Home buying thread

Nija

Nija

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Pink throne yard art at a friend of mine's place. There's a real, regular outhouse on the other side of the property that has the entire seating area bedazzled, with led strobe lights that turn on when you open the door. Fake edit: the trees are all mangled after the tornadoes that we had in NW Arkansas awhile back. It'll take some time to get back to where it was. (picture from the winter before last I think)

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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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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.

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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.

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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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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.

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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.

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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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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.

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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Seananigans

Seananigans

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Intrinsic said:
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.

View attachment 640251

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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.

View attachment 640253

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.

View attachment 640254
Click to expand...

Dude, I love this, thank you. Keep them coming!
 
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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Seananigans said:
Dude, I love this, thank you. Keep them coming!
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I have a TON of drone shots, down to walking through the framing holding the drone (this weekend I may completely disable the sensor’s and try to fly it through). But I try to limit the posts to just a couple. If there’s anything you’d like to see closet construction wise just ask.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Got a Reolink outdoor camera with solar panel to mess around with and check in on build. Data plan isn't bad at all, $5 / month for 1 gig. I don't keep it streaming or anything full time. Just threw it up on a tree today. Will go back and adjust it this week.

Tomorrow have to go with MIL to do her plumbing and electrical walkthrough for her build. Will be nice getting to work through it with her before we're ready for ours.

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Fucking spiders…

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R

rectifryer

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Some people REALLY hate when the kids from the pool run in the house to go to the bathroom without fully drying off. So that guy decided to just put a shitter out by the pool pump for those quick pisses. Maybe the dude of the house himself doesn't like taking the time to dry off to go piss.
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It’s pretty common in Florida tbh. It’s next to the outdoor shower for the pool. Someone just wants to shit while swimming, not really something to complain about imo.
 
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Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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A lot done so far, still about 100,000 things to decide. Was out at the site today with my MIL and her house, so flew the drone over the trees to take some pictures.

Roof is pretty much completely framed, by the time we left a whole lot of the decking was completed. They were waiting on a 2nd delivery of material but will probably have 90% of it wrapped up today.

Having a ton of trouble making changes while looking at it and am going back and forth on so many small things. We talked forever about doing exposed rafter tails around the whole house, but then started talking about what to do with the gutters and the fascia board covering up the rafter tails. Talked about doing it only on the porch. Talked about the pitch of the roof at the bottom of the gable. I never caught it in the plans but the center and right gable are 8:12 and the left gable is 6:12 b/c the roof has a different pitch over there. So, now talking to them about making them all 6:12, I think 3:12 would be good to match the porch roof but we don't think that'll work due to where the gable bottom meets the roof.

Now talking about doing open eaves in the gable rake instead of across the whole house. Doing ceder wrapped outlooks and tongue and groove inside the eaves. That, at least, you could see from the street and ground while looking up into them.

Have talked about changing to shake shingles in the gables. It just never ends and I have nfc what to do. We had an interview with an architect / designer from Ontario last week that was very nice. She's working on a proposal to help with interior design stuff but I think it'll take too long to get her on board to help with these exterior elevation questions. The good news is that we can hold off finishing the gables for a bit, and hold off closing in the porch if we want to make a pivot there.

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Lanx

Lanx

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Intrinsic said:
A lot done so far, still about 100,000 things to decide. Was out at the site today with my MIL and her house, so flew the drone over the trees to take some pictures.

Roof is pretty much completely framed, by the time we left a whole lot of the decking was completed. They were waiting on a 2nd delivery of material but will probably have 90% of it wrapped up today.

Having a ton of trouble making changes while looking at it and am going back and forth on so many small things. We talked forever about doing exposed rafter tails around the whole house, but then started talking about what to do with the gutters and the fascia board covering up the rafter tails. Talked about doing it only on the porch. Talked about the pitch of the roof at the bottom of the gable. I never caught it in the plans but the center and right gable are 8:12 and the left gable is 6:12 b/c the roof has a different pitch over there. So, now talking to them about making them all 6:12, I think 3:12 would be good to match the porch roof but we don't think that'll work due to where the gable bottom meets the roof.

Now talking about doing open eaves in the gable rake instead of across the whole house. Doing ceder wrapped outlooks and tongue and groove inside the eaves. That, at least, you could see from the street and ground while looking up into them.

Have talked about changing to shake shingles in the gables. It just never ends and I have nfc what to do. We had an interview with an architect / designer from Ontario last week that was very nice. She's working on a proposal to help with interior design stuff but I think it'll take too long to get her on board to help with these exterior elevation questions. The good news is that we can hold off finishing the gables for a bit, and hold off closing in the porch if we want to make a pivot there.

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having just dealt w/ my own hvac, are you gonna have 1 unit whole house, or 1 unit per floor?
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Lanx said:
having just dealt w/ my own hvac, are you gonna have 1 unit whole house, or 1 unit per floor?
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1 per floor. That’s how our current house is and I won’t have it any other way.

I have 3 independent Manual J/D/S plus the one from the company my builder is suggesting and none of them agree with each other. HVAC is a total crap shoot. The old timers want to use their “rule of thumb” for 1 ton per 500-600 square feet and won’t listen to you when you tell them building science actually exists. Then when you get independent load calculations done the locals won’t install or warranty based on that, even though you may have PE stamped calcs. Because it isn’t there’s and they don’t trust it.

So, finding a needle in a haystack company that both does actual Manual J calcs and does new home construction HVAC is seemingly an impossibility here.

I’ve gone in circle with my builder and this is honestly one area that for 6 months we haven’t been able to see eye to eye on and we keep kicking the can down the road. Now that the roof is (mostly) done though, this is coming next in a few weeks. We’ll be forced into a decision and I’ll have to deal with it.
 
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