Can you believe we’re at week 40 of this whole crazy process???
As I was sorting through pictures today I was so thankful that I made a note on every Friday on our calendar to let me know what week we were working on. Makes the walk down memory lane stage so much easier!
In my last post I mentioned a few things about where we were at in the process, but there weren’t any pictures. Today, today I have pictures! And wow, there’s been a lot happening!
I talked about the roof getting poured…
Sooooo glad that stage is over. I think because we were hoping it would be done in June, and then July, it just felt like such a long process. The guys really pushed through, working late every day and even on Saturdays just to get everything done by the end of August.
At some point I mentioned that we were insulating the roof with foam to help keep the house cool. This is what that looked like before the pour day happened:
Letting the kids see what was going on up there.
The roof is formed by nailing plywood and 2×4’s to the lower walls, then each other, and everything is supported from below by metal jack stands. Once all the plywood was in place and the edges of the roof were formed the guys placed all the foam. After that the rebar went down. In the photo above all of those guys are tying rebar together. There were another few guys on the other side of the roof all doing the same thing. If the rebar isn’t tied together it’ll shift when the cement gets poured and won’t be structurally sound.
After the rebar was all put in place Evens followed behind with all the electrical lines for ceiling fans and lights. The edges of the socket boxes lay flat on the plywood so that after all the form work is taken off they sit flush with the ceiling. The foam has texture on it so the mortar will stick when they stucco everything.
While the last bits of all that stuff on the roof were happening the tile started arriving. We had to do it in 3 loads. So. Much. Tile.
There’s one more pattern hiding under one of the yellow and white piles. The fun thing is that this isn’t the floor tile, but I’m not going to tell you what it’s for yet! Let me just say that the tile boss got excited when I showed it to him and told him what we were going to do with it.
When we were waiting for them to load the tile, which literally took hours, I made sure to take some pictures of the factory because I think it’s amazing. I want to write a separate post on it, but until then, here’s a peek at just one little part of it…
Little Haiti aside for you here – the day that we picked up the first load of tiles was also the first time that I got to see Haiti’s very first overpass opened. They’ve been working on it for the past year. It’s definitely helped the traffic congestion in this part of town!
When we arrived back at the site I found Daniel finishing up the pain in the office. I said he looked like a monster, and the guys may have given him a nickname because of it…
After the roof pour was done and everyone recovered a bit things moved into full steam ahead. The guys have done SO much in the past week and a half! Seriously. I feel like the last few months things were in slow motion as we worked at getting things ready for the pour, and now that it’s done they’re all working on separate projects and it’s all finishing stuff, so it’s really noticeable now.
For example, a few days after the pour Boss Abner went to work on laying the floor tile. He started in the office and it was a bit touch and go for the first day. When we watched the pace of things Chris and I started calculating how long it would take, and basically assumed he would need at least a month, because he would also be at the mercy of the stucco guys and the paint going up on the second floor.
Um, we were wrong… After he got in his groove, which happened on day two of doing tile, he started flying.
With the exception of the edge pieces that would need to be cut to fit, he’s done all of the office, the hallway and the kitchen, which is the biggest room in the house, in about a week. We had to pull him off of the living room because some of the walls still need to be finished and paint touch ups done. Today when I went out in the morning he had measured all the edge pieces in the office. When I came back about 4 hours later he had a good part of the edges cut and mortared in.
Some of you may have noticed that the amount of mortar under the tile itself is really thick, almost an inch. Because the tiles are cement, and not ceramic, this is the way they get installed. This was all taken into account when the engineering drawings were done up. You may also notice that the tile is still pretty dirty. It’s going to get washed, then have the joints mortared, cleaned again, and then we’re putting a sealant on it to protect them. We didn’t do that when we did our current building and we now know why it’s so important.
On Monday another big thing happened – they poured the inside stairs that go up to the second floor! And the reason this is so exciting is because it’s the last major piece of construction. Yes, there are still things happening, but this was the last big thing that needed form work done and concrete poured.
This is what things looked like last week when they were building the form work…
And this is what things looked like at about 11 am today…
Boss Sail (Sigh-eel) actually finished stuccoing that opening and the doorway to the stairs not long after this, then he moved back upstairs…
Yesterday, in the master bedroom at around 8 am…
The first layer of mortar going up on the ceiling. The first layer just gets thrown up. Literally, they throw it at the surface. It’s rough, but pretty thin. After that they follow with a second coat, but this time it gets smoothed with a large wooden trowel, and then followed by a wet sponge to really smooth it out. To do the ceilings the guys set up a platform on piles of blocks.
Just down the hall a few more guys were working with Boss Biren (Bee-when) to set things up in what will be Alex’s room. That’s Biren in the picture chipping any chunks of mortar off the walls that need to go before they start stuccoing. Again, this was at about 8 am.
Today at about 11 am this is what I found…
Biren had finished the first coat on the entire top half of the room, and was on the second smooth coat. I like this picture because you can actually see the difference in texture between the two coats. When I went back out there at about 3 pm this afternoon, I couldn’t see Biren because he was in the closet, and the guys were already taking down the platform and getting ready to move things to Olivia’s room. Sail was back working in our room and had already finished a good chunk of the second coat. I have a sneaking suspicion there might be a bit of friendly competition going on between the rooms… When I took the picture above, Boss Dja came up from his break and said, “What, you aren’t done yet?!” ;)
I have a feeling that the stucco is going to be finished a lot faster than we thought it would be!
There’s a lot going on up on the roof too. After the pour was finished this is what things looked like…
And this was this morning…
For the record, when Olivia and I went back this afternoon, the farthest wall on that little room were already as tall as me. And what, are we doing with all that steel? Why, it’s the supports for our solar system. Those looooong bars in the foreground are going to cross over all those pillars and then support the cross pieces, which will hold the panels. The panels will cover the south half of the roof and deck.
Here’s looking down on that deck from the roof right after the pour…
About a week ago when they were forming the pillars for the panel support system…
And today! Everything was cleaned up and ready for stucco. Those rebar pieces sticking up out of the deck are going to get poured into small posts that will support the railing.
That door opening under the ladder is the laundry room. I haven’t taken any pictures of it yet because I would have probably fallen off the deck. Basically it’s big enough for a washing machine, a wash tub, and a small counter in between to hold a laundry basket. We have our washing machine in our bathroom now, but it takes up valuable real estate. And, if there’s a problem it not only leaks water all over the floor, but Chris has to take the door off and drag it out on the deck to fix it. The new laundry room will be wide open, so well ventilated. If there’s a problem we just sweep the water out onto the deck, and Chris can easily pull it out for any repairs. The tricky part? Rather than having it drain into our septic, we ran a separate line for it that runs through the walls, across the lower deck floor, and underground next to the house where we’ll put a gravel bed and plant things over top. Fun, hey?
I haven’t shown you an outside view of the house in a while, so here it is…
And, in case you were wondering how they get all the big tools up on the roof, they do it like this…
Most of the time they’re walking up and down the ladders like they’re a set of stairs. When I go up and down the ladders I’m holding on for dear life and trying not to throw up.
So there you have it! A very picture heavy catch up of everything that’s been going on in the past couple of weeks. Hold on to your hats, because it’s not going to slow down!
~Leslie
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