The house has been attracting a lot of interest this week. As well as several visitors (not including the building inspectors who came on Monday and gave the place a clean bill of health), we ended providing guided tours to two sets of visitors.
On Wednesday the Boohakers (who are also building a house with Bill Anderson) met us for a tour of inspection of houses that Bill built in Achasta. This is a very upmarket housing development outside Dahlonega clustered around a golf course. The houses there are mostly “Macmansions” – far too big houses built on far too small plots. We were interested in some of the décor and finishes used, to see if there were any good ideas to borrow. We have a fairly clear idea of the look and feel we are seeking, so we were not swayed by some of the more extreme ideas. Jeannie Boohaker discovered that she has many friends in common with Lisa – Georgia is a very closely knit state. She was in a bit of a dither – she has an interior designer pushing her down a number of roads where she is not at all sure she wants to go – as a result she is having a very hard time making up her mind about everything.
After Achasta, Bo and Jeannie expressed an interest in seeing what Bill is doing for us. Their own house is very different to ours – a fairly modern design with huge panoramic windows looking out over a lake. We have seen it a couple of times, and the sheer scale of it is overwhelming, especially as the main living floor is an open-plan cavern. When they saw what we were doing they were very complimentary and kept remarking about the number of features we have built in which are relatively cheap if done at construction time (like the stamped concrete floors downstairs). All the planning we have done is paying dividends!
On Thursday, our friend Maggie from Big Canoe (see my blog of 10th November) came visiting with a friend who was staying with her. They also thought the house was a great thing, and they loved the design of the living room with the huge exposed trusses. We all went out to lunch in Dahlonega afterwards and had a very long and noisy lunch. The thing that is apparent is how interested so many people are in what we are doing, and everyone who sees the house comes away with a big smile – I think that this will be a house with a really good atmosphere when it is complete. There are now two articles about our build on the Garrell Associates website (the house architects). And there has been talk of even more public exposure, but I won’t go into that yet.
Finally, on Saturday, we popped out between rainstorms to Three Sisters Vineyard for a quick glass of wine and stock replenishment. I don’t know why it is that the rain seems to fall mainly at the weekend – which is not that should bother us, every day is a weekend for pensioners! It was Easter weekend, but not such a big thing here as in Europe. No public holidays, things went on much as usual apart from the local churches advertising egg hunts, and the local supermarket selling Easter bunny cakes in fluorescent yellows and blues. Raises the question about why the Easter Bunny is responsible for hiding eggs – surely it should be an Easter chicken.
Finally, a little fame. We are now featured on the website of Garrell and Associates, the architects who designed our house. You can see the report at the Garrell Associates website.
On the build site
Progress is happening on several fronts simultaneously. The interior rough fit of plumbing, air conditioning and electricity is now complete, so the building inspectors visited to check the work to ensure it “conforms to code”. No problems reported, I am glad to say. That being done, we were ready for the next stage of fitting fibreglass insulation inside all the exterior walls (and a few interior stud walls too, to provide extra sound insulation). The insulation is a shocking pink colour, so there is now a pink hue inside the building. Next week should see the start of creating the interior walls and ceilings using copious quantities of plasterboard.
Outside, the siding and shingles have been fully fitted, so from about three feet off the ground the house is largely complete and a yellow/green colour. It all will need painting further down the road. The lower part of the wall will be covered in a veneer of reclaimed bricks. The first of three deliveries of bricks on Friday was nearly a disaster. Lisa’s cousin Zack is supplying these from his stocks of reclaimed bricks from cotton mills. A lot of them are handmade, over a hundred years old. He had loaded them onto pallets and neatly gift-wrapped in plastic sheeting. 500 bricks to a pallet. The problems was how to get these pallets off the flatbed delivery truck. TJ, whose crew is building the Great Wall of Dahlonega (still), came to the rescue – he has a bobcat front loader but no forks for lifting pallets. We did a deal with him – we would buy a set of forks for his bobcat and he would unload the bricks from the three deliveries and transport them down to the building site from the main road.
However…….. A pallet of 500 modern bricks would weigh just on the limit of what the bobcat could pick up (according to the bricklayer). What nobody realised at the time the plan was hatched was that old bricks are different to modern bricks. Modern bricks have a dimple in the biggest sides but old handmade bricks are solid. And they weigh a bit more. The difference was evident with the first pallet that GTJ tried to lift. Rather than the pallet carefully lifting into the air to give enough clearance to move it off the truck and lower to the ground, the pallet remained firmly in place and the bobcat’s back wheels went up unto the air. Disaster!
After some serious pondering, TJ’s wall building crew were summoned to join in overcoming the challenge. It was finally decided to partially unload each pallet in situ, lift them off the truck with the scoop that the bobcat normally uses, and then lift the remaining lightened pallet. Sounds a great idea, but moving three tons of bricks by hand takes a long while. The lifting capability of the bobcat was enhanced by having one or two hefty workmen hanging on the back as the pallet was lifted. The whole unloading exercise took about two and a half hours rather than the expected thirty minutes, and then TJ spent most of the day moving the bricks and pallets down from Porter Springs Road to the build site.
The remaining 32 pallets are scheduled to arrive on 30th March, but TJ has arranged to borrow a more beefy bobcat for that unloading job. Meanwhile, his crew continue to build the Great Wall.
The rough fit of services to the house is now complete. Cables installed and neatly coiled. Shiny central heating ducts winding about the rafters. Pipes popping out of the floor (currently equipped with pressure gauges to prove that there are no leaks). The next major step is to get the building inspectors in to sign off the work, and this is scheduled for Monday. Once that is done, the insulation can be installed (extra thickness for soundproofing around the bedrooms, Bill the builder has advised – I wonder what he thinks might be going on). And at the end of next week we will be ready for the interior dry walls. These are made of sheetrock (plasterboard to the English) and then covered in “mud” and sanded down two times to give a lovely smooth finish. Bill warns us that this is a messy job (i.e. keep away whilst this goes on) and will take about two weeks.
Not that we haven’t been busy too, though. Orders for reclaimed bricks and for the reclaimed heart pine flooring have been placed. We have located a supply of reasonably prices interior doors – not an unimportant matter, as we have 30 of these to purchase. They are at a discount building supply store near Atlanta, who has an apparently unlimited supply of top brand name doors at a really knock down price. It seems incredible how many doors there are in this house – but count the number in your own home and you may find that a surprise, too. We have picked rocks for covering parts of the front of the house and the fireplaces, and now are thinking about a few pendant lights, paint colours, tiles for bathrooms and other requirements. We are determined to be ahead of the builders with the things we are sourcing and with any decisions we make so that if there are any delays, it will not be our fault!
Next week should see a number of small finishing jobs inside before the dry walling starts midweek. Outside, the bricklayer, Alfonso, will be starting his work, and the Great Wall of Dahlonega should be finished. Lots of other outside jobs are to be done, but nothing else can be done inside whilst the dry wall crew do their thing. Bill has decided to go away for a few days holiday whilst the first part of this process is underway, so I guess we will try to keep out of the house too!