Good morning!

Well there's nothing like being woken up to the sound of concrete being poured 15 feet behind your head at 8am. Masons were here early. Vapor barrier was laid and concrete poured for the floor of the basement. The masons are still here at 1:45pm, I think they are fixing up the outside walls where the cracks are- will know for sure when I go out later. I have to say their ladders have evolved. I'm not sure where the 2x4 one came from, or how safe it is the way it's propped up there.

Concrete blocks finished!

Monday- they didn't start until 12ish and wrapped up around 6:30pm.

First impression: it's not as tall inside as I thought it would be, upon measuring its like 92-93 inches from the footer to the top of the concrete. Also not too happy with some of the joints, as seen in the pic below.

They did install a French drain which is a flexible black pipe back to a cistern, which is seen in the back corner in the pic.

Patio Wall Conduit Routing

Since the patio retaining wall will be under construction soon, I needed to figure out how many conduits we need to get into the wall and how the LED lights will be connected.

I have made the equipment selections (12V water proof, LED strips and drivers) and put together a couple of sketches to guide the installation.  http://www.flexfireleds.com/warm-white-ip68-waterproof-led-strip-light-reel/

The patio retaining wall is a total of about 51.5 linear feet on the inside, where the lights will be.  The LEDs come in reels of 16.4'.  So three reels will be slightly short of covering the entire wall.  We have some corners we need to navigate which will be easiest done with flexible wire strips and connectors, so we will probably make up most of the difference with these.

http://www.elementalled.com/waterproof-solder-connector-pair.html

The product literature indicates that 32' of LEDs can be connected together without a voltage drop problem.  The LEDs are about 48W / strip, so two strips is almost 100W of light.  So we can connect two strips together and then run third strip in parallel to this to get a total circuit wattage of 150W, requiring a 200W driver.  http://www.elementalled.com/12v-dimmable-driver.html

To minimize the number of conduits that need to be run in the wall, we can stub up between where the single strip and double strips are connected.  As cheap insurance, in case we want to change this later, we can run another conduit to the rough location where the two strips will be connected in case we want to separate them at any time.

We want to be able to dim these lights because they may be quite bright at full output.  This means we need drivers that are capable of dimming.  We also want to have them switched at two locations so 3 way switches will also be required.

We also have 3 GFI receptacles that we want to put in the wall, but this is pretty simple.


The design sketches are shown below, complete with product numbers for purchasing, when it is time.

Conduit Routing Plan

Patio Lighting Wiring Diagram

Detailed Patio Lighting Layout

Product Purchase List

Finishing Foundation Walls

The masons were here early on a Saturday morning!  2 masons arrived at about 8AM and two more arrived at 9AM when I was leaving to get, a new to me, guitar!

When I got home at about 5:30, there were still 3 masons here.  I confirmed that they are Polish.  They are killing it on the foundation wall and are just about complete.

When I got home they hadn't left a spot for the window and I was concerned, but a few minutes later I heard a saw and thought maybe they are cutting the window out!  And they were!  They have the anchors for the sill plate installed on the east and west corners, but not on the north / south walls.  I am not sure if they just ran out of time or what happened.

They tore back the siding to expose the existing sill plate, rim joist and subfloor to see how high they need to go.  The new rafters will be 2x12s instead of 2x8s so the bottom of the joists will not line up.

They filled the blocks (by the bucket full) that had reinforcing bars installed.  They have used most of the block now.

They still need to get the tile drain / perforated pipe installed by the footing.  These materials haven't been delivered yet.

Now for some photos:

Walking the planks is fun.  They are a bit rickety, but some big masons were on them so it must be safe. They lay them so that one side of the plank is under the previous plank, and on top of the next plank so they are weighted and don't fly up when you step on the edge of it.

Got some good overview shots from ontop of the cinderblocks that are left.

We need to make sure we strip back some of the earth around the existing foundation so that we can rubberize and seal the joint between the two foundation walls.

7 Courses

Three masons arrived around 7:30AM this morning and started pulling the forms off of the footings.  That was all I saw before leaving for work.

They were able to get 7 courses of block laid today.  It looks pretty good, though I did notice some joints without mortar, or where the mortar appears to have shrunk since they laid the block.  Wire racks were used between every other course and rebar was also used vertically.  I wonder if they will be filling the wall with concrete.

I am glad we will be getting the rubberized water proofing to seal up the cracks.

There is a box of anchor bolts that will be used to attach the sill plate,but I didn't see any lintels for the window, so I am not sure what the plan is for that.

Now for some photos!

Deliveries

Getting ready for foundation walls!

Not sure if they will progress tomorrow with rain coming.

Footings for basement poured

4-6-12

The mason installed the footings for the basement today. They dug out the area by hand!

The big 3-0

They started excavating this morning! Don't you just love the ladder they rigged? They also took down the maple tree with the red leaves that was next to the patio.

One step forward...

Gas line was moved today. Plumber came out around 8:30, and NJNG got here around 12:15pm. Ball valve installed inside so we can turn off the gas inside when adding new pipe for the addition. What made me nervous was after the gad co dug the hole in the street, they put a fire extinguisher next to the hole and then one of the guys was in the hole! If it would have exploded, I'm not sure that little fire extinguisher would really do much. But everything went smoothly (I think- I really wouldn't know) and we now have a shiny new meter. NJNG guy said we could paint it if we want to, but we really don't spend a lot of time on that side of the house. Currently there is still a hole in the street. I still haven't figured out what exactly they did in the street, but oh well. Hopefully they will fix it before some car looses a tire.

Delayed...again

We were scheduled to have our gas meter moved yesterday but the snow on Monday pushed the schedule back a day.

So then we were scheduled for today. We then found out that the time slot was for the afternoon and the GC thought it was too risky to shut the gas off in the afternoon and opted to reschedule for tomorrow.

Hopefully this will actually happen tomorrow.

We will need to remove the red maple tree at the end of the driveway to allow for the back hoe which is fine since it is in the way of our future wood shed anyway.

Coffee table complete!

One coat of gel stain and three costs of polyurethane separated by a day each, and we are finally finished with the coffee table build!

We learned a lot of new things during this project and will use them in future projects.

Most notably with finishing we will try other wood filler techniques like Ana White suggests. We used regular, gray stainable wood filler but it didn't take the same color as the wood and stands out as blotches.

The holes from the nail gun are so small that we might forego the wood filler or use filler that is already colored to match the stain.

We are happy with how it turned out and are looking for an end table design now.

Stained!

Becky stained the table today!  It looks great and we can't wait to get it completely finished so we can use it!

It's together!

Finished the drawers, and sanded it down yesterday. Also attached the top which hubby put together. I applied some stain today and plan is to polyurethane it tomorrow.

Table Day 3

We spent 2 more hours, and got the drawers built and drawer glides in. It's pretty smooth, but needs some fine tuning. Apparently we are 1/16" shy on the width of the drawer which isn't bad, but makes it so we need a shim to get the glide to line up.

Day 2 of Table Making

We spent another 3 hours and got to step 8! The next step is the dreaded drawers. Hopefully we are square, so the drawers slide. The clamps I bought today definitely helped get everything nice and tight. I also bought a hand sander for when we are finished.

Practice makes Perfect

Since hubby wants to try to build the shelves and drawers for the closet, I decided we should have a smaller practice project to see what we are getting ourselves into.

We will be trying to make this: http://ana-white.com/2012/02/plans/benchright-coffee-table

Hopefully it works out so we can get rid of the cheap coffee table I got off of Craigslist. So far we spent 2 hours at Lowes picking up supplies, and about 3 hours on the table. We only got to step 3/14, but learned how to use a few new tools.

In other news: Supposedly digging will start Wednesday! Hopefully the gas meter will be moved by then.

Our Latest Tool Purchase

An air compressor and brad nail gun from Harbor Freight.

Flatustrating

The gas company came back out today to sketch the new meter location because they lost the paperwork from last week.

They originally said the meter must be at least three feet from a window but later said the three foot rule wasn't required if you don't use the window.  They will relocate the meter to the location we requested.

They said the cost would be $600 and it would be 2 weeks before they could move it. (They have to get permits and schedule an appointment to come back out.) They also recommended running the inside gas lines so it's ready for when they come out.

The GC said he would try to speed this process up and plans to start excavating on Thursday of this week.