Hydronic Heated Floor & Concrete Slab

Prepping for the hydronic heat floor to be laid, and then we'll have more concrete to pour for our slab!  

 

ready for concrete!!!

Next step...framing!

BACKFILL

We are finally back filling now! It's nice now that we don't have a huge moat around our house!  With all the rain that we got in May and early June, the river flooded and gave us a moat!  Today the river opened back up at 3pm.  Feels like summer is finally here!This will be the view of our front door and new section of the house

 

This is a view of the corner of the house, looking at the dining area 

This will be one of our favorite spots! The screened in porch! Filling in so we can pour the slab

        Back yard, looking to our outdoor living space!  Can't wait!

River view!  Big rectangle to the right will be where the fire places will go. Looking forward to that!

Stay tuned...

Concrete Walls

Walls are up & concrete has cured.  Ready for back fill!

The grass has even greened up, Spring has sprung, and we are ready for the next steps. Rain is in the forecast so this might delay us now... 

2nd Phase started!

Hi Everyone!! 

It's been a minute since I last posted, hope you all enjoyed the winter, and holidays... We have a lot happening here all of a sudden! Hoping to bring everyone up to date with this post as we have been super busy over the last few months. On Wednesday of this week, (4/24/19) our concrete contractor arrived and started excavation for the second phase of our house project.  Excavation was finished early morning Thursday 4/25 and boards were being set for footers by mid-day...In rolled the concrete trucks (2 of them) around 4:30pm and completed by about 6pm.  By today, Friday, they were here early again and pulling the boards off of the footers and prepping the forms for walls. Most of the wall forms are up, sounds like they just need a few more to finish the inside walls, and we'll be ready for concrete most likely Monday 4/29.  Feels like we had nothing going on all winter on our house project and now all of a sudden here we are almost ready to install the radiant floor heat for the 2nd half of the house. Then we'll be onto framing! All very exciting!!!

ALL THE FORMS ARRIVED, AND ARE NOW BEING LAID OUT

                                  

I guess I should rewind a little... 

After demoing the little house last fall, Brandon injured himself while trying to move a section of the roof from the little house.  He was trying to flip it to move it into a different location out of the way and ended up disconnected his bicep tendon. Yuck, right!? His surgery was the week after Thanksgiving, and he did great in surgery and recovered pretty quickly.  

He looked like he had a bionic arm...

Then it was my turn...I had surgery on my foot right before Christmas.  Dec. 20th I had a handful of things done to my foot.  I had a bunion fixed, a long toe shortened (yuck), a pinched nerve taken out, and two ligaments repaired on the bottom of my foot.  5 incisions total, and about 4 months later and I'm feeling pretty good.  Still not 100% but working towards it.   It was a slow yet busy winter for us, not only with injuries and surgeries, but we had a couple of other house projects going as well.  We are excited to be getting back into our house and working hard to get as much completed before next winter.  We have pledged to ourselves though to have a little more fun this summer.  Last summer we worked a ton, and didn't have as much fun time, so this summer we are planning to get out and have a great summer together as a family.   

We hope you are enjoying our blog as much as we are having fun documenting a huge part of our life.  In addition to projects, Brandon has started a construction and design company called, Niche Construction... and I have reinstated my Real Estate License and am now a Realtor with Keller Williams Success Realty in Barrington, IL!  Lots of big stuff  happening in our lives right now.  We are very busy, and trying to make the best life for our little family while showing our kids how important it is to work hard and follow your dreams and passions.   

Stay tuned, we hope you have enjoyed our journey thus far. 

~Liz & Brandon

Filling Crawl Space

Filling Crawl Space

In this update, you'll see Brandon is using a Bobcat to bring fill into the crawl space so we can eventually pour our concrete slab and start building the second side of our house. For those of you who didn't know, or forgot, we still have a whole other side of the house to build.  Last fall was the side with the bedrooms, bathrooms, laundry, basement, etc.  This fall is the side of the house with kitchen, dining, and living room, as well as the entry way and courtyard area will be started.  Below is a picture of the fill that we had dumped on our street side yard when our street was done over the summer.  Our street was paved for the first time ever this past July and they had to take about an inch of the material off to prep the road.  This ended up being a Win Win for all, because the county would have needed to haul the fill out and bring it somewhere else to dump it, using large trucks and having to pay for haul away fees etc.  As you see it was excellent for us as we would be needing fill this fall to fill in the crawl space once we demoed the house.  WIN WIN!    

We have made a big dent in the pile. We only had the bobcat for a 3 hour rental, so we weren't able to finish the project completely, but finished what we needed to, to prep for concrete.   I don't have a before picture but the pile stretched from one side to the other of the picture on the right. 

ONE LUCKY KID! He is getting to ride on all of these "toys" that we keep renting! Fun to watch them work together, and see their smiles.   

Kids making "snow" angels out of gravel.  They always seem to find fun at the job-site. HA!

Clean up!

Clean up day!

Although its great that the house is down, we still had a lot of clean up work ahead of us to do.  The next few days we spent cutting up large pieces of the wood floor, filling up our dumpster, and trying to clean up around the house the best we could.  Suns out guns out! HA! 

 

Working into the dark once again.  We really try to pack as much as we can into one day.  Then we get up and do it again until it's complete. 

I think I see a few more spots we could fill! :) We have officially only used one dumpster for this house demo. Impressive if you ask me. We really know how to pack them efficiently.

 Now, let's get this outta here...Ready for pick up!