July — Garage Facia, Siding & Other projects
In late June we finally removed all the fill from our excavation — the stuff we coated with shotcrete and used for access to the lower part of the site.
It was a project we weren't entirely sure could be done since it's very steep and seemed (to us) almost inaccessible by machinery.
But we shouldn't have worried. The track hoe operator simply worked his way down to the bottom, backed his trucks about a third of the way down, and loaded them up. The dump truck drivers were a little uncertain, and occasionally one needed a little nudge to get started back up the hill, but it went off without a hitch.
 
We also had a fun day or laminating the curved facia for the entry roof. We built a life-sized jig on the floor of the living room and laid up two pieces of 1x12 cedar and glued them into the radius of the curve.
 
Then around the first of July we stared siding and got to test out our elaborate scaffolding. Here's a shot of one corner with deck beams cantilevering out from the house
Below are a couple of shots from the scaffolding.
 
 
The gypcrete went in over the infloor heat system in late July. First the infloor heat guys laid all the pipe, and then the gypcrete guys did their thing.
It's now early August and we're just about done with the siding. Next it will be decks, the insulation/sheetrock starts up inside, and soon we'll pull off to the cabinet shop to build cabinets. You'd think we could time things to we'd do cabinets during those howling November rainstorms, but it doesn't always work out that way. And we can't complain about a month of beautiful weather for the siding.