Guest House Construction: Part 18

Guest House Construction:  Part 18

As is lately the case, we can go a week or so and nothing happens on the guest house and then all of a sudden a crew will show up and blitz through something with lightning speed.  It's both frustrating and fascinating at the same time. Another fun thing that always seems to happen is that we will have perfect weather for a week or so with no progress and then a bunch of work is scheduled to happen on, let's say, Tuesday and it rains all day so nobody shows up.  In truth, we are probably right on schedule but I'd rather be ahead.  A lot has happened this week especially, so here's the progress we've made since 'Part 17'.

We had sheetrock delivered.  It's kind of interesting.  It was a truck full of sheetrock and two guys who basically carried each piece in by hand.  

They stacked it up in different areas around the house.  They even carried a ton of the stuff upstairs.  It was basically like these guys were staging for the hangers that come later.

One morning the foundation guys showed up.  They pulled all of the tension cables in the slab one last time (they have a machine) and then cut off all of the excess cable and packed the holes with mortar.  It didn't take them very long, but it was a step.

 
Another small step that occurred one afternoon was that a guy showed up to run all of the data cables.  I would have thought that the electricians would do this but apparently it's a different guy.  My builder calls him the "Low Voltage Guy".  Apparently it's a different skill set.

Next up was the very exciting step of insulation.  When you start closing up walls it starts to look more like a house.  These guys put in all of the batting insulation - and there was a lot - in a day.  They also filled all gaps with expansion foam and put the baffles in the attic.  They got a late start and ran out of light.  Since there's no power to the house yet they were working in darkness. To finish, they turned their big truck facing the garage and used the headlights to finish up.  They'll come back and blow in the remaining insulation after sheetrock is hung.

While all this is going on, you have to get inspections for certain things from time to time.  League City is a little inspection happy (by Texas standards anyway) but they do them quickly and we've passed every one.  Plumbing, gas lines, HVAC, electrical, framing, insulation - it all gets inspected before the walls get sealed up.

We were told that the guys were coming to hang sheetrock on Tuesday.  We had decided that there was one interior wall that needed to be soundproofed to a degree.  We heard that foam board would do a decent job so we hit up Lowe's after dinner and picked up four 8X4 sheets of the stuff, which had to ride home on all of our heads.

The sheetrock guys showed up and man did they fly through this step.  They had a crew of 6 or 7 and they worked all day.  I think they would have finished completely but they ran out of sheetrock.  

Here's the garage which shows how they were just short on materials.  This is probably the most exciting thing since framing.  It really starts to look like a house with sheetrock up.  

Grandma, Samantha, and Branelle checking out the Man Cave - Mantopia - Manetarium - Situation Room - House of Scott - No Lady Lounge - FOB Albatross.......or whatever I end up naming it.  I can't really keep them out yet since there's no door (and I'm positive I'm going to need Nel to help me carry all kinds of things up there).

I'll probably give this its own blog series, but the pool guys came out and staked out the pool for location approval.  The yard was so wet from rain that there's no way they can get started, but maybe next week.