2011.07.04 - Windows & Doors

We finally got doors & windows installed (minus the front door). Rachel & I went to several places to look at windows and door options, took prices and looked at features. We timed it perfectly and got high quality product at Home Depot for a significant discount, and so we chose them. The doors and windows were delivered and that's when we discovered that the beautiful front door was damaged. It wasn't damaged on delivery, as we saw the guy bring it off the truck with the fork lift. Nothing he did would've caused this. It was likely caused either during shipping or else at the factory. Regardless, we weren't going to pay for a bad door.
Nearly a week later, nothing had been done by Home Depot and they weren't returning our calls or doing anything about it. That was frustrating.
One of Rachel's co-workers' husband works for Home Depot so he came out and inspected. Normally, he doesn't do that, but he did it for us. He took photographs of the damage. However, after that, we couldn't get any involvement from the store management. This was terribly frustrating.
However, after we started bugging them, I think one of the assistant managers finally got involved and realized that there was a problem.
However, the store manager insulted Rachel (practically) by telling her that he'd give her a $200 discount on the door and was willing to "sell" her some stain for the door at a discount.
Give me a break. The door had a distressed finish, but "come on". Offering to sell us stain was an insult.
So we told them to come get the door. They ordered a new door to replace that one and we're waiting for that.
In the meantime, we contracted with a guy to come out and install the windows and doors. I took off work and was home to help him. We also got help from our son when I got tired of carrying the windows. The double windows were pretty heavy, as were the french doors.

They're all installed. I took a few photographs. We're pretty happy with the quality, and the assistant manager at Home Depot made things right, so we have no complaints with them. We're just waiting on the front door and some screen replacements for the french doors.

2011.05.04 - Hoping to Close In Soon

I’ve been meaning to write up an update on what we’ve been doing. Rachel has felt an urgency to get more progress done and so although we both have full-time jobs and a lot of maintenance around the homestead to do, we have put forth a major effort in the last couple of weeks towards closing the house in. We’ve framed in the open areas of the exterior concrete walls. We’ve met with various door and window suppliers and taken bids, and Rachel believes she’s found the one that she’s happiest with. She wants to get the exterior doors and windows installed in early June, so that means that we’ve got to have the exterior walls ready for that.

Anyway, progress has been good and we hope to wrap that up this weekend and then be able to put some sheathing over the framed exterior areas. That’ll have us ready.
We still need to address waterproofing on the roof, but it’s been rainy and wet and we’ve just not addressed it. Clearly that’ll be the next step. We plan on waterproofing, and then covering the waterproofing material with old carpet to protect it from the sun. We’ll leave it like that for a while and wait for more rain so that we can verify that our waterproofing job has been adequate. Then we will get the dirt on the roof.

In addition to the basic waterproofing, once we start adding dirt, we will add a liner for additional waterproofing, and grade that so that water will flow off the roof rather than puddle in areas as it does now. And in addition to the liner, we will add some sheet insulation to protect the liner and also insulate in a manner in keeping with the PAHS theory, which will not only provide good waterproofing and insulation, but will also help the house maintain a more constant temperature year round.

2011.04.03 - We hope to make progress this summer

After a cold winter, we're anxious to get back to work on the house. We have a number of goals to accomplish before next winter. We want to get the roof waterproofed and bermed once and for all. We want to close the house in and get the exterior doors and windows installed. To that end, we've begun taking bids on doors and windows and I've put in an order for the steel framing material that we'll use to close in the openings in our concrete structure.

Rachel and I installed hangers in the garage so that we can finally make our "warehouse" a little more useable. The floor space had been used up by various building materials and having the wall set up for storage, this frees up some of our floor space for other things. If we're going to be moving forward this summer, we'll need to utilize our space more efficiently.

We have more to do in the garage to reclaim floor space and store away the materials we have in a better way. Hopefully, we wont allow the storage area to be used as inefficiently as we allowed before.

Hopefully, in a month or so, I should be able to report progress again. We'll see.