I pretty much expected this week to be a loss because we're supposed to get somewhere along the lines of seven inches of rain throughout the week. It wasn't supposed to rain until today (Tuesday), though, so our builder had left the shingles off of our existing laundry room after joining the laundry room roof with the roof of the new house last Friday. I assume he meant to cover it yesterday before it started raining, but when we woke up yesterday morning, it was already raining. Ben texted Phillip at about 7:00 yesterday morning to ask him to send someone out here to tarp that roof before the laundry room got ruined, and he said he already had a guy on the way. So I think we averted that crisis, but we ended up with a rainy day on the one day this week that we thought we wouldn't have rain.
In spite of the terrible forecast, however, the guys have made great amounts of progress over the past couple of days. The rain stopped yesterday morning and held off until last night, so the siding guys were able to finish up the trim on the front of the house (except on the laundry room part, which is still in flux due to the roof-joining issue) yesterday.
Today, Gray Hodges delivered my bathtub and the tub/shower unit for the upstairs bath. Here's a picture of Phillip earning his keep and carrying the tub/shower unit up the ramp.
The picture is from one of my security cameras. I wasn't just standing there being a jerk taking pictures while the guys carried heavy things. Anyway, we kind of had a hard time finding a tub/shower unit that would work, as the upstairs bath is on the end of the upper level and has a sloped ceiling on both sides of the room. The side walls are only 6 feet tall and, of course, the ceiling gets taller as you move toward the center of the room due to the roof slope. Anyway, we could only find one tub/shower unit that would fit on the 6-foot wall height; and man, it fit like a freaking glove. Another half inch, and it wouldn't have worked.
Phillip's guys worked on the deck yesterday and today and have built it out around the front of the kitchen toward the existing garage. It will eventually come all the way around the side of the house and connect to the deck that is on the garage now.
Our electricians have also been working the past couple of days. We had a long walk-through with them yesterday afternoon to tell them what fixtures we're going to have, where we want switches, etc. Now they're just pulling the wires.
Probably the craziest thing that happened today is that one of Phillip's guys spent all day caulking any and all joints, cracks, open spaces, whatever on the inside of the exterior walls.
This is actually a requirement of the Town of Farragut. They have apparently adopted this "International Building Code" that carries with it a lot of energy-efficient requirements and other pains in the arse not generally required outside of our fair Town. One of the requirements is that they have to do some kind of test by which they attach a sucking mechanism to a hole in the house, suck a bunch of air out, and the air-tightness has to meet some target level before the house passes inspection (I'm obviously not very good at explaining this - I lost interest after listening to Phillip and Ben discuss it for 10 minutes). They told our builder that all this caulking would be necessary to pass that test. So we're paying for a guy to spend two (or more) whole days and a case of caulk on this crap.
Moving on: It actually rained quite a bit today, so I was surprised to see that the siding guys had moved around to the back of the house and started putting the siding on. They also got the trim done around the garage door frame.
They finished the trim on the front so the stone guys could come back and finish the stone on the front, and then they moved to the back to stay out of the stone guys' way. I'm not in love with the naked color of the Hardi-Plank siding (it will eventually be painted the same color as the garage), but it will be nice to have a yellow house for a while instead of a green one.
I hope we can keep this progress going through the rest of this rainy week. Our shingles were delivered today, and I also hope to report roofing progress once it stops raining early next week.
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