Friday, February 8, 2008

Some Progress and Some Decisions






This week seemed like a bit of a slow week at the job site. There were some winter flu bugs and the contractor was waiting for floor joists and for a stretch of days before taking apart too much of the existing house. There is a lot of demolition that will happen at the existing house- removing the roof, removing the upper floor walls and removing the corner at the addition. Once this happens, the new second floor framing will need to happen very quickly, so the existing house isn't left exposed to the elements for too long. This phase of the construction will start at the beginning of a week so that it can be mostly enclosed before the weekend. The demolition will be exciting, as the house will really start the transformation- but it will also be very scary to see the existing structure dismantled.





The spaces in the addition are now a little better defined as the sheathing is going up. There is no second floor yet, but with the joists now delivered, the 2nd floor framing should start next week. The steel column and beams are in to support the load of the existing house as the corner is removed.

Progress on the house means that Kevin and I have to get serious about finalizing decisions. Without deadlines, we tend to put off making decisions. We once debated the carpet selection for our attic project for about 2 years. It wasn't until we had a guest coming for the summer and absolutely needed the attic space, that we made the decision. Yes, we need deadlines. One of the decisions we had to make this week was exterior siding and colors. We had done studies on this before with the help of a Google Sketchup model. Sketchup is a great tool for quick studies on colors and materials.

We had started looking at muted colors with a few bold color accents.
Although we liked the understated quality of muted grays, we were concerned it would look a bit too industrial for our neighborhood. We thought about how this would look on a snowy day, and it just seemed to heavy.
The top is a corrugated metal siding from Metal Sales. http://www.metalsales.us.com/ The bottom is HardiBoard cement board siding. We wanted to make the house as low maintenance as possible, so we are going with a prefinished cement board. This prefinished board can be painted another color in the future- because of this we started looking at using white.This was our preferred option from a couple of months ago. When we started looking at the exact metal color samples, there was 2 greys to choose from. One was a dark cooler grey and the other was a warm lighter gray. We were hoping for something in the middle- but no such luck. We were concerned about the lighter gray becoming taupe in the bright sun. Unfortunately, we have not seen any direct sun this week to test the samples out!


After much debate, we are going with the darker gray metal panel. This is a bolder move that we're excited about. The metal roof on the office (to the right) will be Galvalume (aluminum color). We still have decisions to make on the colored panels- but these will just be painted, not prefinished, so the deadline for that decision is not imminent. We'll see how long we can put that one off!





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