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Inspection passed, mortgage approved, and we start to move in

hannonpi — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:21:28 +0000

Unfortunately with all that happening I haven’t actually taken any pictures. I am sure the 60 or so more or less regular readers are extremely bummed but here is something to tide you over. These are over the course of several weeks, so they are old. Our current status is that we have our stuff trickling in and will spend our first full night there Thursday! However, our septic system (huge) is still unable to take solids, ie no dookies so no spending the night.

Final Inspection Next Week?!?

hannonpi — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:27:26 +0000

We have our final mortgage approved via ING, the loan expires on the 19th which is fast approaching! Sean told me we are going to have the inspector come out on Wednesday for final inspection and Bank Of America is supposed to come out the same day. We are cutting it close, but the Sean is making great progress so I think we can pull it off. We shall see!

I should congratulate Sean on achieving LEED Platinum cerification for the house he is working on in Venice, he not only got the level needed, he surpassed it! Sean has done great work and is a contractor I would recommend without hesitation.

Below are pictures, starting with a shot of Ben who visited last weekend.

How to you build and keep your neighbors happy?

hannonpi — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 17:16:00 +0000

Building a house is noisy, dusty, and starts early in the morning. So how then do you keep your neighbors from wanting to kill you by the end? This is something that I have been trying to figure out. I figured we should probably do a few things in the name of neighborly relations such as we don’t drill and do other really noisy things on weekends or before 8am. However, everything we do is noisy in some way and we don’t have that much day light to work with during the winter. The rules for construction are from 7am to 9pm Monday through Friday and from 8am to 6pm on Saturday. We cannot work on Sundays. So far I have kept people from working on Saturdays because I know how bad it sucks to deal with the noise, but once we are done with the heavy drilling I am tempted to go back to building per the rules. If I don’t work until 8am and don’t work on Saturday I am essentially loosing two days a week of time. Multiplied out over the course of the year that it is going to take that is a about 100 days of work! If we take an hour out of each day that comes to about a day a week. Right now my neighbor would like it if I don’t start until 8am but that would add 1/8 to the cost of the project.

Basically, we need to get this thing build as soon as possible for as little as possible. However, I don’t want to have people sending me death threats you know? Oh and I want to move into a trailer on the property, we’ll see what Jenn thinks of that

Water Meter Is Installed

hannonpi — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:17:00 +0000

Our water meter was installed over the last week. Here is what $14k buys you!

Pretty impressive? Well not all that exciting to look at, but I am sure it will be nice to have some water up there to keep dust down, etc. Unfortunately, it feels like we are making much slower progress on the drilling front. It turns out that not only can we not drill from the road but that we cannot drill all the top holes at the same time! Additionally, in order to drill the top holes we had to cover over the middle four. In addition, we will have to re-drill all holes before putting the steel and concrete in to make sure that we have a solid footing. This is all sounding very expensive. Hopefully, I can cajole my friends to help with painting and convince Chris (Mom’s boyfriend/finance/partner/etc) to come up and help with some of the interior finish work. Chris, we can do it when the surf is good! I finally got in touch with Verizon, however, Charter who said they were going to move things still is a no-show. I’ll be meeitng with the Verizon engineer today. As you can see the lines are super low.

As you can see I can easily grab the wires. I was SOOO tempted to yank, but then I think my neighbors might get a bit mad since they would loose their service.

No more holes.

I’ll be up there again today, and will report back. Hopefully the structural engineer made it up to inspect the steel so we can push forward. Progress uber alles.