The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I will start with the good.

This past Wednesday I had the pleasure of hooking back up with Alan from WindRiver Timberframes and his crew at a raising near Happy Jack, AZ.

They had been on site since Monday and had the bents already to go by the time we arrived. The monsoons seemed to be in full swing in the area with rain and lighting stopping work a few times but we managed to make quite a dent in the frame by the end of the day.
The house is 4000 square feet, and will really be a beautiful home when completed. As usual Alan and his crew did excellent work on the frame. Although it is only my second raising I am still amazed at the joinery and the way the frame fits together like a glove!!!

Thank you Alan and crew, and thank you Adrian for letting us help with the raising, as usual it was a real pleasure working with all of you.

Now for the bad and the ugly.

I am sure every project of this size has its bumps in the road. We have hit our real bump in the road. My wife and I have taken quite some time up to now paying attention to detail and trying to make sure that we are doing the right things constructing this house.

As I write this it seems that it will be a miracle if we ever get a roof on this house. The roofing company we hired to install the metal roof got a late start which got things off on the wrong foot. So to pacify me what I would guess would be a third string crew was sent out to get started installing the fascia wrap. To make a long story short it was installed on a Friday, and with few words spoken on my part it was removed on Monday. I should mention that nearly half of the fascia wrap had been installed.

So by now as you can imagine my suspicions are up as to what kind of job will be done. Work progresses slowly and next the crew moves onto installing the roof panels. These are rolled out on site. The panels look terrific!! I feel as if we are on our way and what had started out as a marginal job looks to really be coming together. WRONG!!! Wednesday rolls around and no crew shows up for the day. I am assured that they will be there the next day. They are there the next day. At 11:30 AM leaving at 4:30. I now know why work has progressed so slowly.

Where the craftsmanship comes in to play is in the flashing in my opinion. I have yet to find any when it has come to the flashing. By Friday I have had several conversations with the representative from the company, some of them rather heated. Without saying anything he has offered to refund my money and remove all metal that has been installed.

I have met with one other company and will be meeting with another one on Monday. My hopes are to come up with someone that can get on the project relatively soon due to the fact that the monsoons are under way and we are watching all of it just hit the ground.

I will be the first to admit that we are being very critical but when you see the pictures that follow you will see that there is absolutely no craftsmanship involved in the job that is being performed.

So I am feeling pretty confident that we will be moving onto another company and hopefully be getting a metal roof on at some point.

Work continues on the inside with most of the second floor Aspen being completed. We have been told that the windows that we have ordered should be arriving on site this Thursday, so we can get under way installing them.

Also all 4" pipe has been buried and is ready to connect to the rain catch tank, so we are ready to catch rain as soon as we can get a roof installed.

Ready for the Metal Roof

After taking a week off to go back and see family in MN. we are back at it.

The roofers are scheduled to start this coming
Wednesday. They will start with drip cap then move onto the roof metal. After that is complete they will install the fascia wrap and then the rain gutters.

They estimate that the entire roof should be completed in a week.

We have competed all of the sub-facia work, all of the Grace Ice and Water shield is completed, the fireplace chase is on the roof. Also we cut in a solar light for the upstairs bathroom, and have all of the sewer vents cut in.

The fireplace chase gave us a little problem. The problem was where exactly to locate it. Code requires the stove pipe be 3' away from the valley. And the roofer strongly urged us to keep the chase out of the valley. This all sounds fine but the inside location of the fireplace does not give us a lot of options to move it. We finally came up with a solution that we think will solve both problems. We did give in and move the fireplace slightly ahead which gives us more clearance on the valley and also meets code with the 2+ inches of clearance needed on any nearby timbers.

We also started to install the Aspen on the second floor which is really the ceiling for the first floor. This may seem a little out of order, but it allowed us to locate and do our cutting in on the roof from ladders on the second floor. This made it a lot safer and easier. It won't be long and we will be starting inside walls upstairs and down so this would have to be done anyway.

Along with getting the roof ready we had the trenches dug for the water pipe for the rain collection system. We spent a few hours installing the pipe and getting it back filled so that we are ready to start collecting rain water as soon as the gutters and down spouts are in place. We ran about few pieces short so we have not completed this yet, but plans are to have the connection to the rain catch tank sometime next weekend.

Fortunately it seems that the monsoon season is trying to get going so hopefully we will soon be getting some badly needed rain.