M.T. Acres

I am sorry for not posting an update last week, but due to our windows being on backorder, they did not accomplish much.  They did paint the eaves, but otherwise, not much happened.

However it did not take long for the birds to discover my office and build a nest in the ceiling.

And crap all over the floor.

The windows finally showed up last Wednesday and they were able to get them installed on Thursday.

Tina wanted a garden window in the kitchen.  The garden window they ordered was different than what we both expected, but we both like it better than what we thought it was going to be.  It has a glass shelf that can be set in the middle of the window, so I think it will work out nicely for growing Tina’s herbs.

They also started blowing the insulation into the walls and ceiling.

I am not sure if they plan to do a second coat of the insulation or if they are planning on just sheetrocking over it as is.  But we noticed some of the walls the insulation comes right to the edge of the studs, while some of it is only an inch or two deep.  I have a call into our builder to ask about that.  I am obviously not going to accept an insulation job that does not completely fill the void in the studs.

They also dropped off the sheetrock and mud.  I believe they have the sheetrockers scheduled to start this week.

They also delivered the roofing materials this week.  So I expect they will be installing the roof this coming week as well.  We decided to go with a steel roof so it should last for the rest of our lives.

Hopefully, this will be the last delay until we start our part of the construction.

They made good progress on the house again this week.  But we also found out all of the windows are on a two week backorder.  That means we will end up with at least a week where they will not be able to do anything.  Even so, it is starting to look like a real house now.

The bathtub is set in the master bathroom.

And in the guest bathroom.

The plumbing is run through the entire house.

And the water now runs from the well into the house.

Tina and I went to the house on Friday afternoon and met the carpenters.  They were in the process of installing the outside doors and the pocket door to the master closet while we were there.

On the outside of the house, they got the soffits done and got ready to do the roof this week.

We were talking to the carpenters and they mentioned the birds had already built a nest in the front entryway.

They also said when they showed up to work on Monday, there were two Great Horned Owls sitting in the garage.  Unfortunately, nobody got a picture of the owls.

Lastly unrelated to the house, as we were leaving the house Friday we saw a pretty good sized dust devil.  Although distances in the desert are very deceiving, I estimate the dust devil was about 2-3 miles away.  (The house you see in the foreground is about 1/2 mile from us.)

Back at the rental house, the lemon tree has about 8-10 lemons starting.

We were more than a little nervous about the water in our well a week ago.  When they initially tested it, they were only getting about 5 gallons per minute.  That is enough to get by, but it is still pretty low.

I am happy to report when they installed the bigger pump we are able to get over 9 gallons per minute consistently.  They said the pump draws the water down 11 feet while pumping.  But as soon as the pump shuts off, the water level returns to normal immediately.  It is also extremely quiet.  I was standing right next to it when I took this picture and could barely hear it running.  So that is a major problem averted (for now).

Most houses in the area have a 30 gallon pressure tank on their well to bring water into the house.  So we decided to go with a 1550 gallon non-pressurized tank with a secondary pressure pump.  That way, even if we do run into well problems, we still have water for a few days.

The bigger pump also required larger electrical service as well.  But that is okay since we do not want to have to re-run electrical service if we do have to drill the well deeper eventually.

They also got most of the ductwork installed as well as most of the electrical wires run.

I expect the electrical should be just about done by the end of the week.

One of the features the electrician convinced us to add is LED lighting on the bottoms of the top cabinets in the kitchen.  They will not change much on how I have to build the top cabinets and should look pretty nice and give Tina a good amount to light for working in the kitchen.  The thin black wires in the pictures below are to power the under cabinet lighting.

And they got the exhaust vent installed in the kitchen.  Initially, I was thinking Tina wanted a European style exhaust vent with the vent pipe exposed all the way to the ceiling.  But this will actually be better since it will allow her to have a top cabinet above the cooktop as well.

Finally, Tina had to go to Tucson to get the chimney pipe for the woodburning stove for the livingroom.  Since the stove was due to have a price increase in the next couple weeks, we decided to buy it now.  Although, we are not taking delivery on the stove until after the sheetrock and taping is done.

Wood stoves are expensive!  But the one we got should look pretty nice and with the mild winters, we are thinking it should be able to provide most of our heat in the winter.

Although the house does not look radically different than it did a week ago, it is easy to tell they made good progress again this week.

Our friend Eve wanted to see the progress of the house, so Tina and I went over on Friday afternoon and took Eve to lunch, then stopped by the house.

They have just about completed the framing and started working on the trades.

I especially like the way the front entryway came out.  We get a lot of wind, so having the front entry covered is going to be nice.

Still, the back porch is my favorite part of the whole house.

With the plywood on the trusses, we finally got a sense for what the high ceilings are going to look like.  We are both very happy with how those are coming together.

The electrician had just started tacking up boxes and few of the can lights.  When we got there, the HVAC guys were still busy installing the ductwork so I did not take too many pictures of the inside as I did not want to get in their way.

On Wednesday, I got a call from our builder Brad, with some bad news.  I had the well drilled 7 or 8 years ago right after we bought the land to make sure there was even water on the property, since no water meant building a house there was out of the question.  They had originally hit water at 500 feet.  They dug the well an additional 40 feet deep.  In the years since the well was drilled, the water level in our valley has dropped almost 30 feet!  Our well still has water, but if the water levels continue to drop we are going to have a problem.

I queried Brad about whether it made sense to just drill it another 100 or so feet now to avoid problems in the future.  However, Brad said sometimes the water levels come back up.  To further complicate matters, he mentioned that well drillers usually will not come out and set up to drill just 100 feet.  Plus, once the well has been drilled deeper once, it cannot be done again and we will have to drill a completely new well.

Therefore, Brad’s suggestion that we decided to follow is to put in a larger (and more expensive) pump than we originally planned.  That way, if/when we do need to drill down, we will not need to replace the pump too.  We are also going to have 1500 gallon above ground tank that will be filled automatically by the well.  We will draw the water for the house from the tank rather than directly from the well.

Finally unrelated to the house, Tina and I went into Tucson on Saturday to visit my mom.  A block away from my mom’s apartment is the largest nursery I have ever been in.  On the way back home, Tina convinced me to stop at the nursery.

We have been talking since we moved about getting some small citrus trees.  They sell “Midget” versions of most citrus trees that supposedly grow well in large pots and do not get bigger than 6-8 feet tall.  After looking at numerous “Midget” citrus breeds, we settled on trying a Midget Meyer Lemon tree.  Our friend Eve has one and she gets several dozen (full sized) lemons from it per year.  We looked through all of the Midget Meyer Lemon trees and settled on one that looked pretty healthy and had a bunch of blooms on it.

We bought the tree and a cheap pot and some dirt and took it home.  However, when Tina was planting it in the pot we found a tag on it and found out it was not a Midget Meyer Lemon tree.  It had been put in the wrong area of the greenhouse.  It is a full sized Meyer Lemon tree.  These damn things get to be 25 to 30 feet tall and 25 to 30 feet around!  Furthermore, they do not produce several dozen lemons per year; they produce several HUNDRED lemons per year!  I guess I am now in the lemon business too.

I went to the house today and they have enough plywood on the trusses that the inside of the house is actually shady.  There are still enough big holes that are not yet covered and enough holes in the OSB sheathing that I would still prefer to sleep in a tent over sleeping in the house.  But it is actually starting to look like a real house now.  Okay, maybe not a house yet, but at least a barn.

On Friday, Tina and I went to the house to meet with the Electrician to discuss how we actually want the house wired.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the way the house is actually wired does not need to match the blueprints as long as the wiring meets code.  It also appears we got real lucky building now rather than next year.  The Electrician mentioned that the code for our area follows a standard written in 2011 that requires circuit breakers costing about $5 each.  The 2014  version of the code, required by the area where our rental house is, requires circuit breakers costing $105 each!

The Electrician took careful notes of our meeting (all over the floor).  He told us the $ symbol means “switch”, but I am not that dumb.  He is a small businessman too.  So I am sure it means bleed this idiot’s bank account dry.

The Electrician also convinced me to add some LED lights under the top cabinets.  That is something that Tina wanted originally but I had convinced her to forego them due to the additional false bottom required in the cabinets.  (I was thinking of the under cabinet lights from 15 years ago when I made the cabinets for our Minnesota house.)  The new lights look pretty neat and I do not think it will change the design of my cabinets much, if any.

The plan for the coming week is to have the framing totally complete by mid week.  Then the Electrician and the HVAC guys will start their thing.  The following week will be the plumbers.

Last Saturday I went to the build site by myself because Tina was sick with a bad cold.  As I drove towards it, I was surprised that I could see it from almost 1/2 mile away!  It is actually a 3 dimensional project now!

The power company even had power running to it!  However, they put the electrical box on exactly the opposite side of the house that we paid them for.  That was due to the fact that they did not get their work done before the concrete work was done.  We have not yet determined if they are going to give me some money back since the trench we paid them to dig was considerably longer than what they actually ended up digging.  Because the well is on the opposite side of the house, I am going to have to pay Brad quite a bit more to dig the trench to it.

I think the porch across the whole back of the house is really going to be something special.  It will obviously have a roof over it and will include 2 ceiling fans.

They also delivered the roof trusses.

They had also completed quite a bit of the interior framing.  However, most of the pictures I took of the inside are very difficult to discern the individual rooms.  However, the photo from the front door, down the main hallway into the living room is pretty cool.

Finally, Brad ran into a problem when one of his tractors developed a bad oil leak.  Unfortunately, it is the tractor that he needs to dig the second trench for the leach field for the septic system.

The pace of the build really started to pick up in week 3.  They got the slab poured for the house.  Then they dug the footings for the back porch and poured the porch and the garage floor.  The concrete work came out really nice.  We are very happy with it.

We also got the first delivery of framing materials.  The headers Brad chose to use are manufactured headers.  They look like 5 2×6’s laminated together and planed smooth.  I think they will be much stronger and more rigid than the headers in our old house which were just 2 2×10’s nailed together.

Finally, they started digging the septic system.

The septic tank looks awful large, but I figure that is because we are so close to the Mexican border.  They know we will be eating a lot of Mexican food and everybody knows how that goes right through you!

In week 2 they were able to get the concrete blocks set on the footings and get all of the underground plumbing done.  They also added several inches of compacted gravel fill inside the foundation to give the concrete slab a nice solid bed.

The house started to look a little bigger, but we still wondered where we were going to fit all of our stuff.

Tina also asked our builder, Brad, to not haul away the dirt they scraped up when leveling the ground for the foundation.  We will be able to use that as fill in the raised gardens we plan to eventually build.  Although it has quite a number weeds in it, I expect we should be able to kill those by spending some quality time with the flamethrower we bought shortly after moving here.

The electric company also finally brought out the power poles necessary to get electricity.  Although the power company wasted no time cashing our check for bringing power in, they did not seem to be in much of a hurry to actually bring the power in.

And of course, since it was a week before Valentine’s Day, Tina felt the need to decorate the tractors and outhouses at the site.

Construction on our new house began the week of January 23, 2017.

Our builder, Brad Cooper (http://www.mc2homes.com/), has been extremely helpful in leading us through the house building process and is doing an excellent job so far.  We are doubly appreciative of his efforts on our behalf since he is not going to be completing the build.  He is going to be taking the build through the sheetrocking and taping and we will be doing all of the finish carpentry, cabinetry and flooring ourselves.

I am certain that I am the worst type of client for Brad to have since I know just enough about construction to be able to formulate really stupid questions and harass him by constantly reminding him of the obvious.

By the end of the first week, they had leveled the ground, dug the holes for the footings and poured the concrete footings.

The concrete they used for the footings must have been some specialized kind of concrete made specifically for footings.  I picked up a piece of the concrete slag and was surprised at how light it was compared to similar sized piece of sidewalk concrete.

Tina and I have been visiting the build site, which is about a 45 minute drive from our rental house, every Saturday.  The photos above are from the first Saturday we went there.  We were both extremely surprised how small the house looked with just the footings poured.  It really did not look much bigger than a small garden shed and we were both left wondering where we were going to put all of our stuff.