Author: JessDellen

Roof Raisin’

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It happened! It finally happened! The right trusses were delivered, installed, and covered with shingles. We have a real roof—hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?!

A reminder of where we were last time…
Trusses midway through the process.
Plywood, plastic sheeting, angles for days, and—oh, look! More snow.
What a beaut!

The original plans had a flat roof straight across the front porch with some cool columns poking up through, but with the winter/snow we get here, our builder advised against it. It looked fancy, sure, but we didn’t want to have any water or weight issues with winter storms getting as out of hand as they can around here. Our builder ran into a few other issues with some of the angles because they weren’t really worked out in the blueprints (cool, cool). But he sorted it out and we’re ready to move this party inside!

We Have Truss Issues

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Look, I didn’t want to have to make two “truss” puns in a row any more than you wanted to read them, but desperate times…

The trusses were delivered on December 20th. It was pretty exciting with all the trucks and cranes and absolutely massive-looking trusses everywhere. Alas, most of them are somehow the wrong size.

Don’t ask me how. They have access to the blueprints. Our builder has impressed upon them near-daily that the house needs to go under roof for winter work AND the trusses are already nearly a month behind, but here we are on January 4th still waiting for the new ones.

Oh, and the real kicker? The truss company isn’t coming out to take back the wrong-sized ones. So our builder has to disassemble them himself because they’re taking up a ton of space. He’ll use the wood for extra bracing and support, so it’s not going to waste. We’ll get whatever’s left over and hopefully be able to build a shed with it.

Look at all these (mostly) unusable trusses!

It’s absolutely wild to me that we’ve hit so many roadblocks this early in the process. From the loan taking three months longer than expected to having the block crew pull out at the last minute to the roof trusses being late and then the wrong size… It feels like a lot. It also feels like it’s taking forever. That’s partially because we’ve been living in a very small space for almost a year and a half. (Our original goal was to only have to live in the trailer for a year, but that was aggressively optimistic.) And it’s partially because we started the loan and contract processes back in March and we’re not yet under roof 10 months later.

At any rate, this is the number one reason why we insisted on buying property with an existing home on it so we’re not at the mercy of anyone else’s timeline. We can stay here for as long as it takes to build the big house without any concerns about being out by a certain date, renting back from new owners, living in a hotel, etc.

Truss the Process

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We’ve hit our first of what I presume will be many hiccups along the way. For whatever reason, the company building our trusses is behind. We were supposed to start framing the roof at the very beginning of December, but now it’s looking like we won’t have trusses until at least the 18th.

Our builder is itching to get the roof on so he and his crew can be sheltered from the elements now that the weather has turned. Because we’re so far behind schedule—thanks to a certain loan company I won’t name—it’s especially important to enclose the house and work over the winter because 1) we want a house to live in, and 2) the folks building it need to actually, you know, work on it and be paid.

When we were slogging through the loan process, I felt like I was herding cats all day, every day for months on end. We’re at a point in the process now where I’m able to be patient and relax a bit because I know that for as desperately as we want to be in the house… our crew is even more eager to finish, get paid, and move on to the next thing. I no longer feel a constant pressure to command the ship—I think that at this point, everyone else is rowing just as hard as we are toward our destination.

We live in unprecedented times where supplies and staff seem to wildly fluctuate from embarrassingly bountiful to unimaginably rare. I know that everyone is doing what they can, and hopefully we won’t be too far off schedule because of the trusses. Anyway, please enjoy some interior shots from exterior framing!

Mudroom, laundry room, master suite, dining room, etc.
View from the front door. Peep that big-ass hole where our triple sliding-glass door will lead to the screen room!
The dungeon.

We’ve Been Framed

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Things are really starting to take shape and I can barely contain myself! We’re at the point now where I can see the big house before I even cross the street, thanks to the framing. Also: Should I be concerned about all the rain and snow that’s saturating the wood all the time here in London—er, western Pennsylvania? Because the precipitation has been out of control over here.

I’ll probably never stop talking about how much I like being across the street from the build site because I love-love-love stomping over there to see new progress. I know it won’t always be this obvious and that later it’ll look like nothing is being done because it’s all internal. But damn is it fun to watch all this progress.

Just the basement level.
Main floor is framed. Screen room above the patio now has a floor.

We Love a Solid Foundation

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All that digging and timber-clearing were cool and all, but this is what makes it feel real. Really real. Stuff-is-actually-being-built real. And with the foundation in, it’s way easier to visualize where things will be and get a better idea of room sizes, views, etc.

The bump-out on the left will be a covered patio and on the right will be a little sunroom type of deal in the basement.

At this point, the block has clearly been laid and the beginnings of our drainage system are in place. The walls were reinforced with rebar and concrete, and they moved some dirt into the basement/patio areas to prep it for getting a floor. Whenever that happens. They also tarred the outside of the foundation for extra waterproofing.

Openings for a people door on the left and a vehicle door on the right.

I’m still in various stages of cat-herding with the gas, electric, and water companies at the moment. I am legitimately floored by how much project management I’m having to do. lol I’m constantly calling and emailing people about things. Half the time I have to pass them along to the builder because I have no idea wtf is going on. They get all specific with me about BTU outputs and junction boxes and no. Just no. I have no idea, please talk to the professional about that.

Fun with Footers

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Something neat I didn’t know about footers, likely because I’ve never built a house before, is that they can look really sloppy. If you know me, you know that I’m a bit of a neat freak and I don’t do well with chaos and disorganization and things that aren’t straight/even.

So imagine my (internal) anxiety-fueled meltdown when I realized that some of our footers are literally just trenches in the ground that have concrete poured into them.

So we just like, dump a bunch of concrete in there and hope for the best?

To be fair, some of them were nicely framed with straight, parallel boards and crisp 90-degree angles.

That’s better. Clean lines. Woosah.

But the back of the house looks like complete chaos.

To be clear: I know this is just going to serve as the base for the foundation block. No one but us will ever see this and its appearance is totally inconsequential. I was just not expecting something so… messy. lol

The funny thing about the uneven edges is that the concrete looks like a liquid even when it’s set.

That’s Like… a Really Big Hole

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Woo, we’re cooking now! The entire footprint is completely dug out to the point that they took the backhoe already.

Me, for scale. I *think* I’m standing under where the front door will be.

We got our house number already, which absolutely blows my mind because we literally just put the request in on Friday. So, by some miracle, that only took about half a business day to come back. Personally, I think the guy who came out to drop the GPS pins felt bad for us because I told him about all the hassles we’d gone through just to get the loan finalized. I wonder if he maybe pushed it through for us. And if he did? What a peach!

I attempted to make a lil rendering below with Microsoft Paint 3D. It’s… serviceable.

Is it to scale? Unlikely.

Does it accurately reflect our finishes? Nope.

Is it even in the right place? Maybe. I think. Look, all the dirt is the same color so it’s pretty hard at this distance to see where the foundation will go. lol

A graphic designer I am not.

Anyway, it’s a fair estimation of how things will look for those of us who sometimes have a hard time envisioning things realistically. And by “those of us” I mean me. When I try to imagine how it will look, the house is either monstrously large or comically small.

Also pictured above: We got the beginnings of our driveway added today in the form of at least two dump truckfuls of crushed stone. It’s mostly to prevent deep(er) ruts from the even bigger equipment that will be rolling in, but it’ll serve as a base for gravel later. Selfishly, I like that it makes it easier to walk up and down the hill without sliding around in the mud.

Footprint Fings

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It’s absolutely wild to me that we started here…

July 30, 2022: After the first round of timber cutting.

…then went here…

September 14, 2022: Two rounds of logging and some light excavation.

…and now we’re here…

September 23, 2022: All timber cleared with the footprint pinned out.

Today was a pretty big day. We got the whole footprint mapped out and had the county rep come and drop GPS pins for our new address. I didn’t realize this, but your new addy has to jive with the standards set and adhered to by the folks responsible for 911. Makes sense, right? You definitely want them to be able to find you when you choke on a hot dog alone in your house and your dogs won’t stop play-fighting long enough to notice.

Anyway, there’s some grid-formula-thing that says every 10.56-ish feet is a new address number. No, not a house/lot every 10.56-ish feet, but the numbers go up that often, which is why our next-door neighbors’ house is 40 units up from ours even though there are no lots in between us. The county rep came out today with a fancy-ass GPS/satellite phone-looking thing and dropped a few different location pins into it. Allegedly in a few business days, it’ll tell us where our new house will fall on the invisible address grid. Once we get the address, we start applying for permits and getting the ball rolling for utilities. Woo!

Poorly drawn lines are my own because it’s really hard to see the stakes and spray paint.

In the meantime, I’ve been stomping around inside the footprint trying to get my bearings and mentally arrange furniture. lol

It’s Finally Happening!

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We were originally slated to break ground on August 15th. That didn’t happen because we were still in loan limbo.

Then we were supposed to break ground on September 6th, but we needed to have more trees cut down and moved out of the way.

On September 13th, the most glorious thing happened: A convoy of heavy equipment showed up and started mowing down everything in its path.

Since then it’s been nonstop sawing, digging, and dozing from dawn to dusk and I’m LIVING for it.

I do want to take a moment to mentally pour one out for all the vegetation we’re losing. The house is a rancher, so the footprint is pretty big. And we needed to clear enough area to 1) accommodate the house, 2) avoid having a tree fall on the house, and 3) allow enough ventilation and sunlight in to keep moisture issues at bay.

At one point while we were walking through a warzone of tree tops and stumps, Mike made a comment about feeling like the bad guy in FernGully and I agreed. As a pagan who has loved the woods since I could walk… this degree of slash-and-burn is devastating.

And I do mean slash-and-burn. We didn’t have the time to cut smaller trees and tops into firewood because we had to make up for lost time. So the excavator pushed all the tops, stumps, and other leftovers into a pile and burned it.

Buuut, we can’t live in the trees and if you wanna make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs. Or that’s what I’m telling myself over and over. We plan on doing a massive tree-plant once construction is done in an attempt to replace some of what we decimated. And we’re going to install a wild yard, consisting of mostly hardscaping and native plants instead of grass. Hopefully, we’re not throwing the local ecosystem too far out of balance.

The Loan that Took Years off My Life

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And I’m not even talking about the amount…

I almost don’t want to talk about the loan process because it was a pretty bad time from start to finish. I was going to do a play-by-play to really hammer home how absolutely INSANE the whole thing was, but I don’t feel like re-traumatizing myself. How about the TL;DR version instead?

We applied for a construction loan (that will roll into a mortgage once construction is complete) in late March of 2022 and we were pre-approved on April 11, 2022. We were told it would take between 40 and 60 days to close. Being generous and assuming that means business days only, we should have closed somewhere between June 7th and July 6th.

Somehow our first potential closing date was July 22nd.

Then it was August 12th.

We didn’t actually close until September 2nd.

We hit every conceivable bump in the road between approval and closing. Every weird, unlikely thing that could happen, happened. We missed deadlines due to myriad reasons: the tax documents we needed were never sent to us, the person we needed was on vacation, the committee we needed only meets once a month, and the person we needed RETIRED. I can’t make this shit up, you guys. We also got slowed down because a lot of things would just start to get rolling on Fridays. Like clockwork. We’d finally get a document or signature and then we’d have to sit on it for two days.

Also, there are so, so, so many moving parts. Way more than buying a house outright. We had to split the property into two parcels so we didn’t own one parcel with two homes on it. We had to then get updated deeds and titles for the two newly split properties (that took FOREVER). We ended up having to pay off the original mortgage on the trailer with the new loan. We had to get separate construction insurance from our homeowner’s insurance.

There are also a lot of things that seemed to be circular. The most recent being we can’t get permits until we have a house number, but we can’t get a house number until we have the front door location. So the builder is clearing the trees and marking the front door, but can’t do anything else without permits.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: The guy who can give us a house number is out of the office the week we need him. Super.