Rooms With a View...of Too Many Clouds!

The area we live in is a desert. Deserts are places that are dry -- right? We are also in the midst of a horrific, multi-year drought, and drought means really dry -- right? So, what does a horrific, multi-year drought in a desert look like? Pretty much like this:

I did not take this photo, but it looks a lot like what we've been seeing around here lately.

That's right. Because we are building a house, during a drought, in a desert, at a time of year that is historically warm and sunny, it has been raining -- a lot! Again!  There is simply no other explanation: the amount of precipitation in this area is directly linked and inversely proportional to how much we want it to be dry.

Why, you may wonder, is rain a problem at this point? I can sum it up in one word: WOOD. Wood is the basic building material of our new home, and wood has a tendency to soak up water. It can then swell, warp, split, mold, delaminate, lift, etc.-- none of which makes for happy home builders.

We were happy enough a few days ago, when we started to see actual wall frames sprouting up on the site. At the end of the first day, the place looked like this:

A few walls standing, with more put together and ready to go the next day.

It was only a few walls, but we could see what the view from the master bedroom windows was going to look like, and that was quite wonderful.

View from one of the master bedroom windows.

By the end of the next day, the place looked like this:

Day 2...lots of walls, not much rain!

This day was really fun, as most of the exterior walls were up with their cutouts for windows. Speaking of which, I knew I had designed the larger of the two front bedrooms to have a big window (I had envisioned this as my office and pictured myself gazing out at my horses from my desk), but now that I can see the cutout for it, I realize that it is HUGE!

Me sitting on the windowsill of the large front bedroom.

You may have noticed that the floor in the above photo looks wet. That's because the picture was taken on "wall day 3", when we had far too much rain for comfort.  When Michael and I arrived after the workers had left, there was a good 1/4" or more of water sloshing around on our particle-board floors.

This is NOT something you want to see on your OSB floors.

 
Yikes! Worried that this much water and more to come could cause the chips the floor sheeting is made of  to start lifting up, Michael got busy with a broom and did his best to push the water out of the house.

Demonstrating the broom-handling skills of an Olympic curler, Michael swept the water out of our house.

He did a pretty good job, too, making me think that if the SCADA thing doesn't work out, he might just have a career as a professional curler.

In case you don't know, curling is a sport in which grown men with little brooms sweep the ice fast or slow in order to alter the speed of a tea-kettle shaped rock that another man tries to slide into a target zone. No, I am not kidding.

Of course, winning an Olympic medal in curling would likely not make Michael as happy as seeing his new garage for the first time. Here he is, taking in its height and size, imagining all the future projects he will no doubt work on in this great space:

For now, our work in and around the garage and all the rest of the house involves trying to keep the site tidy. This means, in part, picking up and sorting through the piles of waste wood, keeping what we can use or burn as firewood, and taking the rest to the dump in our handy-dandy horse trailer. There has been surprisingly little waste wood thus far, as it seems that much of our lumber was custom ordered to specific lengths, meaning fewer cuts and fewer leftover bits.

Another constant clean-up task is picking up stray nails in and around the house. We have found them in places one would not expect them to be, including driving/parking areas where they could easily puncture a tire. They could also pose a hazard for the wild horses, like these that came through just yards away from our front door the other evening:

How many places in the world do you see THIS on your property? Notice their backs, wet from the rain.

Fortunately, I don't have to bend over to pick up every single nail (which would kill my back), as we have a couple of sweeper magnets that can pick up a dozen or so at a time.

A sweeper magnet is a life-saver for backs, tires, and wild horses!

We are saving ourselves a chunk of change by managing the clean up of the site ourselves, so we will continue to do this once or twice a week throughout the build.

As of this weekend, the house looks like this:

Most of the interior walls are up now, so we are able to wander through the rooms and get a real sense of what they will be like. This is a mind-boggling experience for me, as I have never designed a house before, and I spent countless hours agonizing over every detail, trying to visualize how it would look and feel walking through the spaces I was creating.

I can already see that there are a few things that probably would have been better done a little differently, but all in all, I think it is not too shabby for a first try. Jake seems to like it, at any rate -- check out how happy he looks standing in his new house!

Jake wagging with joy as he checks out the new digs.

It will be almost sad when the siding goes up and you will no longer see the views through the walls themselves, only through the windows. I have also been enjoying "walking through walls" by stepping between the studs, imagining that this is what it must feel like to be a ghost. Still, I am looking forward to having real walls, not to mention a roof, doors, and everything else!  When all that happens, I will no doubt be sporting a grin as big as Jake's.

More soon!

Veins, Arteries, and Cotton Candy

My apologies -- I know it has been a long time since my last post. I've been waiting for something really exciting to show you (like, say, the framing that was supposed to start two weeks ago), but alas, we have been experiencing many delays and not much excitement.

Well, I suppose I shouldn't say that. If you are into plumbing, then things were pretty exciting a couple of weeks ago when the whole house suddenly sprouted an elaborate network of red and blue tubing that reminded me of medical illustrations of veins and arteries.

Plastic tubes for hot and cold water reminded me of that eerie, see-through, "Visible Man" model I had as a kid.

I thought the plastic tubing seemed rather flimsy for such important, permanent piping, but Michael explained that this stuff is a special kind of plastic that is not only food grade (nothing nasty supposed to be able to leech out), but it also has the ability to expand and contract a tremendous amount, making it much more able to cope with the kind of temperature fluctuations we get here in the Highlands. Old fashioned metal pipes would often burst if they got frozen, but these will not.

In addition to the colorful circulatory system, the crawl space is now occupied by giant silver worms creeping their way around the house. That's what the ducting looks like to me, at any rate!

Giant silver worms.

Naturally, while the plumbers were doing their thing, they had to be supervised by one of the local authorities. This time, it was an extremely handsome lizard sporting delicate green shading on parts of his face and back, as well as a positively stunning belly of radiant peacock blue. He looked me over with the cocky assurance of the seasoned lady's man he clearly was, but that little Cassanova still managed to keep a critical eye on the workers by scooting up a stick to get a better vantage point.

"I get off at 5:00, Baby..."

While flirtatious attention from a gorgeous lizard would no doubt make any woman's day, my spirits really soared when I popped back up to the property later in the day to find that we had received a serious lumber delivery.

The skinny ones in the middle of the big stack are two-by-sixes!

And man, there is some BIG lumber up there! There are huge, fat posts and very substantial (and long!) beams (our guess is for the back porch), not to mention plenty of 2 x 6s for the main framing work.

We also had TWO inspectors up there at one point -- one from the County, and one from the bank. They both seemed to think everything looked peachy, but then we got a call telling us that the County gal's boss wanted a few little things tweaked, so Michael went up there on the weekend and got those things done, in hopes that it would prevent any hold ups. Yeah, right.

What was the hold up this time, you ask? Some guys were supposed to come put the floor down, but the County suddenly decided they would "appreciate it" if we could get the insulation done first, as that would make it easier for them to do the insulation inspection. Though they said it wasn't mandatory, we know better than to make anything the least bit difficult for the inspectors!  So, we met with Mike to see if their request could be accommodated, which ended up costing us some days and a bit of drama when the insulation guys promised they would have it all done on a certain day but didn't -- and we had the inspector coming back first thing the next morning.

Miraculously, they did manage to get it done before the inspection, having gotten there at some ungodly hour in the morning.  When they were finished, it looked as if someone had tucked a whole bunch of cotton candy between the floor joists -- but that yummy looking stuff is fiberglass, not good to touch or breath in, let alone eat! I had to wonder about the respiratory health of the laborer whom I had observed installing the insulation without the protection of either gloves or a mask.

This laborer was installing the "cotton candy" fiberglass batting with no mask and no gloves. Yikes!

Once we had the go-ahead from the inspector on the insulation, I was relieved when the carpenter guys showed up and made fast work of putting in the floor sheeting.

The floor sheeting was both exciting and diminishing.

I have to say that while I was thrilled that things were once again moving along, and it was quite something to be able to walk across the "floor" of my new house for the first time, the neat covering somehow made the whole thing seem like there was less there rather than more, as you could no longer see all the amazing stem walls, the little cutouts to get from one part of the crawl space to another -- and no more sightings of giant worms, veins and arteries, or cotton candy!

But, as we assumed the carpenters would be getting busy and building us some walls within a day or so, I was nothing but pumped.

I should have learned by now that when you are building a house, getting pumped on any given day surely means you will be deflated soon.  It is now at least a week since the floor sheeting was put down, and today was the first day the carpenters were back at all -- a skeleton crew of two who got hardly anything done all day.

These two lonely carpenters didn't manage to build us walls today.

I know that in that old story about the tortoise and the hare, it was the slow and steady shelled one who won the race -- but dang it all...I want to see some SPEED out there, guys! Maybe they can follow the example of this NASCAR-worthy hare I saw today outside my window, who certainly knew the meaning of haste when I made a tiny noise and sent him flying across the yard. No big surprise that he heard me...look at those EARS!

This is the guy we need supervising the carpenters!

I will be trying to get up there every day this week so see if we do indeed see a house starting to take shape, and if we do, you will be the first to know!

Starting to look like something...

Michael and I were talking about this whole project the other day, marveling at how this idea of a house that we designed from scratch, batted around, worked on, and refined for the better part of two years is now actually becoming a "real thing" out there in the world. For me, there is something almost eerie about it -- as if all these concrete guys and carpenters and plumbers somehow got inside my mind and took something out of it when I wasn't looking. I really can't explain it, but it is definitely weird -- good, but weird.

I guess it is starting to hit home because this truly isn't just a dream or an idea any more -- there is a very solid, undeniably real structure taking shape before our very eyes. Here is what those eyes have seen lately...

It was something to behold when all the forms were taken off the concrete and we had a complete foundation in place. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted a bunch of photos showing what it looked like at that stage, so this one will have to do.

Me, welcoming future visitors to enter my future front door.

The day we took the above photo, we brought our dog Jake up to the property with us. He loves to go there, and as he is not at all the type to wander more than a few feet out of sight of us, we feel comfortable taking him and letting him have fun. Jake's definition of fun is hunting any creature that falls into either of the two categories of beings that interest him: "Geckos" and "Bugs".

The Gecko category (so named because Michael erroneously referred to the little fence lizards we had back in Redding as "geckos") includes any and all lizards, as well as all other things that scurry and hide but which are larger than bugs. Squirrels and outdoor mice fall into the gecko catagory. Indoor mice are of no interest at all -- those are cat toys and not to be trifled with. Bugs, on the other hand, are to be vigorously pursued, indoors or out. Bugs include all manner of insects, both flying and crawling, as well as the entire arachnid family.

So, what happens is, you let Jake out of the car, point in any direction, and say, "Gecko!", and he runs around trying to find it. On our property, you are pretty much guaranteed that there is a lizard within ten yards in every direction, and plenty of squirrels, rabbits and whatnot, so you are really not sending him on a wild goose chase. On the day we took pictures of the foundation, he found at least one lizard AND a squirrel (two well-known species of geckos) in an uprooted tree -- kept him busy for eons!

Jake, diligently hunting down those pesky geckos!

This was on a Sunday -- the day before the carpentry work on the floor joists was supposed to start. We had thought the lumber would have been delivered by then, but as we saw no lumber, we had a sneaking suspicion that we might be looking at another delay. Sure enough, Monday came and went -- no lumber. Turns out the sub-contractor dealing with that was out of town and the carpentry would not start until later in the week.

Fortunately, this delay provided a window of opportunity for Jason to get back up there and do some more work that would make things easier for the carpentry guys. He was able to do the backfilling around the foundation, dig trenches for wiring and waterlines, and start the trench work for the electricity. The electrical trench has proven challenging, to say the least, as it has to be five feet deep and go through some tricky terrain full of trees, not to mention the fact that the ground is basically solid rock in some places, brutally hard for even Jason's big machine to break through. Kind of gives new meaning to the term "trench warfare".

Trenching in tough terrain

Broken rock, after Jason smashed through it and dug it up for the electrical trench.

There were also a few tense moments when Michael went to lay in the water tubing he had purchased in the appropriate trench. His measurements, taken some weeks before, had prompted him to buy a certain length roll of tubing, but when he was actually rolling it out, both he and Jason had some concern that it wasn't going to be long enough. Turns out he was exactly right, and relieved that there wouldn't have to be a join in the tubing -- always a weak link when you have to do it.

The perfect length of water tubing.

Once the trenching for all the non-electrical stuff was ready, we had to have the county inspector up again to look it over. They sent Kristin this time, and she made sure we had all the proper depths, the right kind of sand to line the trenches with (so that whatever conduit or piping you put in there doesn't get punctured by rocks). Everything passed with flying colors.

The Inspector with Michael, checking the trenches.

Sand for lining trenches.

Another thing the carpentry delay gave us time to finish up was preparing the garage floor and the drive up to the garage. This involved more compacting and measuring, as had been done on the main house part. Once again, Michael was up there manning the machinery and gittin' 'er done!

More grunt work for Michael.

 Then at long last, on Friday, the carpenters arrived to get started on the floor joists. We had everything ready for them -- only just in time, as Michael was still getting things set up with the generator (and sending me running for gas for it) early in the morning.  There was only one problem: no wood. When I got up there with the gas, I saw what no owner/builder wants to see: an idle crew waiting around for materials to arrive. I refused to get flustered, however, and instead asked a very nice fellow named Isaias to help me get the gas cans (heavy!) out of the car and to fill the generator.

The wicked gas can spout.

But here was another problem: neither Isaias nor I could figure out how to get the deviously evil gas can spouts to pour! We fiddled with them for far too long, to no avail. If gas can spouts could laugh devilishly over thwarting the best efforts of mere humans, these would most certainly have been cackling away.
 
Isaias finally gave up, screwed the spout off entirely, and poured the gas into the generator as best he could without a spout. There was definitely some wastage lost to splashing, and I found myself sincerely hoping that no one would light a match around this fellow any time soon, as there was no doubt that some was splashing on him.

It wasn't until he was just about finished that I noticed that the other gas can had INSTRUCTIONS on the front of it! Turns out you had to hook some little lip on the damn thing and get that to push down before it would pour. Who knew? Still, I didn't feel too bad that we had wasted all that time, as there was nothing for the men to do anyways.  Hoping that the wood would show up soon, I started down the driveway.

Naturally, because I left at that exact moment, the truck with the wood magically appeared, and I met it half way down the driveway, forcing me to back up and around several twisty corners with ditches on both sides -- not easy! The driveway was originally supposed to be 20' wide to allow vehicles to pass each other in case of an emergency. Well, it ain't there yet. Nonetheless, I was very happy that the wood had arrived and that Isaias and his crew could get cracking.

The wood truck arriving -- yeah!

And get cracking they did!

The carpenters getting seriously busy.

Those guys were fast and did a great job, perhaps driven to excellence by their watchful supervisor, perched high atop the exhaust pipe of  Jason's big truck.

Ever vigilant, the job site supervisor tolerated no slacking!

 With such a leader at the helm, it didn't take long before the site looked like this:

Wow -- our future floor!

They basically did all of that floor joist work in one day, and it is rock solid. I always said I wanted to let my horses come in the house...with a floor this strong, that would be no problem.

There may, however, be one problem. We can't for the life of us figure out how we are supposed to get into the crawl space, as there doesn't appear to be any reasonably sized "cut out" left for a trap door. There is one cut out, but it is so small that Michael would have a hard time getting through it.

This "cut out" might be the only way into the crawl space, but at only 18" wide, it would be a tight squeeze!

We have a call in to Mike P to see what the plan is. Could be that this munchkin-sized hole is IT! My friend Dona says that the trap door to the crawl space in their house is tiny, so small that her relatively slight husband has to become a contortionist to get in there. Time to start that yoga class, Michael...

Meanwhile, one thing that is definitely NOT a problem was the surprise we got when we drove up on Saturday, the day after the carpenters had done their thing. The garage floor had been poured!

My new rival for Michael's adoration: A perfectly poured garage floor.

I wish you could have seen Michael's face light up when he saw that, and the joy that suffused his entire being as he examined the work and concluded that Roberto's crew had done an amazing job. Pouring concrete sounds like it would be simple, but it is actually quite scientific and fussy, especially on something like this. It has to be just the right thickness to have the correct "slump factor", meaning that it will level just enough but not too much, which is what allows you to form an exact degree of slope.

Michael  was like a kid in a candy store explaining all of this to me, and pointing out how the concrete slopes very slightly from the back of the garage to the front, which will allow any water (from melted snow coming off cars, etc.) to run out of the garage.

If you look carefully at the low wall on the left, you can see that the floor is slightly higher at the back than in front.

He also showed me the rubber they put in between the stem wall and the slab, which allows the concrete to expand and contract (due to changing temperatures) to some degree without cracking.

The black stuff is a layer of rubber designed to prevent cracking.

Michael, as someone who likes to do things correctly and well, appreciates it when others do the same. He was so enamored by his new garage floor that he went back the next day just to look at it again. I told him that should I ever have need to twist him to my will in the future, all I will have to do is go stand in the middle of the garage with some old engine oil in hand and threaten to spill it on his beautiful slab. Unfazed, he replied, "Your threat won't work -- they put a sealer on the slab." Sigh.

So, as of today, the plumbers were up there starting to do whatever it is that they do. Michael went to the site this morning and went over the plans in detail with the head guy, which was good, as there were a number of things that needed clarification. I will try to get up there and get some pictures tomorrow.

And, speaking of pictures, did you think I would leave you without something cute and totally irrelevant to the building project? Of course not!  Here are a couple of photos from a few nights ago when I went to pick up the new pony that we found for little Skye, my friend Becky's four year old. The pony is gorgeous -- looks like a miniature version of my palomino, Lido. The first shot shows the looks on Becky and Skye's faces when the pony first stepped off the trailer from Oregon (we had not seen him in person until that moment). The second shows the pony with his new "mommies".

This is what sheer delight looks like.

This is what the new pony, christened "Maximus Aurelius", looks like.

Becky decided to give the pony a more interesting name than "Flash" (what he was called before), so she thought something big and grand for such a wee little guy would be fun, since most ponies have Napoleon syndrome anyway. She chose "Maximus", and I suggested adding "Aurelius", since that means "coated in gold" in Latin. The really fun part has been hearing Skye try to pronounce this mouthful -- it comes out different every time, but she has been getting pretty close with "Maxus Realius". I kind of think THAT should be his official name!

Rain, Rain, Go Away

This is what I have learned about building a house so far:

Just when you think everything is finally starting to move along, something unexpected will happen to throw a monkey wrench in the works. Or if not a monkey wrench, perhaps a unseasonal storm. Or two. Or ten.

Yep, because we are building a house, we have had the wettest couple of weeks that anyone can remember. Seems that the Weather Gods enjoy messing with construction schedules. They toss a torrential rain here, a wallop of hail there, and look how the ant-like humans scramble! What fun to create a domino effect of delaying a concrete pour, so that the framers also get delayed, and the backfilling can't happen, and so on, ad infinitum.

Not only do said gods enjoy the delays that makes us puny humans tear our hair out, they also get quite a giggle out of causing damage wherever they can, like to our poor roughed-in road.

Rain + cement trucks = one very sad, sad road.

This is what our road looked like after the cement guys tried to make it up to the site, slid all over the place, then gave up and went home. Not a pretty sight!

The scouring rain also sent many tons of sediment washing down into our not-quite-finished culvert/drainage trenches, which will now need to be dug out all over again.

But wait: the Weather Gods  had another trick up their sleeve: HAIL! Oh my goodness, when Nevada skies get to hailin', they don't hold back. Most hail storms I have seen in other places were brief, but the one we got last week had some serious staying power, taking its sweet time while pelting our sage and pinion world with a thick layer of pea-sized ice balls.

This was the Eveready of hail storms...it kept going, and going, and going...

I could only imagine what a hellish tattoo the horses were enduring at the barn, which has a metal roof that is loud even when it rains. Knowing my boys, they probably scooted out of the barn as soon as the hail started to fall, preferring to get pelted rather than stay put in such a thunderous and scary racket.

Fortunately, even a freakishly long string of storms must eventually come to an end, and when it did, the site got busy again. Yesterday, I got to watch as the concrete for the stem walls was poured, which was very cool to see. The concrete gets pumped through a big tube carried by a huge, articulating boom that can easily reach across the entire site.

The concrete boom reaches for a far corner.

One guy controls the boom with a wireless joy-stick set-up, which required great concentration to keep it moving and in just the right position. See kids, playing all those video games IS applicable to employment in the real world!

This fellow (who calls himself "Butter" -- I kid you not), controlled the boom, a very precise job.

The guy on the other end aims the tube as it shoots wet concrete into the forms, which have a slot in the top just for this purpose.

Other guys then come along and stuff the concrete down with their gloved hands, while another walks along banging a hammer on the sides of the forms, all aimed at eliminating any air pockets inside the forms.

The concrete production line.

There was also some catch-up work to do with the footings that had not gotten poured on the day the trucks could no longer make it up the road.  I got to watch this, too, and was impressed by the care and finesse that went into creating smooth and level surfaces for the footings.

Smoothing the footings.

Speaking of smooth and level, it really was amazing to see how precise all of this work has been. Michael explained to me that it is extremely important for the foundation work to be spot on, according to the plans, as any mistakes or lack of evenness in the foundation can cause serious problems for everything that gets put on top of it. For this reason, the entire site was carefully marked and measured using bright string.

Marked and measured form showing the slot on top for concrete and the string that criss-crossed the whole site.

Then, just when we thought the sky would be blue and beautiful for days to come, some clouds formed up out of nowhere and started to spit -- at the precise moment that we were trying to get the last concrete truck up to finish the stem wall pour.

Where the heck did these come from?

Fortunately, we got lucky, with the rain staying too light to be of any consequence. Phew! We caught one small break at least.

So, now we are hoping that Roberto's crew gets the wooden forms off in time for Jason to do the backfilling, which is supposed to happen tomorrow afternoon. We thought the forms were coming off today, but when I went up to check this evening, they were still there. Sigh.

The framers are supposed to start on Monday -- that will be really amazing to watch! Floor joists first, then walls will start to sprout up, giving the whole thing a new sense of reality.

Meanwhile, we at least know that we are really and truly a construction site now -- because we have a Port-o-Potty on site!  No more peeing behind a bush for our hard-working crews.

All the comforts of home!

And, they should be extra grateful that they won't have to go tromping off behind the bushes these days, as the warmer weather we are getting has started to bring out the rattlesnakes.  Michael found this one in the driveway of our rented house just the other day:

Not a fellow you want to meet when going to answer "nature's call"!

While the rattlers are not a welcome sight, we are starting to see the very welcome return of larger numbers of wild horses, many of whom go off to parts unknown for several months in late Winter/early Spring.  We had a herd of about a dozen behind our yard today. You can see them by clicking on the video below:

And, check out the off-the-charts cuteness of this little girl, who was born to a small band we call "The Simpsons", after the cartoon family. The rather homely mare is Marge, the stallion is Homer, the filly born last year is Lisa, and this baby girl is (naturally) Maggie. Had she been a boy, she would have been Bart -- maybe next year will see the family complete! We were all surprised that Marge gave birth to such a colorful and pretty baby...we hope Maggie takes more after her daddy than her mom in terms of conformation, as poor Marge is the epitome of poorly put together.

Baby Maggie, as cute as they come.

I have taken pictures of baby Maggie twice now, and it has been very sweet to see what her older sister does when she thinks someone is possibly a threat to baby sis. Lisa, who has always been afraid of people, making herself scarce if you come anywhere near her, will now march right up to me fairly close, putting herself between me and Maggie. I can see real fear in her eyes -- she is still just as scared of people as she ever was -- but she is willing to put herself at risk to protect Maggie. 

Meanwhile, their momma, Marge, couldn't care less, as she is rather over-acclimated to humans. It was Marge, in fact, who gave me my very first wild horse encounter soon after I moved here. She was in our front yard with Homer and Lisa, who was a small baby then herself. When I went out to take her picture, Marge walked right up to me and sniffed my hand, hoping I might have some sort of treat for her. This is not supposed to happen -- it is illegal to feed the wild horses, but lots of people do, creating this "semi-tame" kind of scenario we see with Marge. 

Marge with baby Lisa last Fall, in front of our rented log house.

Well, that's all for the moment, folks. More next week when the framing starts!

Love to all.