Backfill and Framing Prep

Welcome back to our home addition/remodel project! It’s Monday, November 1st, and it’s the start of week four. Today we are getting some of the smaller stuff knocked out of the way. 

As you can see, Donavan is lowering a compactor down into the hole, because today we are back filling. It’s going to be super nice because working around this big hole is getting really old. 

We have a pile of dirt in the back that we’re going to be filling up the hole with. When we dug the hole we went a little bit overboard with the material we removed. We wanted to remove enough so that if the material fell off the wall, it wouldn’t completely bury where we were working. This hole is about eight feet wide by eight feet deep. 

With our egress window, we can only fill up to about the bottom of where the window well will be. But we’re going to try and bring the grade on the other side up to to final grade. 

Donavan thinks we should fill about up to that line on this side, which is about eight inches below where we’re going to finish, and then we will taper down to the window. On the other side of the addition, we have quite a ways to go, because that is a pretty big hole.

That’s where we’re going to leave it for now. We need a little bit of room here because we’re going to do a parge coat here, which is a stucco-like finish. That finish has to go a little bit below final grade. We also left some air around the window well that we’re going to install later on. Next we have to do a little bit of cleanup to make this a little smoother. But that’s going to be about it for the backfill, at least until we do final grading! 

All right, now we are going into the basement to start pulling stuff apart. 

It’s now the next day, and we are still working on finishing up smaller things before we start framing. We have a couple pieces of flooring to put on and we are going to pull the siding off today too. We were going to put that parge coat on the above-grade section of the ICF, but it’s too cold to do that now. 

We’ll finish up the flooring and then we’ll strip the siding from the corner of the original addition to the windows and up to the gutters.

Here’s a closer look at this MiraTEC. It doesn’t do so well with water. Hopefully the Tyvek helped protect the house.

That’s a little bit mushy there. Fortunately for us, it’s going to be taken out anyway. All the nails on the bottom of the window flange are rusted out.

So this has a gap, so they just cut in a drip edge. So the water would get back behind here and then it’s behind everything. The rest of the windows look to be in better condition, but Donavan guesses that they were constructed the same way. As long as they are dry, it’s not so much of a problem though. 

Well, there is our almost completely naked house! We’ve still got to go around the corner a little bit, but we’re going to tidy up. The next step will be framing, so we are getting everything back here, getting it all assembled and organized. 

Here’s our load of materials that we’ll be using tomorrow to start framing up our walls. There’s a lot of stuff there! All of the prep work is essentially done, so we can start framing tomorrow. We are moving right along! 

Thank you, as always, for joining me. I greatly appreciate it! If you have any questions or comments on the home remodel and addition or anything back in the shop, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. Until next time, happy woodworking!

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