Home buying thread

Little more progress this week. They spent some time getting mother-in-law's house moving so she's barely ahead of us now. Since hers is smaller I think it was more efficient for them to do what they could between the excessive heat days and kind of holding off for a longer period to do ours.

She's got plumbing and vapor barrier down, they'll target slab pour either tomorrow or Monday depending on weather. They need to finish off a couple of spots with some additional rebar, complete adding the dobies to the wire mesh, and tape a few more seams but she's coming along.



We should have plumbing done tomorrow and Saturday. They'll come through and spray dirt for termites, do vapor barrier, and we may be on schedule for slab pour end of next week depending on heat. They won't pour in > 100 degrees and that is day-to-day right now.

A little progress on our build finally...

had plumbing done, conduit for island power, vapor barrier, rebar and mesh installed, shower form was added. That was end of last week, start of this week. Most of the under-slab plumbing are drains and clean outs. The recirc for hot water will be run through the 1st/2nd floor joists instead of underground. That way we don't lose heat to the earth acting like a big heat sink.



Then today they poured slab. It isn't supposed to break 100. Hoping everything sets well. We've got extra sprinklers to keep it wet, fiber strands were added to concrete, doing a couple extra relief / control joints. Will go back and take more photos once it is set and all.




Thought it was cool how they lay out the lines for the pour, and here on the back porch you can see it is slightly sloped away from the house.

Went to check on the slab as it cured and everything looked pretty good. Very very small hairline settling cracks in two spots, but almost not visible unless light was just right. Didn't see anything significant or concerning, at least from my layman perspective.

The ortho from the drone was a little off or something. Could measure it correctly in WebODM but trying to overlay the plans didn't line up so had to scale it just a tad. Don't know enough about this to really say why, but the individual measurements in WebODM match the plans but overlaying the two pictures didn't match. Probably a lot of technical reasons from scale and distortion that still exist.


We also received the 1st full invoice for all the foundation work. Overall, we're +3.8% at the moment. Some items were lower, some higher, but it works out to about $3,000 over on $77,000 estimate. I can live with that for now. We did request additional rebar throughout the slab; the clearing was a little more extensive and getting the grade exactly how we wanted. Everything tracks and I don't think we're getting robbed of anything.

Now that we have actuals coming in, I'm still tweaking the display a little bit to track draw requests vs what is actually paid and what has been budgeted.

I'm probably the only one interested in any of this, but I can't not apply work things to daily life. Even though I do more program management today and not individual project management, I still enjoy messing with data.

Framing going on! Almost have a completed 1st floor. They're finishing up some bracing, installing another LVL for the space between kitchen and living, then will start exterior sheathing tomorrow. Floor system should be delivered tomorrow and then next week they'll get into the upstairs framing and should have some more updates. Walking through it is super exciting now b/c it feels like a house and what it may eventually look like.


I'm continually impressed by how clean this jobsite is. Letting the kids run around is 0% worry b/c there's not a nail or piece of trash, anything, on the slab. Could almost eat off this thing.


Back yard view where our 18' slider will go looking out into the back yard. Extra heavy support beam above it. Pretty much spans the length of the living area with a few feet on each side. Then there will be another beam to the left dividing living area from kitchen area.