Am I back?

Ok, so I haven't written in, what, almost 3 years? Is that any reason to stop reading my blog? I should think not. I'm not a very demanding content creator, so it should be easy for you. :)


Ok, so where was I ... ok, yes. The old format. Lets do that again.


Weather: Lovely! Quite nice for this time of year. It's burning up our lawn a little though ...


Music: Hrm .. been listening to a bunch of Pulse on Sirius. Other than that, mostly CBC Radio 1. I must be getting old, I prefer current events to tunes.

Family: Well, I'm married now and have a little 18 month old girl. I'll be blogging about her a lot, because she's hilaaaaarious, and that's what parents do. Here's a pic of our little angel ...

Work: iMaint 3 was a great success. In fact we've shipped iMaint 3.5 since then. I've moved on to the redesign of the UI, essentially merging our web and vb6 UI's into a single c# WPF UI. It'll be slick.

House: Well, we finished that a couple years ago. Have a front lawn, but no back lawn or shed. Although, a month or so ago I finished our back deck (see!? I inherited at least a little skill from my pa). A pic in shameless self promotion:

'The' Deck (tm)

S'all for now.

Empire Avenue

Joined EmpireAvenue (www.empireavenue.com). Fun site! EAVB_WLYIKPGSJV

15 McHugh: Day 28

A month has gone by already, and it feels like we are no further ahead. Probably because we almost aren't.

The clearing of the land is done, but the grade was too high and is currently being dropped 2 feet. Holy dirt!

We've been in talks with our geo-thermal/in-floor heating contractor, and things are looking good on that front. We'll be digging 6 foot deep piping trenches in the back yard before too long.

The aforementioned contractor #2 couldn't take on our project, so we defaulted back to
contractor #1, who accepted the project and is due to start 1st week in Nov. If that holds up, our move in date would look to be late February. That'll give us a few months to fine tune the interior before the spring comes and we can start the landscaping. Good times. :)

One silver-lining is that the local truss company has become freed up and can build our trusses. Joy. We still may buy out of town due to some rumors we heard, but we'll see how that goes.

One bad thing about being late is that Nicole and I can only live in our current location (my aunt's house) until she returns mid December. That means moving in with either of our parents, or renting an apt for 3 or 4 months. The former offends our love of privacy, and the latter would be expensive and work laden (mostly because we'd have to find it, then furnish it).

In the meantime, via an old friend now working in the US, we have a high end home building firm reviewing our house plans to offer some free advice. Free is good! (http://www.horizonbuildersinc.net/) Thx Vic!

Terry

15 McHugh: Day 13

Holy nutz. If you aren't going to build a house turn-key, you should acquire project management skills before jumping into this. I have huge lists of phone numbers, estimates, dates, square footages, etc. It's a lot to manage, and that becomes apparent when talking to contractors who ask you questions you don't really know the answer to, but should.

So yeah, many delays. We were late getting things moving ourselves, so we dropped the ball on a couple of things. For one, the local truss company, Pro Truss, is booked up for the next 3 months, so we had to put out our plans to other towns for quotes. Pain in the ass given the distance. This should have been done long ago. Also, getting a certified contractor has become a problem again. The original guy is running very late (can't help us until mid November!) so we've started looking elsewhere. We found another certified guy, and this weekend he'll let us know if his team can take our project. They are currently doing two commercial buildings using RewardWall, and they can only take on one house before the building season ends. Hopefully ours!

In the meantime, Nicole and I have been searching for the best prices on various things we need: appliances, flooring, faucets, etc. We found a fantastic little store in Hare Bay called Jesse Collins and Sons. Highly recommended! They have a large stock and must move a great deal of it quickly because their prices are great. We are buying 1600 sq.ft. of BEAUTIFUL hardwood there, and so far their appliance quotes are the lowest. Chester Dawe in Gander has pretty good flooring prices too (recently bought out by Rona) so check out those guys before you buy.

TPC

15 McHugh: Day 1 (Sept 20th)

New house underway!

Quite a bit of work has gone into the process to this point, and things are getting somewhat confusing, so Nicole and I though it a good idea to document the house development for ourselves (should we be brave enough to attempt this again later in life) and for anyone else who may benefit from our decisions and/or mistakes.

We are considering this day 1 of the house building process, because the clearing of the land started last night. However, all the steps leading to this point are important and at times obscure, so we'll list those too.

1. July
   
   
   1. Downloaded a decent piece of house design software and laid out the basics of what we wanted.
      
   2. Sent our design ideas to a professional to have the house plans drawn up.
      
   3. Put a $1000 down payment on the block of land we wanted (lot 13) which is somewhere in the middle of this woods.
      
2. August
   
   
   1. Put our old house up for sale.
      
   2. Sold it 1 day later! Woot!
      
   3. Received completed plans. Design work plus 5 copies came in at about $400.
      
   4. Met with many banks haggling mortgage interest rates. Have pre-approved mortgages in several places, I guess we just have to pick a bank once we are ready to begin.
      
   5. Delivered copies of the house plans to various people:
      
      
      1. Surveyor's: survey the land, and provide the plot plan. (Surveyor's eventually sent their completed work and their copy of the plans to the town engineer; see Sept 6)
         
      2. Building supplies stores for materials list estimates.
         
      3. A specialist in geo-thermal heating and heat pumps.
         
      4. Construction contractors. This was tricky in our case as we are doing the entire house with RewardWall (only using lumber for the interior walls) and needed a certified contractor. In our area, RewardWall is supplied by Newfoundland Styro.
         
3. September
   
   
1. Sept 6: Town engineer had our building permit ready. Picked it up along with the copy of our house plans, and a booklet detailing at which stage each of the town inspections will occur. Cost: $387.79.
2. Sept 10: Dropped off a copy of the plot plan to our excavator, and gave him the ok to grub (see Defn #6) the land. He said this work is often in the ballpark of $5000. Ours would be more because the land was higher than grade (2 feet had to come off the top) and it is a large block.
3. Sept 19: Surveyor's finished their work (pegging the boundaries of the land). Paid their fee of $340. Also, Excavation began in the evening.
4. Today: Drove up to the land again to take a look, grubbing is going well. Also visited the geo-thermal guy and picked up his estimate. Expensive stuff! He's working on some additional numbers for us.

Woot! House is Sold!

Weather: A little cloudy, but it's 16.5 degrees Celsius, which is pretty warm for this time of year/morning.

Music: 3 songs on repeat: Plain White T's – Delilah, Stabilo – Kidding Ourselves, Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah.

Family: Nick is back to St. John's for another year at MUN. Tom finished his helicopter's license a few months ago, and yesterday he completed the PARE test in 3:31 (requirement: 4:45 or less). Gratz Tom!

Work: The usual. iMaint3 is coming along nicely. Most of the other programmers are deep into my architecture now and the system is refining quite well. I'm working on a scheduling recurrence system right now (generate 'every last weekday of every 3^rd month' type stuff) which is proving to be a lot of fun.

Zievo: Dead stop. Too much else going on.

Home: House is sold! Woot! Nicole and I have temporarily moved into my aunt and uncle's house (they are currently living in Nunavut) while waiting for our new house to begin construction. We purchased a block of land at Grenfell Estates (block 13) and will start building soon. The house we are going with is a custom design, yet simple, that we arrived at by using graph paper cut-outs to lay out the rooms and sizes we wanted. The final plans were completed by an engineer in Gander and picked up Tuesday of this week. So far so good.

Next step: contractors. We are going with a RewardWall house which is stronger, warming, and more sound proof than a wood framed home. Sounds great, but finding certified workers is tricky. We are also fairly sure we want a geo-thermal heat pump system, water to water. That'll give us in-floor heating with a very attractive monthly power bill.

Exciting times!

The Poetry of Lyric

"Deep within I'm shaken by the violence of existing for only you. I know I can't be with you ... I do what I have to do." - Sarah McLachlan, Do What You Have To Do