Monday, March 21, 2011

Decisions, decisions

We're very happy to have hired Bob Granberg and his company to put in the basement and complete the house to "lockup" stage. Bob has built many Linwood Homes houses, all over North America and even one in Scandinavia, and surprisingly, will be a neighbour as he lives only 10 minutes down the road from our property! We had asked for two bids on this part of the project and both bids were very similar, price wise. We chose Granberg Construction primarily for the reasons stated above.
Saturday, (my birthday) we arranged to visit the property with Bob and see what if anything could be started right away. We met him at his beautiful log home, high above Robbins Range Road and were introduced to Carl, who will be supervising the framing of our house. We loaded into two trucks (ours and Carl's) and rumbled up to our place. The road through the Crown Land was in excellent shape where Jayson had put in the crushed rock but the driveway on our property was quite muddy. The lower section was a little dryer than when we visited last week, but the upper portion had started to thaw and was quite gooey. We were leading the way in our big Ford and had little trouble getting up to the house site, but Carl barely made it, choosing to stop just shy of the building site. We all agreed that it was going to have to dry out before any real work could commence. They both liked the site and said the slope would be perfect for the walk-out basement, but were concerned about heavy concrete trucks being unable to navigate the muddy driveway. So, work with us folks...everyone should ask their favourite deity to bring warm, dry weather to our little part of the BC interior so we can get started. Thanks, in advance!
On Friday, we spoke briefly with Jason Tomlin, our TNRD building inspector. He advised that we needed an engineer to certify that the "prow-shaped front" of our house design was structurally sound. Linwood has their own in-house engineer and indicated that this shouldn't be any problem at all. I should have the paperwork on Tuesday, March 23rd.
We have been considering our colour choices for siding, roofing and trim as we need to inform Linwood of these when we order the house. We have settled on the "Autumn Red" siding from Certainteed (fiber cement product), bright white for soffits (aluminum), fascia and trim (Smartside engineered lumber). The roof will be Certainteed fiberglass 30 year shingles with the "Mountain Timber" colour scheme.
We will be signing off the drawings and placing the final order for the house tomorrow. Pretty exciting!

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