The Crunch. View from bottom up--photos in reverse order...

What remains of our bathroom.
Looks like a tornado hit, eh?
We found an old issue of "American Home", dated December 1945 in one of the walls.

The front wall is hanging from the jaws of the machine.

Tearing off the roof decking.

Scraping off the roofing.

More roofing coming off.
Starting the roof removal.

Arrival of the demo folks.

Demolition

We weren't exactly sure when the actual demolition of the old place would happen -- the demo contractor has been talking about a lot of salvage activities associated with the demo. Well, crunch time is tomorrow -- Tuesday. It appears that, aside from a few items we specify (like the cast-iron bathtub), they crunch first and separate later. So tomorrow is The Day. That gave us a bit of a chill -- we thought we might have more time to get accustomed to the idea, but not so. We will be there with cameras in hand, maybe with tears streaming; but it's gotta happen. We have some regrets, considering the fact that the house has a history of past owners and all their associations. The trees around the place predate all of us, so maybe that's a grounding point. The whole idea of moving the house further back on the property is to preserve the trees, so the big trees will be a point of continuity no matter what.

Video later.

Update

So it's been awhile since I have posted any info about the house project. As you can imagine, after living in one place for 30 years, there's a _lot_ of stuff to pack/toss/recycle -- and most of it involves making a decision about which route to take. In addition to that, getting ready for the house demolition itself -- moving plants around the place we want to save, salvaging what we can (lighting fixtures, kitchen cabinet hardware, etc.) has taken a lot of time. Then there's setting up our new digs where we will stay for about 6 months while the new house goes up. So there's some whining I am done with. Oh, yeah -- just to keep things even more 'interesting', I've also caught a nice summer cold.

So here are some photos and a few captions to explain things. Call this the "best of" sequence...



OK, this may not look like much. It show where one of our outside sconces was --there were two on each side of the front entry. The dark spot in the center is where the mounting screw went. Notice anything else? Right -- no power. Those things had been there for at least 30 years, and never had any power to them. I thought the electricals weren't hooked up, but they always were just eye candy....



I call this photo "first load". At least of the big stuff -- we had been moving boxes over to Lisa's rental awhile before this went over. I used the tarp because it looked like it might rain (it didn't).


Here is a photo of Lisa sitting next to the temporary power pole that was just installed. Power to the house is slated to be cut on Monday the 26'th.


"Mark and cats". They don't know that they are going to be moving soon. The tiger stripe at my feet is named Rosco, and the Siamese at shoulder height is Nibbles. That's not a name we gave her -- it came from her previous owners. But it is appropriate, given her habit of tasting everything in sight.


Here's a photo of Rosco after his relocation. He doesn't look too upset.

This shows the gas company getting ready to remove the old gas line. There was a bit of confusion on this part of the job. The excavators noted that the gas line was pretty close to the neighbor's water meter, which had not been Located. Our water line was located OK, and the gas line was. So they had to delay the job until the locating service came back out to mark the other water meter. I was inside our house working on stuff when I saw the locator working near our water meter -- apparently, he was just repeating the locate that had been done before. So I went out and told him that he needed to do a locate on the other water meter. It wasn't his fault -- the gas folks gave him OUR address, so what else was he going to do. I'm glad that I was there to straighten things out. Hopefully, this kind of thing won't happen very often during the project....


Asbestos. What a pain. As part of the demolition, we had to get the house evaluated for asbestos. Guess what -- an old house has asbestos flooring in it. Naturally, there is a whole industry devoted to removing it, and it's rife with all kinds of environmental requirements. What you see here is the exhaust side of a high-efficiency HEPA filter. The interior rooms that have the asbestos have been sealed off, and the workers are in bunny suits and respirators. The HEPA filter is used to capture any asbestos dust that is released during the procedure. And this is stuff we walked on for 30 years. In its un-broken form, the flooring is supposed to be OK. Oh, and get this: Asbestos is still used in lots of products. So we have an interesting circular relationship between the installers and removers, many of which do both (maybe on alternate days).


Here's a photo of the "decon" chamber they put over the back entrance to the house. Our bedroom is on the right, and the utility room is straight ahead through the door. Both areas had the old square viny tiles, you know, the kind that were made with asbestos....

That's all the photos for now. More later.

Contracts

Boy, are there a lot of variations on building contracts. The one our builder initially gave us was a little long in the tooth -- they were using one that had been handed down like an old painting or something. There were some omissions that most modern contracts have --like arbitration -- so we contacted our lawyer to see what he thought of the contract. Most portions were OK, but not so clear by today's standards (and items like arbitration and lien waivers were clearly missing). He gave us a contract that one of his clients had used, but even that had some omissions by our standards. In addition, we had a contract from a builder for our earlier design; and it had lots of good stuff in it. So we did a copy and paste, taking the best of all of them, and putting it all together.

We sent the result to our general contractor, and they loved it. ..actually, they wanted to know if they could re-use it for future building contracts.

Should I put out my shingle? Maybe not (keep your day job, heh ). But the bottom line is that we now have a contract that actually protects our builder more than the original contract, and one we can live with, too. That's the best of both worlds.

So we're going to sign it tomorrow, Thursday July 15. It also will be the start of a substantial money flow out, but we think worthwhile in the long run.

We've been working hard on moving out of the old place this week because demolition of the old place is slated for the 19th. We've been moving stuff over to our temporary home for some time now, but the pace has obviously accelerated. We're planning on finishing up the major move-away by this Saturday. We still have a lot to do, so Good Night & postya later.

House Plans

By popular demand (actually, just 1 demand but it's from my Dad), here are some more photos. They are our house design--the main and upper, plus some elevations. Click on them to enlarge. Sorry about the funny page layout; the blogging software seems very primitive when it comes to arranging photos on a page; or maybe it's just me.

The drawing for the basement is missing, but it's just a big room with a water heater and furnace. Not worth the viewing IMHO.

Slightly-larger-than-baby-steps

I'm sore today, but we've more to do. We've started moving our plants and shrubs that are in harm's way from the upcoming house demolition. Thank God for the John Deere 770 tractor and front loader!

<----Here's a "before" picture of the front bed. There are a number of small to fairly substantial-sized rhododendrons in there, but they're not very obvious yet. But the next photo clearly shows where they WERE:













The closeup photo shows the tools we used to help us pull the big shrubs out. It took shovels, a chain, metal rods and a mallet, along with a lot of grunting and sweat. Oh yeah, and the JD770. Definitely can't forget that.

Rhododendrons aren't too bad for moving because their roots are pretty shallow. Even so, a big rhody has a big root ball and therefore pretty heavy. We began by digging around the plant, starting at about the "drip line", which is about the same as the plant's maximum width. After finding the fine mat of rootlets, we dig down until we're below the root mat. For big rhodies, this means digging down about 2 feet all around the plant. Then the metal bars are pounded in at an angle, on opposite sides of the plant, and a chain is run around the bars, at the bottom of the trench we've dug out. The purpose of the metal bars is to force the chain to go down, rather than pulling up too high and potentially breaking off the stem of the plant. The hook at the plant end of the chain is attached to the chain to form a loop around the plant. Then the other end of the chain is attached to the front loader (not shown). Slowly backing the tractor up then applies enough force to pull the shrub free of the ground and out of the hole.

Repeat as needed for each plant.

I need aspirin .

The Contract; County shenanigans

I've been a little busy so this post has been delayed. Some interesting developments as far as what the County wants before they will give us a building permit; but first, some bits about the building contract. I won't go into a lot of specifics for our case, but this was an excellent source of information on what to ask for in a contract. Looking through the contract our builder gave us showed that most components were there. In addition, looking up builder's info on your local CCB web site can be very informative. The CCB site I've linked to, of course, is the one that would apply in our case but you can see what to expect.

The final word on the contract situation: with some minor changes/additions, we're about ready to sign on the dotted line! About two weeks after that, we will have to be outta here because the bulldozer arrives to knock the old place down....so we have to get cracking on that end of things. We probably will hire a mover to help with the larger items.

Now, about the County. Discussions with their planning folks initially got us pretty excited because they were talking about putting a sidewalk across the entire frontage of the property, and paving the entire distance of the driveway. The former is relatively minor, but could stand out like a sore thumb because we would be the only frontage on the street with a sidewalk. The latter issue could have been very expensive, since the driveway will be >200 feet long. Not to mention that it would be paving over the sensitive roots of some very large Doug Fir trees, which is a big no-no.

However, relative calm returned after some additional details came out. It turns out that they only want about 20 feet of paved driveway, coming off the public road. And the "sidewalk" may only extend a few feet on either side of the driveway, more like an apron. It also can be asphalt instead of concrete so it will look more like an extension of the main road. Our main problem may be people using the apron as a parking spot, which would block access to our place. A "vehicles will be towed" sign might come in handy at some point....

So we will see a slight "bump" in the price but on the larger scheme of things it probably will be less than 1% of the overall budget. Whew.

Summary: a good contract is important; resources are readily available to help configure your contract; calm is recommended when it comes to handling unexpected developments in the project (i.e., get used to the unexpected, 'cause it's gonna happen!).