December 8: Framing Up

The workers arrived with correct 2x6 framing around 11:30am and by 4pm (they were still working) the sidewall framing was up and they were working on the roof framing.   (Above photo taken by supervisor before work had finished.  By the end of the day, the roof framing had also been done.)

After months of delay, it's moving fast.

It's very impressive looking from the master bedroom window.  I'm glad I went with 9 foot sidewalls, it's not too high to block sky views from master bedroom as I feared it might be.

Supervisor texted me with photo and asked me to buy french doors I wanted at Lowes and tell him which store they could be picked up at on Friday.  I did so during my dinner break and texted Supervisor about location, and also bought a keyless entry lockset.  I'm going to have to extract my Fleetwood window from my junk room tonight also.

Before leaving for work at 4pm, I noticed the sheathing on my front lawn was OSB.  I had intended not to use any OSB, only real 5/8 plywood because according to many plywood is better.  In fact, the contract (which the contractor read aloud to all assembled this morning) specifies 5/8 plywood.  I mentioned this to Supervisor when I called at 5pm.  I told him the roof decking, at minimum, must be real plywood, because I am concerned about long term sagging.  He said he would check out the cost, it was no problem to do so, but he wasn't sure if it had been figured into the estimate.  His excuse: OSB is often called "plywood" and that was what he had assumed.  (The contract itself says plywood, however I have a long paper trail of emails where I insisted on "plywood not OSB.")  (See update at bottom.)  OK, minor error, shows you have to watch every step.  It does basically bug me that even top rated contractors are always looking to save a dime on materials.  My approach is that I always look for the best quality you can get, without making the price astronomical.

One can guess that even the fanciest homes (I was just looking at a $10M home on Zillow) are full of second class materials underneath the super fancy surfaces.  Well I can't afford the super fancy surfaces, but having good quality all the way through just makes me feel good.  It turns out, it's not extremely expensive to add extra good quality materials to a project.  Often it's amazingly cheap.  It's just a hard to get a contractor to actually use them because they're always trying to save a dime here or there with slightly inferior materials, and that is what they are so used to doing it's very hard to get them to do otherwise.

I have a paper trail of emails in which I repeatedly asked the contractor to use "plywood not OSB" and the contract was revised twice to remove the word OSB.  Plywood gets written into the contract, but the construction supervisor interprets it as "OSB, just another kind of plywood."

If I were building something for myself, I would not only use the higher quality materials, I would drive an extra 40 miles to get nicer looking material of the same general kind.  That's the kind of thing I do (and moreso) in my audio equipment.  I'll spend days online trying to find the best capacitor, within reason, for a given project.  It's like being a master chef, though I don't much cook as such.

But I don't get many projects like that done (most often, the nice parts just sit around), and if I were building a building it might never get done.

Update:

The supervisor brought plywood (nice looking too) on Friday morning, no more questions asked.  I intended to send email showing paper trail of discussion about plywood, but never figured out how to get the wording right.  And best of all, it wasn't necessary anyway.