Thought I'd just catch everyone up on the chronology of the construction of our home in Roxborough Park ..........
We finally own the land and the first thing to do is to test the soil to ensure there's nothing unexpected underneath the ground, like an aquifer, old stream bed, rocks, etc. that would impede construction.
From here, we have to survive three reviews by the Roxborough Park Foundation Design Review Committee and a two-week, multi-department review by Douglas County before we get a building permit.
March 5th, 2014 is Day 1. Steve the Builder says it'll take no more than 250 days to complete construction, so we'll be in the home by November 10, 2014.
Six months later ........... We officially break ground with my first shovelful of dirt and the first bucketful from the excavator.
We've gone through the three phases of review by the Roxborough Park Foundation Design Review Committee, and in the last meeting with the DRC they asked us to move the house 10 feet West and 5 feet North (on the drawings) to make some space between us and the neighbor to the East. That meant a couple of re-draws, a new drainage plan, and a new landscape plan to be approved by the DRC and a Building Envelope Change to be approved by Douglas County. Those approval processes cost us about a month of time.
The digging proceeds. They take out and stockpile as much dirt as possible around the edges of the property for later use as backfill. But still, some of the dirt has to be hauled away and out of Roxborough Park by truck - an expensive proposition! Hopefully none of the dirt has to be trucked back in!!
After the diggers think they are done, there's an "open hole inspection" to ensure the soil is as it should be to support the footings and foundation, and a surveyor check to ensure it's been dug out correctly and is correctly placed on the lot. We DO NOT want to move the house at this point!
The open hole inspection and the surveyor have blessed the excavation and we are ready to proceed with framing in the footings for the walls.
The weather turns cold and snowy, so the excavation had to be tarped overnight to keep the ground from freezing. Snow is not really an issue, but freezing is. The ground has to be thawed in order to build the forms, and poured concrete shouldn't be exposed to hard freezes because of the danger of cracking - who wants a cracked foundation footing?
It only took one day to erect the forms and pour the concrete for the footings. Today is a Friday, so the concrete will cure over the weekend and they'll begin to put in the forms for the walls on Monday March 17 (St. Patrick's Day).
The re-bar sticking up out of the footings are used to connect the walls to the footings.
At this point, it gets really, really expensive to make changes to the design of our home. We did make one final change to the exterior walls - the garage doors have been moved two feet south to facilitate getting the cars in and out of the garage, and to create as much space between the cars and the North wall of the garage as possible so we'll have more work and storage space. Steve the Builder had to check with the Architect to ensure that the headers above the garage were placed correctly and were large enough to handle this offset loading. We're OK, but we had to increase the thickness of the engineered glu-lam beam from 2-ply to 3-ply.
That's it for now.
Be well!
Woo-woo! SO exciting! Your lot looks gorgeous, with the hill in the back and all the pretty, red soil :) Oh, and blue sky, I don't see that enough living in VT!
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