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15 Feb ’12
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I let that set up over night and started on the walls the next morning, just spacing and making sure the joints are staggered
After letting that set up overnight I pulled the spacers, wiped down the tiles and sealed them
After letting the sealer dry, I started grouting and wiping again
I finally finished that, I then needed to trim out the shower entry
I ripped down some pine
and stained it up
and trimmed out the other side
my wife threw on a coat of poly
15 Feb ’12
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we cleaned up and went and got some chinese for dinner and came back and started staining the floor
and stained our way out the front door
and then it hit us both, the house was done. Besides setting the toilet when the floor dryed, we were finished, we felt a multitude of feelings, but one of the greatest feelings was sadness. We had spent so much time and energy over the years in planning the house, and worked on it for 4 and a half months straight, it was strange to be completed. The date was sunday oct 25th 2009, 6 days before Halloween which was our target date.
15 Feb ’12
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I spent the next 3 days screwing around with the toilet, I had to get 3 different toilets, before I could get one to fit. When the plumber had set the rough in for the toilet, he didn't take in account for the drywall, wainscoting and the baseboard, I had to drive to bangor, augusta and portland, before I could get one that fit. You wanna know frustration, try mounting 3 toilets and having to return them, oh
well we got it straightened out
we had the freezer delivered for the pantry
and the stove and refrigerator
and slowly moved in all our personal items during the week
had the washer and dryer delivered, of course this was a issue, it doesn't come with a conversion kit, so we had to special order it and had to take our clothes to the laundromat for 2 weeks to dry
got the entertainment center set up
set up the kitchen
and on sunday november 1st, we brought the dogs and cats down, and officially moved in
2 days later I woke up and saw my wife standing out front just looking around, it was good to be home
15 Feb ’12
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winter quickly set in
the house outperformed our expectations, we used slightly over a half cord of wood the first year
the following spring we had to address the front of the house. The dirt we had put on top of the insulation became a huge mess. We were debating between installing a wood deck or pouring a slab. One design flaw we had with the house is we didn't pin the front wall to the slab. In the Mr. Roys original design he had backfilled the front of the house as well which would keep the wall from shifting out. My wife wanted to keep the front open and I had not modified the design and anchored the wall to the footer. To get around this we decided to pour a slab two inches above the wall and pin it to the footer to basically sandwich the wall between the interior slab and the outside slab. It wasn't perfect but it was the best solution we could come up with.
So in the spring we scraped off the topsoil
and exposed the footer
we cleaned it up the best we could, the bottom was quite rough, we would have to address this later
We set up some forms
and staggered it back to form a step down to the granite
we ripped up the filtration fabric
and raked it out, exposing the footing drain. We went and rented a compactor
and spent the next couple hours raking and compacting
15 Feb ’12
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we backfilled around the forms to stop any blowouts
and started drilling out pin holes into the footer
and hammered in 2 foot sections of rebar
we ran rebar around the perimeter
and laid down wire mesh
all ready to pour
15 Feb ’12
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The next morning the pump trailer showed up, because of the way the house sits we had to pump it around
we ran the hose around the building
and started pulling concrete
we started floating the slab
and it quickly set up
I let it cure for two days and started pulling the forms off
he was not impressed
I had to brainstorm a way to finish off the bottom
15 Feb ’12
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we decided to cut the slab into a 3x3 gridwork so it looked like a large tile floor and to provide stress relief
and snapped a line and cut the bottom of the stucco 5.5 inches off the bottom
all done, we also had a seamless gutter delivered
we used a piece of 2x6 pressure treated and filled in the bottom cut, we also installed a drain for the gutters
the next afternoon we washed the cement several times to get it clean
and my wife started staining with the same stain as inside
we mulched around the slab
and mounted the gutter and piped it through the drains, we used this for our rain water catchment system
at this point the house itself was officially done
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