A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
September 2023 #15290 Page #102
Building Your Own Home – Part VII Managing Inevitable Problems
W
e are in month seven and have managed to maintain the schedule, give or take a week. At this stage, I am spending a lot of time By Thomas McAnally walking the site, crawling around the attic, down in the crawlspace, TheJobLine.com and everywhere else, looking at work and asking questions. In addition, I am watching the schedule like a hawk, constantly checking in with subcontractors to ensure they will be here as scheduled. There is a lot I don’t know, but I am finding the pros are willing to take enough time to make sure I understand what they are doing and why. Most of what I have caught has been easy to redo, such as taping seams between flashing and building wrap to keep water out of the house, making sure the workers are meeting our specifications and not cutting corners, and knowing enough about the code from my past life that I caught several mistakes that would have been expensive fixes. On top of that, I am the unofficial Safety Inspector. “Get off that top rung,” “wear your safety glasses when cutting metal,” and “where is your fall protection?” are a few of the comments I’ve made to the crews. The outside is done and doesn’t look much different from last month. That’s because the majority of the work is now inside. Electrical, mechanical, and HVAC rough-ins are done. I did all of the low voltage and technology wiring, and that had to be done before insulation and drywall. Insulation was interesting. We went with a 2-1/2” closed cell spray foam in the walls and R49 blown in for the attic. The crawl space walls and band board were encapsulated with 3” of closed cell spray foam. The crawl space will be considered a conditioned space. While the insulators did a great job, we had an issue with foam overspray getting on the window and door frames. They will remove it once the drywall folks are gone and most of the dust settles. The latest catch wasn’t as easy to resolve, or so I thought. The builder jammed the plywood together at the peak, leaving no 2” air space to vent the attic to the ridge cap. I didn’t notice it until I was installing a 6,000 CFM whole-house attic fan in the attic. I joked with the builder saying he needed to get that cut back before the fan came on and blew the roof off. He had a crew here in 3 days, and they cut all the ridge seams back. He apologized and said it shouldn’t have been that way. It’s fixed. It’s all good, but we will see when the fan comes on.
PHONE: 800-289-5627
Read/Subscribe online at www.componentadvertiser.com
FAX: 800-524-4982