Shadows

The trusses arrived a few hours early on Tuesday. In fact, the truck delivering the trusses arrived just as the truck delivering the appliances drove off. Since I was there to sign for the appliances, I got the treat of talking a bit with the truss guy. The second sentence out of his mouth was to claim that due to the utility lines on our side of the street, he wouldn't be able to use the truck's crane to raise the trusses to the roof. Uh-huh. Luckily, I was able to duck out of further conversation and leave the debate to the on-site professionals.

Magically, by our meeting today with John Hammerschmidt, the trusses were up. Now, it appears we did get an early pruning of the trees around the new east wing. It may've come from the eventual use of that truss crane, or, maybe like John claimed, it might've been done with circular saws by the roofers. The neatest thing was the shadows the trusses cast in the great room from the noonday sun.

The new furnace got placed this week. Now, this has it's own story in the remodel. In the fall of 2005, we noticed the air from our heater smelled, well, musty. We had things looked at. The furnace guy gave our mammoth and ancient Coleman furnace a clean bill of health, but remarked that since our ducting was uninsulated metal, we were really inefficient both in the heating and the distribution.

Hmm. From there, we got an estimate for a new furnace and ducting. That came in at $10K. Now, with our long held desire for a remodel, it made no sense to us to spend that chunk of money, knowing it was likely we would replace it within a year or two. Laura & I crossed our fingers that the furnace would get us through to the 05-06 season, and pledged to take concrete steps to remodel in the spring. When time passed into June 2006, we remembered that pledge and started the design.

Remodel progress this week was evident everywhere in the house. All the shear walls are up around the outside. The trim boards for the window exteriors have arrived. And drain lines to the dry well are nearly in, meaning the trenches will be getting filled in soon.

On our walkthrough, we noticed the three windows in the guest bedroom were framed to the same height. This was consistent with the list of windows, but not with the drawings of the facade. Honestly, we'd missed this on our window review.

John graciously agreed to adjust framing and windows to align with the facade drawing. He noted that due to slow construction activity this year, the window exchange will go pretty fast. He expects it will be only two weeks of lead time to get the resized windows in, instead of a more usual four weeks. And by the end of August, well before the hint of rain, we should be under roof. Our timing of the remodel, like much of our experience, is quite fortunate.