The Walls are Built!

Wow! I'm one week away from beginning construction....yikes! Actually, I'm past the part of being scared. Now I'm just anxious and nervious....anxious to get the project under way and nervous about the weather....please don't rain, please don't rain!

I've got most everything in place to begin construction. Here's the schedule:
- Thursday, demo the existing roof
- Friday, frame the new floor
- Saturday, erect the exterior walls and roof supporting structure
- Sunday, erect the roof and blacken the walls and roof (tar paper)

I can tolerate a certain amount of rain, but I really do need it to be dry for Thursday-Sunday. If you are a praying person, please offer up this request for us! Thanks!

So I received this picture update from my SIP manufacturer this morning. What's a SIP? Structural Insulated Panels. I'm using them for my walls and roof. They are prefabricated panels built in a warehouse up in Loveland, CO. They are a fantastic "green" building material with an R-value of 42 for a 6 1/2" panel. They are constructed, then erected in the shop to ensure that they fit. Here's a picture of my addition, as it sits up in Loveland:
The company's name is Insulated Component Structures - Rocky Mountain, inc. (check them out at www.ICS-RM.com). They are a great group of guys to work with. They took my CAD drawings, created shop drawings from them, and built these walls within about a week. Now they will disassemble the walls, stack them in order, store them until next week and ship them down to me in Aurora. The panels cost more than traditional wood framing, but they are worth every penny. The foam they use has no ozone-depleting off-gasing, and the scrap left over from constructing the panels is minimal, i.e. no dumpster full of scrap material! The labor involved with erecting the panels is minimal: one day for the walls, one day for the roof. This is a 600sf addition! All the req'd. conduit for electrical runs are placed inside the walls before the foam is injected. All the window headers are built into the panels. Basically, once I have these walls erected, all I need to do is tar paper the exterior, hang the windows and doors, then add the finish material on the inside and out, and I'm done. Yea!

Now that I've got this blog up and running, I will post updates here for you to follow. I will try for dailies, but truth is it might end up being every 3-4 days in which I post my updates. But please keep checking out our blog to find out how our prjoect is progressing!

Love ya! Ciao! a.Z. + Crew