Home Stretch

When I last wrote about my house-building adventures, back in December, the house looked like this:

If you take a look from a similar angle today, you see this:

As you might expect, there was more to getting the house to this point than merely hanging around for four months and watching things happen. So sit back and join me on a journey through house creation, Maine-style.

Since I've been serving as the general contractor, I've made it a habit of showing up at the site on a daily basis. Most days, this serves little more than satisfying my own curiosity as to the progress that has been made. Some days, however, I am called upon to clear up a question or two. And, on a few occasions, I've had to endure the domino effect of one problem leading to another, which leads to another, and so on and so on. Those are the days I seriously question why the heck I just didn't buy something that was already built. But, so far, I've survived it all. And while things are taking longer than I had hoped, the delays are not entirely unexpected and there is, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel.

The weather in November and December proved to be very fortuitous to building. There was no snow and temperatures were often unseasonably warm. When I left for Christmas for a week and a half trip to Indiana, the first timbers for the roof were set in place. For the first time since I started the building project, I was going to be away for an extended amount of time. By this point, it was quite apparent that the carpenters were more than competent in keeping things moving on their own, so I wasn't really worried about anything going wrong while I was gone. It was going to be tough, however, to not see the building progress on a day-to-day basis. But good things awaited me in Indiana, so I said goodbye to the carpenters and proceeded to enjoy the holidays.

In my abcense, winter came to Maine. With a vengence. I made it a habit of checking the Belfast weather on the internet while I was in Indiana, and while I basked in balmy 20 and 30 degree temperatures, I could only imagine how the carpenters were faring while it was 10 below with 50 mile-per-hour winds. It turns out that the carpenters are not only competent builders, but they posess common sense as well - they realized that not much work can be accomplished in -60 wind chills, so they wisely chose to stay home on those days.

Severe weather not withstanding, the carpenters did manage to make a quite a bit of progress while I was away. When I returned, I saw for the first time what my 14-pitch roof was going to look like.

It was also about this time that I realized that while my architect had designed an attractive and unique house, the uniqueness does not come cheap. Steep roofs and numerous gables cannot be put together from prefab components. The angles call for uncommon building wizardry. It also takes time. Lots of time. Prior to starting, the carpenters gave me an estimate of 8-9 weeks to get the house framed and weathertight. Add about eight weeks to that estimate and you end up with the reality. Can you say "cost overruns"? For better or for worse, from the outset I agreed to pay the carpenters an hourly wage rather than work from a set contract rate. They argued that the uncertainties of building through the winter made it virtually impossible to accurately estimate a job, since the weather could profoundly affect the progress. In retrospect, that may have not have been the best idea in the world for me, but, then again, had they offered a set price I'm not so sure I would be comfortable with the idea of them possibly cutting corners or hurrying to cut their losses. Although it has been a bit painful financially, their workmanship is absolutely stellar and I would not hesitate to hire them again. If there ever is an "again," of course.

Of Fireplaces and Propane

About the same time I returned from Indiana, the mason shoed up to start the building of the chimney and fireplace. Masonry and winter weather do not go together all too well since the mortar needs warmth to set and dry, but over the years the mason has devised strategies to allow him to work year-round.

These strategies involve propane heaters and plastic "tents" placed around the growing brick structure. Such strategies also involved more than a few sleepless nights on my part. The thought of a propane tank running unattended through the night kept me tossing and turning with thoughts of my new house going up in flames. In retrospect, I probably really needn't have worried - propane heaters are used on construction sites all the time - but having had no previous experience with the process, I couldn't help but be concerned.

Propane, it turned out, would be my friend (and I use the term loosly) for much of the winter building period. Not only did the mason use it, but I discoverd that in order to help ensure that my foundation would not crack due to frost, I would need to keep my basement heated. This meant that I, too, would need to keep a propane heater going night and day.

Unexpected expense #22 - a propane heater. They come in many sizes, shapes, prices and capacities. They are also difficult to come by in the dead of winter - it seems I wasn't the only one in need of one. I finally settled on a relatively inexpensive yet powerful model and proceeded to "heat my space." Unfortunately, I almost proceeded to kill myself and the carpenters through propane poisoning as well.

It is often said that experience is the best teacher, but in this case I would have settled for a less direct learning approach. The heater did, indeed, heat the space. It also made it very difficult to breath and made one's eyes water and lips tingle. Having never had a propane heater before, I thought this was merely a "feature" of propane heat. Sort of like the smell you get from a kerosene heater, only a bit more annoying.

During this heating period, I also needed to put a primer coat of paint on all of the boards that were going to be used for the exterior trim. One fine weekend, I spent the day alternately sucking propane fumes and keeping close to the floor (where one could at least breath without caughing) while painting the seemingly endless supply of boards. I survived the incident, but it wasn't until the following Monday that I learned that this propane high wasn't "normal." In an extreme example of understatement, one of the carpenter's said, "Greg, I think there might be something wrong with that propane heater. We nearly choked to death coming into the house this morning."

So the propane heater went back and I got a different model. And, indeed, with this model you were able to breath while standing in the same room with it. In this case, "live and learn" was more like "almost die and learn."

The fireplace progress was slow but steady. Each day saw the addition of a few feet or so of brickwork. Well, almost each day. You probably cannot imagine the look on my face when I walked in one morning and saw two of the mason's helpers carefully tearing down the back of the fireplace. Certainly this was not the way to build a fireplace, I thought to myself as I witnessed this unfortunate incident. I found out later from one of the helper's that he had sincerely hoped he wasn't around when I happened upon this "deconstruction." The problem, it turns out, was that one of the plum lines used to keep the corners of the fireplace straight had slipped down on the nail from which it was attached to the ceiling and the mason did not notice. As a result, the top corner was about a 1/2 inch off level. The only remedy was to dismantle and start over.

Like the house itself, the fireplace also had it's share of "uniqueness." And like the house, the fireplace also proved to be much more of a project than initially expected. Unlike the house, I had come to a fixed-price agreement with the mason prior to starting. About halfway through the project, the mason took me aside and confessed that he had terribly underbid the project. I'm not sure if under any circumstances I would have had the heart to say, "too bad, I have a signed contract," but this situation was particularly difficult in that the mason had done quite a bit of work for me in the past and I considered him a personal friend. In the end, we agreed to split the overrun. Unexepected cost #23.

The rest of the fireplace went up smoothly. It is my intention mill a beam from a section of one of the oak trees I had to cut down and use it for the mantel, but so far I have been unsuccessful in finding a sawmill that will take on a single section of wood. So, it may be awhile before I see a mantel.

Light Up My Life

In my past essays, I've told of the difficulty I had with getting electricity to the property. Unfortunately, things haven't gone much smoother with the electrician. For some reason, just getting him (or "them" as the case may be) to show up seems to be inordinately difficult.

But he did show up one cold February Saturday to walk through the house to plan the location of fixtures, switches, and outlets. If you've never done this before (and how many among us have?), let it be known that this takes a lot more thinking than I had planned to devote to the task. Visualize, visualize, visualize. "Do you want the switch on this wall or this wall?" "Where do you want the outside lights?" "Do you want switches for the outside lights upstairs and downstairs?" "Where do you want the phone jacks?" "Where do you want the outside outlets?" "Where do you want the smoke alarms?" Suffice it to say our feet and hands grew numb well before the task was finished. Two and a half hours later, we had a plan as evidenced by a bunch of unintelligible (to me, anyway) scribblings on the blueprints.

A month and a half later, when the electrician showed up to begin the rough in of the wires, he couldn't find the blueprints. And so it goes.

Exit, Stage Right

It was one of those "domino" days, where I was starting to get crushed under a seemingly never-ending barrage of problems. This time, it was apparently an architectural problem. It seems that when the carpenter started to assemble the gables on the roof on the side of the house facing the water, things didn't work out the way they were supposed to. If he assembled the structures according to the blueprints, the inner ends of the gables intersected. Unfortunately, this wasn't discovered until he had finished framing one of the gables and started the framing of the other one. The remedy required taking down both gables and starting over. (After the chimney incident, I should have come to expect this.)

Needless to say, I wasn't very happy with the architect. So I gave him a call. And it was then that I discovered that his assistant, who had been involved from the start with my project and was principally responsible for developing my blueprints, had left the company. I don't quite remember how the conversation went, but the bottom line was that the architect was sure that none of them could have made the mistake, and that it was surely the carpenter's fault.

I may never know who was "at fault," and, in the long run, it doesn't really matter anyhow - the gables are fine now. It's just that when you pay good money for an architect to design things so that everything goes smoothly during the building phase, it is quite perplexing to find that things don't. Unexpected cost #23.

June 1st, Whether It's Ready or Not

All in all, I can't complain too loudly about how things have gone. For the most part, I've managed to hire very competent subcontractors. The quality of everyone's work has been excellent. And the result promises to meet or exceed my expectations.

One of the most difficult aspects has been making the many decisions that have to be made. Tubs, showers, plumbing fixtures, light fixtures, kitchen cabinets, countertops, appliances, flooring (there are 3.4 billion different types of tile), paint, trim - it is never ending. And once I make a decision, I, of course, wonder if it was the right one since I will be stuck with it for the foreseeable future.

My next "house" entry will cover the much-anticipated move-in date. I'm committed to getting out of my apartment by June 1, so I will be moving whether the house is entirely ready or not. I try not to think about how much still must be done in the next month, but it's unavoidable. The sheetrocker's started last week, so I should have finished walls and ceilings within a couple of weeks. Then, I'll need to paint all of the rooms, do an extensive amount of tiling (which I plan to do myself despite having never done it before), put down hardwood flooring and carpeting, put in the cabinets and interior trim, get the water hooked up, polyurethane all of the trim, landscape, putt the final coat of paint on all of the exterior trim, get the deck built, and on and on and on.

But, then again, six months ago this was merely a sloping hillside. It all just might happen!