My new favorite things

I don't think the pictures here match the actual products, or properly reflect how excited I am - what we're looking at in the first picture is our new stove, a Wolf 48" range with six burners and a griddle, and two ovens.  I am very, very happy with this stove.  When we first started looking for appliances, we checked out the usual suspects and thought we'd get a nice but average 30" or 36" stove.  Maybe something a little bit nicer, definitely stainless steel, but all in all, nothing too crazy.  Then I wandered over to the much, much higher-end section of store (damn you, appliance showrooms and your manipulative layouts), saw the big Wolf range, and promptly decided that this was the stove that needed to move into our new kitchen.  I checked the price tag and sadly realized that the Wolf cost more than the first car I ever bought (granted, it was a pretty cheap car but still).  After quite a bit of research and a few months worth of polite but persistent phone calls, I located a floor model Wolf with all the features we wanted, struck a deal, and voila...we have a gorgeous new range at a (relatively) reasonable price!  As a result of my bargain shopping, we had to take delivery of the range before we were really ready for it so it's now sitting in the still unfinished kitchen space, but we'll be careful and work around it.  A little inconvenience is a small price to pay for such a lovely range.

On other happy news, drywall finally started this week after a brief delay caused by last week's flood and subsequent drying out.  We subbed out the work and it's taken them three days just to do the closets and upstairs bathrooms, so I'm glad that we're getting some help on this project!  So far, our laundry room (second picture), master bedroom closet (third picture), and most of the master bath (fourth picture) now have walls.  It's great to walk around and feel like the house is finally becoming more of a house than a construction zone.

Much work, few pictures

We spent the long weekend insulating the addition, the second floor, and the crawl space and it was a long weekend indeed.  Unfortunately for blog post purposes, insulation is one of the more boring things to photograph since all the walls look, well, like walls.  But all the walls are now stuffed full of insulation!  It turns out that the Roxul is not as itch-free as advertised (a lesson we learned the hard way, predictably) but it was still much easier than working with fiberglass.  We have a bit of the crawl space left to do but first we have to get the plumber out here to fix the last drain (a task we thought was done until we crawled under there and saw that it wasn't).  So, we'll probably have one more day of itchy work before we can call this task complete.

On other news, we're looking forward to starting drywall next Monday.  We went ahead and hired it out after calculating that it would probably take us a couple of months worth of weekends to do it ourselves.  Instead, they'll probably be finished in a week or two and then we should have some better pictures to share!

Insulation begins

We passed all our inspections so it's time to insulate. We chose Roxul insulation for our house. It has a higher R-value than fiberglass and you can touch it with your skin without getting itchy. Although it does feel like a thick wool sweater so it's not completely itch free, but it washes off whereas fiberglass doesn't. I've done 3 bags out of 32 and it goes somewhat quickly. You can cut it with an electric knife easily, but it's very dense and heavy. A bag of it weighs about 60 pounds so hauling it upstairs was quite a workout. We're making sure to foam or caulk all the edges and any gaps so we should have a very tight, energy efficient home when we're done.
Roxul is also a green product made from 40 percent recycled material. The R-value is 4 to 8 higher than comparable depth fiberglass. Plus it's fire resistant and a better sound barrier. The downside is that it's twice the price of fiberglass, but we're saving money doing it ourselves. I think our cheapest bid using the cheapest material was $4200 and the Roxul and cellulose for the attic cost us about $2200. It should take us the better part of 2 days for the walls and another day for the attic when the drywall ceiling is up, but you can't argue with the cost savings or energy efficiency gains! Should be a productive weekend.

Judgment Day

No, not the impending Hurricane Irene, but Arlington County inspection day. How did we fare with the building, plumbing, mechanical, and electrical inspections? Well... let's see... everything we did ourselves passed no problem (yay!). However, the one thing that didn't pass was the drains/waste/vents that we paid a master plumber to do (boo!). Hmmmm go figure.... it's possible it would have passed if he showed up today when he said he would (or at all for that matter). So the inspector rejected the vents and drains, but gave us the OK to go ahead and insulate. Our insulation isn't getting here until Friday so we should be able to get the plumber and the inspector back on site early this week to get everything hashed out. We have to get the insulation inspected so we can't put up the drywall yet anyways. All in all it was good news from the inspection department.

Earthquake Tuesday

I marked Earthquake day here in Arlington by continuing work on the house. I'm off this week on a little staycation to finish all the odds and ends so we're ready for our inspections. The plumber came out to finish up the drains. The tubs are hooked in and theoretically ready to use. All the valves are installed and the PEX rough in is complete. It is holding a steady air pressure for a few days now so I'd say the install was perfect. Not one leak... not too bad for a part time plumber. I also got the attic baffles installed so we can insulate as soon as our inspections pass. Looks like we're going to save $2000 by doing the insulation ourselves. Plus we're using a higher quality insulation called Roxul. Its rock wool so it's not itchy like fiberglass and the r-value is about 4-5 points higher.

The house also survived its first decent sized earthquake.

Picture Perfect

Saturday was a busy day - we got up early and picked up a cargo van so we could buy a whole mess of lumber (see below for why), a bathtub for the second upstairs bath, and other assorted bulky items.  Then we spent the rest of the day finishing the exterior trim on six first floor windows, a task made much easier by one of our new toys, the Kreg jig.  Using the jig, we drilled pocket holes in the trim pieces and then screwed them together to make picture frame window trim.  Because we're working with old brick window openings, we also had to add trim pieces to level the windows before we could put the frames on.  It took the entire afternoon to do all six windows but now all the windows that are exposed to the weather are finished and caulked - a nice feeling given all the thunderstorms we've been getting lately. 

Early morning

We got up early to beat the heat in the attic to install a storage platform. It took us a couple hours, but we gained some nice storage space. Kristin protested with a sit-in halfway through since I woke her up too early. I met her demands of a nap today and work continued.