Sunday, March 21, 2010

A house of blues

Saturday, we got up early, and headed out to try to finish the insulation and get the tarps on, before the end of the day. Throughout the day, everyone was helping.

Mom helped dad with cutting some of the foam boards.

Matt showed up again, and started by helping me get the cut pieces for the second layer in place. He joked that with the sun reflecting off the roof and cooking us, we should sell tickets for tanning survices. "All natural, tan in half the time!" Between Friday afternoon, and all day on Saturday, I got a bit of sun burn on my arms, and my face and ears.

Newt and his son Eric, showed up. Eric worked on sorting through the scrap material, and putting it into more organized piles, so I could see  what I have to work with. He and Newt got a fire going, and we burned some of the cardboard packing, and small pieces of wood, and the remnants of the hay and straw bales that were used to protect the concrete floor after it was poured.

Newt stokes the fire.

Eric threw a couple spray foam cans into the fire at one point. After they went KABOOM and shot into the air like rockets, Eric had a direct lesson in why you don't dispose of those in a fire. Thankfully, no one was hurt, other than their nerves.

David and Melissa came out, and David helped get more of the foam put in place. Some of the pieces, involved quite a bit of debate as to the best way to place them.

My dad, Matt and David have a discussion about the next piece to go on.

As we got to the last few pieces, we realized we were running a little short. We had a bit more scrap than I had planned for. But we looked at the scrap pieces, and realized that we had pieces that would do fairly well to fill in the remaining spaces. So we just used those pieces.

The final layer is done.

Time for tarps. We weren't sure when we would get rain again, but we wanted to make things as waterproof as we could, and protect the foam from the wind. So we got out the big tarps I had bought. We set them out, overlapped them, and weighted them down.

Racing the sun, once again.

I now had a blue roof. We realized we didn't have enough bags of sand to properly weight things. so we used some of the boxed rolls of plastic that will be the waterproofing, as additional weights.

We were pleased with what we had gotten done, and David was nice enough to take a picture of me and the rest of my family, in front of my blue house.

The first family portrait at the Hobbit Hole

Today, my dad, mom and I went out, and did a few more things before the rain moved in. We got some more stuff cleaned up and organized. My dad and I got some measurements of where the ground is (outside the dirt that is piled up in front and back of the home) relative to the floor and vent pipes in the home. We also marked where I want the excavators to try to move dirt from in front of the home.

Here is what the house looks like now, from the vantage point where I have been taking comparison photos.

Hopefully, the next time I take a photo from here, you will be able to see the full window and door openings.

2 comments:

  1. I hope the wind we had down in Cincy on Sunday didn't cause you problems. Looks like you had some fun.

    Re: Spraycans+Fire... Tell Eric to leave that sort of thing to the Mythbusters.

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  2. Tarps were still in place at lunch yesterday. I am hoping to go out this afternoon, and get some more photos. Adam, excavated the dirt from in front of the house yesterday.

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