Spray foam insultation

 This past weekend Chris and his brother,Cale, began the process of putting in spray foam insulation. Thankfully, Cale is a spray tech and had the time to spend the weekend...plus a few more nights after work...helping Chris to get it all done.

The outside South corner of the house. This area will be built to hold the wood boiler and other equipment required for the radiant floor heating

This is the kitchen done.

This is the upstairs north grain bin.

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The living room ceiling being sprayed.

Spraying in some of the pallet walls in the back of the house.

All in all, spray foam insulation cost a bit more in the beginning but it will be worth it in the long run. It cost around $8000 for the material to spray foam it. We got the labor for free ( thanks Cale!..brothers are the best). I also got the trim painted on the back, it was too dark to take pictures tonight though.

Finishing the outside

I have noticed that I have not touched too much on the amount that we have spent so far. After the electric and buying the spray foam insulation we have come up with a total of $47,860 so far on our 3200 square foot house. There are only a few more big ticket items left to buy and then the rest of it will be a few hundred at a time. That price includes the fixtures for the bathrooms, much of the walls and ceilings for the inside,the kitchen cabinets, the doors and hardware ( in and out), and many of the light fixtures, all of which are waiting patiently in storage!

The last few weekends we have worked on plumbing and finishing up the outside of the house. Not much you can take pictures of when it comes to plumbing. It really is not all that exciting!

Someone has to finish painting the trim on the back of the house.....*cough,cough* ME!

The deck on the back is done. We will be adding a handicap ramp on this deck but just haven't go to it yet. The siding is painted but again...the trim!

Side view of the front. The wagon wheels are at some point going to be the side railing for the front porch. We got most of them at a garage sale for $10 a piece.

Around the inside upper edge of the porch there will be a shelf. On that shelf will be a row of these old telephone insulators with lights under them all. We picked up the insulators at several auctions usually only paying $5 for a bucket of them.

Here is the front painted....the light is not great because it is early.

Fine tuning the front

These are the colors we picked for the front of the house! We were trying to make whatever we decided on go with the existing red barn and outbuilding. That same red is on the roof of the grain bins too. The main color of the siding will be a tan and the trim a dark brown. 

The leftover cutoffs from the porches were put to use around the top of the front porch to cover the I-beams on the inside. I cut over 150 of them to nail up.

This is what they looked like going up. The little silver screw heads int he tin will be painted.

Ta-da! The door looks much better painted!

The long view of the porch before adding the small pieces of wood.

The siding was added to the sides of the porch. and trimmed out with cedar. ( we have a ton of leftover cedar so we are using it where ever we can.)

The little pieces of cedar are all up and the tin on the soffit is up also. The front porch has three can lights in the ceiling but will also have a shelf around the outside edge and a row of small lights under old telephone insulators.

Working on the little stuff

Chris has finally been able to take a few days off and we have been working on finishing some of the stuff that has been started but not yet completed. Finishing the framing on the porch and getting it all closed up on the outside. We started to paint a little bit of the house. We picked out the colors because over Labor Day weekend they had a ton of sales on paint at the hardware stores.That meant that we had to try them out and make sure we liked them. Chris worked on some of the plumbing for the house. He is using pecs for the water lines. We had to end up buying two hot water heaters( we had two instant hot water heaters that we were planning on using but they pulled too much power for the service that we have here).

The following are pictures of some more decorative tin that we were able to pick up thanks to a friend of mine who has been keeping an eye out for some. The gentleman we bought it from only charged us $50 for the truck load of it, and he loaded it for me.

This is the building that the tin came off of before it was taken down. It was a building on main street in Appleton City from 1895 or 1896.

 

This is from the pile of decorative tin we bought from Frontier Village in Adrian. It was in the upstairs of a department store that they moved to their site and the upstairs had to be removed because it was in such bad shape. They saved the tin that they could from it and we were able to buy it. 

To go with the colors on the front of the house though,it had to be painted.

This is a picture of the in starting to go up on the front porch.

The back deck also got finished!!!! Now the ramp and stairs have to be added to it but that requires another trip to the store!

It's electric....

We have not gotten a whole lot done on the house. Chris has been working so many hours and honestly has only gotten two days off in the last month and the building process has comes to a standstill because of it. The school he is working on is set to open for the year the 25th of August. I have never looked forward to a coming school year so much! Maybe then Chris will get a much needed few days off. At this point even if he got a weekend again we would be through the roof happy!

This is the back deck that Chris started building last month.

This is all the farther he has gotten on it. I guess we should be happy that working in construction he has a job and stays busy BUT there is a point when you wonder if all the hours are really worth it.

He did get the flashing around the grain bins mostly done too. It took several ideas before he came up with what he wanted to use to join the roof to the grain bin.

We ended up using flashing and a metal brake to bend it, a roll of flexible rubberized flashing on top of that, he then added a bead of special exterior caulking to the top edge of it all to make sure. It has rained several times since he sealed it and there has been no water coming in ( except for the one side of the roof that he has been able to get done yet). He is only able to work on the flashing early in the morning because the roof gets pretty soft this time of year during the day when that asphalt heats up.Since he hasn't had any mornings off lately, he hasn't been able to get to it.

Thankfully, our son Hunter helps to pick up what I can't do. We had to rent a trencher to put in the electric service and Hunter got to play with it. He dug two lines for power. We will have two electrical panels a 200 amp and a 100 amp panel. Hunter also dug and laid the water line while we had the trencher. It cost us $175 for the day to rent.

A preview of the air conditioning for Hunter's grain bin. It is a mini split and will provide heat and air.

What the inside looks like. This unit is small and cost around $500.

You can't tell much from the picture but we are getting ELECTRIC!!!! Yeah! It really seems more like a house when you add all the plugs and lights to the walls. The rough in should be done later this week. We hired a friend of my dad's who has made quite a drive to get here but we trust him and there is something to be said for knowing who you hire when you do have to hire someone! All in all this month has not been a total loss on progress just slow. We are thankful to get to the inside part. Chris is going to work on the trim and some other things on the outside first though before he gets to the finish work inside so maybe we can get it painted when the weather starts to cool off a bit. It is just too hot to paint now!

Finished framing

Chris has been working so much at his regular job that the building process has almost come to a halt. The good news is he was able to take off a few days this past weekend and get the framing inside finished up so that we can talk to the HVAC installer and the electrician and they can take over for a bit. Those two items should be the only thing we pay someone else to do!

This is the framing upstairs in the Master bedroom. It will be a closet,bathroom( with the window) and another closet.

The framing on the side of the bedroom that leads downstairs. We go back and forth on if we will put windows in the wall to let the light in from the stairwell. If we leave them will will probably frost them.

The kitchen pantry door has been framed in and the cabinets for the kitchen have been laid out....the tape on the floor :) The fridge will go next to the pantry, the sink will go under the window and then closer to the bigger window at the right will be the stove. There will also be an island in the center of the room.

The large deck off the back has been started too! Like I said, Chris was busy this weekend!

All of the windows are now in and the exterior will stay much the same. Now that the framing inside is done Chris will switch to trimming out the outside until the electric and HVAC is completed and he has a bit more time. He has been working 7 days a week at work.

working on framing and another material auction

This little guy has been keeping us busy! We got a new bottle calf and taking care of him keeps us busy.

Chris has been working on the ceiling joists on the North grain bin. They are spaced on 16 inch centers at the wall and then taper up to be side by side at the top. We ended up buying all the 2x4's for the joists at a lumber yard that has a 20% off sale on the holidays.

What it looks like at the top of the ceiling. The ridge that holds all the panels of the roof together is helping support the joists. The joists are notched and then tied to the ridge and then nailed to the wall studs and screwed to the metal at the top of the circle. The walls on this side of the grain bin will not go all the way to the top. We wanted it open even though there are two bedrooms on this side. There is a loft area above the bathroom and it will have partial walls. We are thinking that the top grain door will have a skylight in it.

We went to a building material auction last weekend. We were able to get our kitchen cabinets. I wanted them to be quite plain because I want the old tin ceiling to really be the focal point.  We ended up getting 5 lower cabinets, 5 upper cabinets and the small 2 that go over the stove and over the fridge, for $1600. The only other thing that we bought that day, 3444 foot of cedar decking to finish the front porch and to build a back deck. We paid .65 cents a foot for it. Then we ended up having to order the rest of the flooring that we needed for the South grain bin upstairs. We are still waiting for it to come in. It cost us $12 a board and we needed 25 to finish out the floor where we ran short.

This weekend Chris and I were able to get one of the windows in on the south grain bin, the walls and  the ceiling half way framed. We can't do much else in there until we get the flooring and it is supposed to be here this week. We do have an electrician coming tomorrow to look at the house and figure out what he needs. He is a friend of the family and is coming from a long way away to do this for us.