House Stuff

Went over all the doors, door finishes and door hardware for the house today… I never knew there were so many options for door. Glad that’s over.

The foundation/slab was (finally) poured for the house today, so I figure I’ll post another time lapse video (it ends this afternoon).

Sorry the quality is lame and it’s little, YouTube downsamples the video, not me… To give you an idea of how the “real” video looks, this is the last frame of the video:

I picked appliances for the house a few weeks ago, and I ended up with a pretty cool stove (I ended up with the 6 burner, 22″ griddle configuration).

The best part about it is this:

Huh? Must be a Jewish/kosher thing I’m thinking… {shrug}

http://subzero.com/wolf/description.asp?category=dual%20fuel%20ranges&id=30

This will be great because I should be able to cook up some bad ass Top Ramen with this thing.

This is a live webcam shot (well live as of this posting) of my basement. The only reason I think it’s cool is because the three important sides are backfilled now, so we can finally start digging the footings for the main house (the front side isn’t backfilled yet because the dirt from the footings will be put in there, and there’s nothing above it, so there’s no slab there).

I threw together a time lapse of the basement being built. The end of it is today, when they took all the forms off the basement walls and we actually have freestanding concrete walls. Now for the waterproofing of the walls…

The movie runs through 4 hours per second. The resolution is a bit lame, but hey… can’t keep YouTube from down sampling it.

Today we are getting concrete poured in the basement walls as well as concrete sprayed into the pool. I’m guessing it’s pretty much just going to be a zillion concrete trucks coming and going all day (it looks like they do 4 trucks at a time… 2 for basement and 2 for pool).

Shot from web cam:

I didn’t realize how tall 12 foot ceilings are until I walked around the guest house today (since it now has trusses it’s easy to gauge). They are pretty high up there.

The nice thing about it is we can setup some interesting stuff indoors… like a climbing wall, base jumping, hang gliding indoors, etc.

The webcam at the job site is now live… After spending about 2 hours wrestling with 2Wire’s lameness (I need to screw around with it more to see if I can get it configured better).

Went up to the site today to see what’s been going on in the last 2 weeks (since I’ve been gone), and it looks like lots of stuff has been happening…

• Guest house/garage has it’s concrete slab poured

• Basement looks like it’s just about ready to have it’s slab poured
• Framing of the guest house has started (2 walls were standing, and the rest of the walls looked like they were about to be put up)
• Pool is completely dug out
• Underground pool equipment room is dug out
• Transformer and temporary power has been installed
• Temporary phone lines have been installed (it’s wired to the trailer at least, I couldn’t see into the temp phone box if fiber was pulled through the conduit or not yet)

It’s starting to look like a real construction site now with loads of wood and crap strewn all around. hah

I’ll find out tomorrow for certain on the phone line… if we can get Internet soon, maybe I’ll finally get my camera installed up there.

Got word from Mike today that we officially have power at the site now. Someone must have read my plea.

So I was checking out some of the stuff that should be installed soon at the construction site (most notably electricity). I guess SDG&E is going to be putting in a digital electric meter vs. the “old school” mechanical type.

I Googled around a bit to find out what’s up with them… I guess they are going to be taking measurements hourly and make that data available to consumers. Maybe I’ll cobble together an API for it so I can generate my own charts for the data or something. {shrug}

Speaking of SDG&E, if you are reading this Todd, make it happen!

Went up to the site yesterday, and there’s lots of digging going on now. 3 tractors up there (a normal backhoe, a little one for doing foundation footings and then a bit excavator one for digging the basement). It’s hard to tell how much dirt was pulled out, but check out the picture of the excavator (the cab where the dude sits is enclosed on the left side of it). I figure the basement and pool will probably generate ~650 cubic yards of dirt that will need to be hauled away.

Shawn, myself and Allison went to take a peek at my property today and there’s half a ditch now (about 150′, with another 150′ to go). It’s so SDG&E can install a transformer. I guess that means construction started… sorta.

The only thing that could should have held us up today as far as being issued building permits was the Waste Discharge Identification Number (see this post). But the county of San Diego agreed that we weren’t disturbing more than 1 acre, because landscaping isn’t a land disturbance (only the foundation, pool and driveway square footage count towards the 1 acre threshold).

So what does that mean? Well, it *should* have meant that we have building permits now, but instead… the county couldn’t find the permit number for the existing retaining wall that’s already on the site (they ended up finding it after a few hours of looking, but they didn’t find it until 5 minutes before they closed). So hopefully when Mike goes back to county tomorrow they will still know where it is and issue us permits.

For anyone that is looking to purchase a vacation home, why not a castle?

But seriously… I want a castle for my birthday! (please)

http://www.wists.com/chateaux.html