issues ourselves. Hopefully, there will be no more structural changes on the main floor. We were lucky enough to make the changes before they became expensive to make.

Eddie, that may be more information than you were wanting, but there you have it. Thanks for cheking in.

 

[bmac]

I think the best part about getting it dried in is that we won't have nearly as many weather-related delays.

Speaking of weather, the threat of rain today resulted in rescheduling the concrete pour of the garage slab. Supposed to do it tomorrow. We'll see.

 

[EddieWalker]

Thanks, it's those types of things you pay the architect to make sure don't come up. I'm a little anti archetect to begin with, and your list of modifications are all common sense concerns that should have been addressed before you started building.

I'm glad your caught them and were able to fix them early on.

Since you found so many issues, have you gone back through the entire building to make sure you have them all? Your GC seems to be right on top of everything, have you asked him if he's noticed anything that seems odd to him? If you don't ask, he might assume it's that way bacause you want it so, but in reality, you just haven't reckognized the problem yet.

Window and door locations or sizes come up all the time. Is the flow from room to room what you want? Is there a toilet next to where your headboard will be? Noise issues, light concerns and you view are all things that you can't change later on.

I go crazy analyzing possibilities, then fixing them. /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Eddie

 

[bmac]

Eddie,

I think I'm very fortunate to have the builder I have. There are other, more basic problems with the plans that have the builder question everything. For example, some areas of the home have no dimensions listed for partition walls. On those we are scaling them from the plans. The wall height of the center section of the house is 1 ft higher than the left and right sections. On the left side, she shows about 4 steps going down into the guest room. 4 steps for 1 ft difference? Don't know what she was thinking. And then she shows no step down going from the center section down to the floor on the right side. Goofy.

We have spent a couple of hours modifying the window schedule with the window rep. He has been very helpful. Actually, we had no window schedule with these plans. Or door schedule. I may have mentioned that this is actually the second set of plans she did for us. The 1st plan was for a home that was too expensive to build. That plan did have a window and door schedule. I guess she thought we would just use that one.

I could go on and on about the architect. The reality is that she is no longer in buisness here and I can't locate her. So, the builder and I are working out these details / changes as we proceed. Again, thus far, we ave found the corrections before the walls were up. The second floor is less complex as it only has bedrooms. But, we will look very carefully at that floor as well. Fortunately, my builder did not really like the architect from the beginning so he is questioning everything on the plan. That is good.

I think we have the a good feeling for the traffic flow from room to room and are satisfied with it. As the house is surrounded by dense woods, the view is the same from every room. Green in the summer, brown in the winter. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Thanks for the comments. I'll keep a keen eye on things.

 

[bmac]

I'm Back!!! First, a short review. The last pictures I took were posted on 8/8 and showed that about 2/3 of the first floor had been framed. The framing crew only worked on our house Mon. and Tues. of that week as they had to put in some windows on another project. While they were gone, the the concrete slab in the garage was poured.

The framers returned on Monday of this week and resumed framing the garage end of the first floor. We had to make a couple of lunch-time runs out to the site in the middle of the week to clear-up some more architectural issues. I did not have my camera for any of those trips. Evening visits were limited by kids activities and evening showers. So, today was the first time I was able to get out there with my camera. Unfortunately, I had to meet a sub out there and by the time we finished with him, I only had an opportunity to take a couple of pictures before I had to leave.

The design problems this week were a mixture of changes in the second floor plan that my wife wanted to make. These were minor changes that did not present any real challenges for the builder. But, by simply changing from a shower to a tub in my daughter's bathroom required changing the location of 2 small closets. Fortunately, there is so much wasted space in this design, we had no problem finding a new space for them.

The real problem that was due to negligence by the disappearing architect involved ceiling height in the guest bedroom. It appears she disregarded the pitch of the roof when she drew the floorplan for this area. She had a 6'8" door in a wall that, due to the roofline, would only be 5' high. OOPS!! According to her design, one would have to duck one's head to sit on the toilet in the guest bath. Now, as I am not all that fond of having company stay with us, I thought this was a good feature. Might prompt an early departure. My wife thought otherwise. So, the builder said he could put in some knee walls and change the roof design to improve this. I lost the arguement.

The attached picture is from the front. The center portion of the second floor has the exterior walls framed. My son's bedroom and bath is on the front half of this section. A hallway runs left-to-right down the center and my daughter's bedrrom / bath is on the back half. The cursed guestroom will be in the as yet unframed portion on the left. Over the garage will be unfinished attic space. Many might use this as a finished bonus room. However, with each kid having a large bedroom, we didn't see the need to finish this space. And, it will be much easier to store and access stuff here than in the true attic above the upstairs bedrooms via a pull-down stairway. In fact, I'm thinking of putting upstairs HVAC in the "bonus room". My thoughts are (1) easier access to change filters and other maintenance and (2) in the unlikely event of a condensate leak, the only thing to be affected would be the garage ceiling. I haven't run this by my builder yet. What do you good folks think of this idea?

Well, when you don't have many pictures, you have to type alot. Sorry for the long post. If I get out this weekend and see anything worth photographing, I'll take some more.

 

[bmac]

Here's another from the garage end. When the muck dries out maybe I'll venture out to get other perspectives.

The garage door openings are 10' x 9' (or that's what they are supposed to be. Haven't measured them yet). I told the architect to make them big enough to accomodate any sized vehicle I might want to get. With 24' of garage depth, I think we accomplished this. Now that I think about it, would a Unimog fit in there?

 

[bmac]

Took a few more pictures today. The first is from the end opposite the garage side (left side as you face the house). The vertical opening just left of center is for a normal sized window. To the left of that is my bedroom closet. To the right of the vertical window opening is the master bath. The vanity abuts this exterior wall. In order to get some natural light in the bathroom, we are trying to squeeze 2 transom windows above the mirror. You can see the short horizontal rough openings with their headers in this picture. There will be one more window opening on this side of the house on the basement level, just to the left of the ladder. Was not on the plan, but we decided to add it since they framed the basement.