Williams Warehouse......

Is what it felt like last week. It seems that everything decided to come at once. Except for the doors and windows, of course, but more on that later.

Last Monday the company supplying the fireplace called and said it would be delivered on Tuesday. Up to this point no word on the siding either which was supposed to be the week before. Well, Tuesday they showed up with the fireplace. I managed to meet them out at the house and we set it in place right away. They are scheduled to run the chimney either Monday or Tuesday of this week, so at least we will have our first source of heat, or maybe, I should say our second. With our east facing windows, the morning sun really helps heat the house up for the day.

Well, we no more than got the fireplace delivery done and the trucking firm that is bringing the siding calls, and he tells me that he will be there in a couple of hours. The trucker asks if I had a forklift on site to unload with. I immediately told him "No" due to the fact that I was told it was an enclosed trailer so access with a forklift would not be possible. As it turns out, it was a flat bed with a sliding enclosure so a forklift would have worked. So now I have a "not too happy trucker" on my hands. To make a long story short, I was able to get some help and we unloaded the truck by hand which must have amounted to about 1,200 pieces of siding, T&G soffit material, and raw cedar trim board in about an hour and a half. Fortunately, the trucker helped but he was not happy about it.

All of this had to be handled and transferred again due to the fact that it was unloaded at the end of the driveway. There was no way that a semi would get up the driveway and get turned around. So the rest of the week was spent getting all of the material hauled up to the house using the pickup. All of this material came from Lakeside Lumber out of Oregon. All of the siding material and soffit material is pre-stained cedar, and the trim boards will be stained or painted an accent color on site. It probably seams rather odd to have to go all the way to Oregon to get this type of material, but every time I mentioned pre-stained siding around here, they looked at me like I had two heads and was from a different planet!!

So then, out of the blue, the tub company calls two weeks early and says that both upstairs and downstairs tubs are in and will be delivered on Wednesday. So Wednesday they showed up right on time and we got both tubs unloaded and they even helped me get the upstairs tub lifted up to the second level.

So with everything here, unloaded, and covered we got word that the windows would not ship until the 24th of this month. We had originally planned on having them by now so this was not the best of news, but not the end of the world. We just would like to get as much of the outside work done, as soon as possible, so we can concentrate more on getting the inside work completed over the winter, and have the house totally weather tight before the weather really starts to turn on us.

The doors I will not even go into at this time. Every time we think we have it all figured out there is something that does not come with the type of door that we want, or if we do find the one we are looking for, the price of one single door practically eats half of the interior and exterior door budget alone. Our hopes are to have them ordered by early this week.

So unto the work on the house. The priority was to get the fireplace chase framed. So last weekend was devoted entirely to getting the chase rough-framed in so that the chimney could be run. I first had to get back on the roof to locate a point inside the chase already framed on the roof to measure off of for exact location of the fireplace inside. Getting up and over to the fireplace now is a little bit more of a challenge with all of the metal on. The 9 /12 pitch part of the roof takes a little bit of doing to keep your footing on.

Once this was complete, we slid the fireplace into position and went to work framing the chase. On the recommendation of our architect, our intentions with the chase were to taper it down so that we didn't have this massive amount of stone in the middle of the house. Ty's thinking was that it would be too over-powering for the room and perhaps take away from the rest of the area. And after getting the chase framed in, he was definitely right. The whole thing resembles a mine shaft right now, but at the point where it tapers we will band it with some of the left over oak timbers to kind of break it up. The taper also falls at the same level as the second floor oak beams which should tie it all in very well. This should go nicely with the rest of the room once it is enclosed and the stone work completed.


Until the chimney pipe is run, there isn't much more that I can do on the chase, so I have moved on to more framing of the interior walls. The powder room just off of the kitchen has now been completed and the entrance into the laundry room and mechanical room has just about been completed.





The powder room corner was angled by the request of my wife. I was a little hesitant at first to do it, but it has really helped the flow of the whole kitchen area.


Also being worked on and all but completed is the electrical main. All of the wire between the outside meter panel and the main inside the house has been run. This past week I for the 4/0 wire landed inside the main and all of the grounding completed. I would still like to get the siding run behind the meter panel on the outside so I can permanently anchor it to the house prior to inspection.


And lastly here is the years last harvest from the garden. A few potatoes and onions remain but this is about it. A strong cold front pushed through on Friday and lows by Sunday morning were to dip into the low 20's. Saturday morning San Fransisco peaks to the east of us got a dusting of snow so I am sure winter is not far off!!!