Hidden Groves diary
After a six-month delay waiting for the fire sprinkler inspection, we finally got it done and are working on the cottage again. We had to leave our sprinkler pipes exposed, but now we've got the insulation and ceilings done.
Turns out Joe likes vibrant red houses with blue trim.
We're trying to get one room protected from the elements before rainy season starts, so we can store our stuff safely.
We finished installing mere minutes before it started raining. Timing! You can see three of the five skylights in this photo.
We use rafters instead of trusses. For one thing, we can lift them easily to install, and for a bonus, we either get a high ceiling or an attic. (High ceilings in our case, in all three buildings.)
We bought our windows at Habitat for Humanity Restore. Vastly cheaper, but they're kind of randomly sized, so we'll build the walls to fit them and the Back House will look a tad eccentric.
The Back House is starting to look like a building!
We are rushing to get a roof on before rainy season, so we are postponing the framing for all the windows. We will get random-sized windows from Habitat for Humanity, then chop holes in the walls to make them fit later.
Hot, dusty, and fun! Two week hiatus from building. Three, if you count recovering afterwards.
Nobody does this in California, but it seems like a good idea if you want warm floors.
We still haven't figured out what kind of heat pump water heater will heat our house, but we figured we'd lay the tubing under there in case we do.
We got lucky with the weather and got a cool day.
Our awesome neighbor Frank brought his tractor over, and we followed up by bouncing the dirt with a Jumping Jack to compact it thoroughly.
Our favorite plumber wasn't available, and everybody else was giving bids around $4,000, so we did it ourselves.
It took some 25 yards of gravel to fill inside our stem walls. We buried water lines to four outside spigots, as well as bathroom stuff and insulated lines to the kitchen.
The stem walls and footings are kind of overkill for a one-story building.
Now ready to pour the stem walls for the Back House.
Eventually we'll have a deck behind the cottage, but in the meantime we've been staggering up and down a pile of cinder blocks. Big improvement!
Our friend Lonnie from Habitat for Humanity pulled up a giant cottonwood stump, officially marking the beginning of the Back House. The Cottage is still (!) waiting on a fire sprinkler inspection, and we've run out of stuff we can do on that until we pass. (Soon?)
The slab of the Back House will be about 16" above grade, so we staked out the dimensions and where the top of the forms will go.
Suddenly seeing the shape of the building! Also, we successfully adopted out Luka, a Pyrenees Mountain Dog we were fostering.
We picked up a stove off Craigslist for $50 that seems to work satisfactorily. Perhaps a fancy inductive range is in our future, but it was too many decisions to make at the moment. But now we can bake brownies!
We had to withstand a few 100+ days before we got this working, but they weren't too bad. The cottage is well insulated (even with the roof still uninsulated waiting for the fire sprinkler inspection) and has lovely protective shade trees.
It is fantastic not having to wash dishes with a hose out back. Also: best dishwasher I've ever had, hot water, and some shelves to put dishes on. We ran water to the ice maker in the fridge, but it inexplicably still doesn't make ice.
It was surprisingly difficult to find cabinets with lots of drawers. Apparently they're out of fashion, and people just like swinging doors open now. They took about three hours for the two of us to assemble, but they work great.
Still waiting for fire sprinkler inspection, so making life more livable.
It's kind of scary taking a saw to your new countertops.
We are officially living in the lap of luxury, now. No more pooping in a bucket!
We moved the tools and drywall and stuff out of the middle of the floor, making some usable space. Also brought in a TV and sofa. No kitchen sink yet, but we have some temporary counters and cabinets.
We're still unable to work on the ceiling because of insane delays with the fire sprinkler inspection, but we're doing what we can.
We gave notice to our landlords two months ago that we'd be out by April 1. We hoped at that time the cottage would be more livable than it is, but we're committed! We will be camping all summer, but camping in style.
This is the color our kitchen walls will be.
We are still impatiently waiting for the fire department to inspect our sprinkler system.
Some friends of ours from Habitat for Humanity are helping us get the drywall up.
We are having delays on getting our sprinkler system inspected, so insulation of the roof is postponed. California's mandatory sprinkler system is surprisingly expensive because of bureaucracy.
Some 300 feet of 2 inch Schedule 40 PVC glued and pressure tested, with branches for a couple of faucets and the eventual Front House and Back House. Next we hook up the indoor water.
I wish we had rented the giant sit-on trencher, instead of the walk-behind one, to make the trench wider and deeper (and maybe faster?). It worked, though.
The walls are 2x6, so the insulation is R-19, plus another R-4 from an inch of foam on the outside. Because, you know, California gets really cold in the winter.
Sac Sewer tells us that they know where our sewer tap is this time, for sure, so we're going to dig again on Saturday to try to find it. We buried the first 200 feet in anticipation. Wish us luck!
We are using Pex for most of the interior plumbing, which is pretty easy and dependable.
The tap into the city sewer on the street isn't exactly where we expected it to be, so we've got a bit of a fiasco finishing it off, but we're off to a good start.
California homes, no matter how small, are required to have fire sprinkler systems. If you can't afford a top-notch home in California, there's always homelessness as an option.
Some of those LED lights I installed on the ceiling are accidentally 5000K instead of 3000K, so they're way too blue for my taste, and it's been a nightmare trying to replace them -- Amazon has sent me the wrong product 3 times, before finally marking it unavailable. I hope I don't have to pull them out and replace them all.
This is just the wall between the bedroom and great room, insulated mostly for soundproofing. We also passed our inspection for rough electrical and rough mechanical.
There were a couple of millimeters of nail sticking out the bottom of the roof, and Joe hit one while wiring some lights. It looks a lot worse than it was.
