Construction Blogging: I was framed! [I'm still being framed.]

Progress on the house has been a little slower than I would like.  Our framing crew was tied up on another house, and there were some issues that kept them from getting on our site as quickly as planned.  In the meantime, we worked on some other stuff, including digging a well and getting the concrete floor poured in the crawlspace.

Drillers in the mist

Well drilling is kind of gross.

The framers finally got on site a couple of days before we were scheduled to leave on our hiking vacation, and they got a ton of stuff done on the first day!  They had the entire first-floor subfloor built, one wall put up, and another wall assembled.  

But then they didn't show up the next day!  Ben told our foreman that he was disappointed but that, if we came home after the next week and very little had been done, at that point he would be pissed.  We were pretty confident that some good work would get done while we were out of town, but unfortunately, we got a text on Tuesday of that week telling us that the framing crew got COVID and would be unable to work that week.  So, when we got home from vacation, this was once again what we saw:

I guess you can't really get pissed when your framing crew didn't work due to what could be a life-threatening virus, so we just had to sit and stew.  At least the garage floor had been poured, but unfortunately the drain that they put in the floor was not the drain we wanted.  We put a drain in the floor so we can wash cars inside, wash out the floor when we want to, etc.  Our last garage had a long, rectangular drain; and that's what we wanted in this one as well.  Instead, we got a tiny round drain.  This has been noted as an issue that may have to be corrected, but we're going to wait until we get some rain and see how the floor drains before we make them cut it up.

Can you even spot the drain?  Doesn't make much sense to have a tiny drain in the middle of a 40 x 50 garage, but what do I know?  I've only been washing cars in a garage since I was about 8 years old...

Anyway, the framers are back this week!  I'm not sure if that's in accordance with CDC guidelines, but we're staying away from them just in case.  😏  They must be feeling pretty good, though, because they are ROCKING OUT the framing.  We also had a mason out to build our fireplace.

This was the change on the framers' first day back on the job.

And the front view

And the second day

I was at the house today but didn't get any pictures because I was showing a couple of Pilot's construction/environmental guys around (those poor framers had no idea whose watchful eyes were judging them).  Today, they started building the floor for the second story and got some more of the garage walls put up.  So we're finally moving right along, and I hope we can keep it up.  It's time for me to start picking stuff out, so hopefully I'll start having a little more fun with the process, too.