Ready...Set...Frame

This week started out faster than last week. Actually, a little faster than I had hoped--but I'm getting ahead of myself. The roofer arrived as scheduled on Monday, and laid a rubber membrane over the Spancrete slab in the garage. I was a little bit worried about condensation from the slab dripping onto my machinery in the workshop. So I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of 4'x8' 2" thick foam panels to lay on top of the rubber membrane.

It was a bit windy on Monday, and as I was wheeling the first load of insulation panels out to the car, the wind caught four of the panels. One of them was blown out of the parking lot, across the street, over a fence, and across four lanes of interstate traffic. Luckily it didn't cause any accidents. But even more importantly, Home Depot replaced the panels at no charge. I'm sure glad I didn't have to spend another $22.

Here's the slab with insulation all safe and sound and (for a few days anyway) dry.



On Tuesday, the plumber came and set the underground plumbing. I was surprised how much underground plumbing we had. But he got everything done, inspected, and approved in one day.

The next day, the foundation guys came to prepare for the flatwork (slabs for the basement, the workshop, and the garage). They leveled everything, adding a couple more inches of gravel, and covered everything with plastic for a vapor barrier. The framer also came on Wednesday to check things out and adjust the steel columns to make sure they were in the right place.

Here's the basement all ready for pouring the slab:


The workshop is ready too:

Ideally, the foundation guys would have made it out on Thursday to pour the slab. But they couldn't make it on Thursday, so we had to move the pour to Friday. Friday morning, I woke up to rain. But that didn't stop the lumber yard from delivering our first load of lumber:

That's the first floor of our house sitting there on our driveway. Unfortunately, it rained all day on Friday. So no pour. Rain and wet concrete don't mix well. So the flatwork is delayed until Monday. Our first (and hopefully last) rain delay. The framer was supposed to start on Monday, but he understandably doesn't want to be working on top of wet cement, so he's delayed by a day also. 

There was another slight complication. Remember all that work I did to lay insulation on top of the rubber membrane in the garage?  Unfortunately, the rubber membrane worked really well. So this morning, I had 22 sheets of insulation floating in a big 24'x36' bathtub filled with about an inch of water. And there's no drain for that bathtub. So off came the insulation, and I swept the water off the membrane with a push broom.  

So next week (assuming that everything goes well), we'll pour the slab on Monday, start framing on Tuesday, and the electrician will install the electrical panel and rough in the workshop on Friday.