Three Years and Some Change Later...

[OnlyOneDR]

So with a little help here and there I built an addition to our modest home. The house is a 1960 ranch with 3 beds and 1 bath. The hall bath is small and cramped and after my wife moved in it became clearly obvious that the house was in desperate need of a second bath. It would only get worse when her parents, who live about 3 hours away, would come to town for weekend visits. Compounding space needs were all her clothes and things; the house did not have much for closet space. The house is situated back fairly far from the road and at an angle that made it favorable to expand right out the front of the house on the end where the largest bedroom is. It always looked so long and low with the attached garage that adding some character to the front would be nice.

I tried to do everything pretty high quality considering most of the stuff I had never actually done before formally for new construction. I went with 2x6 exterior walls for better strength and thicker insulation, high quality low-E windows, lots of receptacles everywhere (including in the closet and water closet), added much needed receptacles outside on both sides as well as water spigots (including a hot water spigot on one side!). I did get "turnkey" quotes for the work but the prices per square foot ranged from 2.5X to 3X what I can sell it for in this market...not to mention the quotes were way over my budget.

The entire job took 3 years and 2 months, I only hired out one thing, and we were able to continue to use the bedroom the entire duration of the project which was a feat in of itself.

A few concepts were sketched up; I do not remember what online tool I used for the below but this turned into the design to build. 216 square feet total with a water closet, walk-in shower, soaker tub, double vanity, and a decent sized closet. Imagine the top of the picture is the outside of the house and the bottom is adjoining the original exterior wall of the house. It would delete the small window, add a large bay window, transom windows on the sides, and add two interior doors to that wall in the bedroom. My wife named the water closet...

Original exterior wall inside the bedroom:

The house is on a slab so the addition required extending the slab. Long story short the contractor I hired for this portion was not great but got the job done with some cajoling, the weather was terrible right after breaking ground in December 2017 (sub freezing for weeks plus snow) so the slab did not get poured until the end of January 2018. I did the underground plumbing after they excavated but before the concrete pour.

The slab has a 16 OC #4 rebar reinforcement instead of mesh. The slight additional cost was worth in in my opinion.

Then the walls started going up after my stacks of lumber arrived. My wife helped quite a bit with the framing. Due to the slow pace I had to notch the existing roof and do a lot of work to keep the house weather-tight.

Hindsight being what it is I ordered the bay window too early so in mid-March I had to get some help to install it and go ahead and cover it up (I had no where to store it otherwise.) The window sat covered for a really long time.

To tie into the roof I went with a gable profile like is on the garage. I built the addition roof structure first (again with my wife's help) then took a week's vacation to strip and merge the roof lines together. It had a FEMA roof (blue tarps) for a while while everything was in progress.

Continued on next post.

 

[OnlyOneDR]

FEMA Roof, it lasted about two months before the brand-new tarps started giving way to UV rays.

With the structure "covered" I did some interior framing, mind you that for a long time the house stayed closed up with access only from the outside (a sheet of plywood I had on hinges on one front corner).

I "framed flush" the opening into the shower so it would not feel like a cave and instead the ceiling opens right into the rest of the bathroom.

A local friend gave me a hand one Saturday in May of 2018 with the roof decking.

I finished the roof in early July. With that closed in I could focus on electrical, plumbing, and mechanical rough-ins but this was also 2018 and we were getting married in October so not a lot happened for a while. I did get tired of looking at a plywood box sticking out of the front of the house.

To add electrical and plumbing I needed to get to the utilities which are halfway across the house. I pulled five new dedicated circuits for the addition and tapped into the existing lighting circuits for the closet lights. For the plumbing I re-worked the original copper and some PB to feed across the attic with PEX.

A supplementary water heater was added in the attic space for 20 extra gallons of hot water that would be flowing quickly into the bath instead of waiting for water from the other end of the house. I fed that water heater with a hot water supply so the soaker tub can be filled without running out of hot water. This was all insulated later including a blanket for the water heater itself.

Plumbing was not terribly difficult but some parts were annoying and time consuming. To do a free-standing soaker tub on a slab you need a special fitting to "plug" the drain into. With a crawlspace this is unnecessary. I had to frame and mount the fitting into the formed opening I left in the foundation as well as tweak the drain to align where I needed it for the tub we chose.

The shower is a built-in-place walk-in shower. So I had to construct a shower pan and all the water barrier.

Mechanical really only consisted of deleting a register in the bedroom that was over the window, extending the line and branching it to a new register in the closet and the bath. I used metal duct as that is how the rest of the house is built and double-insulated it. The Manual J calculations I did showed that the house would barely change in thermal needs since what I was adding was far better insulated than what I took out (old 4" wall and old window).

Continued next post.

 

[OnlyOneDR]

To get the framing inspection I also had to finally delete the window and board it up.

Once I got through rough-in inspections and framing inspection in March 2019 then technically it was just a race to the finish. Pardon the pun for 2019 my wife and I decided to achieve the goal of completing a marathon so we signed up for the City of Oaks 26.2 for November 3rd and trained all year. That slowed me down a lot with all the training miles and endurance training we did.

I used spun mineral wool insulation in the 2x6 exterior wall cavities since it is rated R23, combined with the extruded polystyrene (R5) on the exterior of the sheathing to achieve R28 walls. The ceiling got normal R38 fiberglass insulation. I still intend to add a radiant barrier to the attic but have not gotten back to that yet.

So by May 2019 it looked like this:

My buddy Wayne gave he a huge hand with getting the ceiling sheetrock up on Saturday that month. I used 5/8" firecode rock in the addition. Cement board went up in the shower and my wife did a lot of painting. You will notice the attic stairs; code requirement for access since the water heater was too far from the next access. I went with an aluminum ladder with full insulation and seals.

Now it is early 2020 and I want to get the tile floor done. There were some notable issues witth the floor back where it ran into the existing slab. It had a significant divot in it and we were using large format tile (8"x48") so we needed a FLAT floor. I tried that floor leveler. NEVER AGAIN. It created a hump instead so I had to grind it out. I could not use a floor grinder because water would go everywhere so instead I had to use a grinding wheel on my 7" angle grinder. It made so much dust that I had to take down all the fixtures I had already installed and everything needed to be vacuumed then wiped down. We had to repaint the ceiling because the damp dust stained it.

But we kept moving along. I put in electric floor heat in both the water closet and the main floor.

Continued next post.

 

[OnlyOneDR]

With the floor in now lots of other things could happen like the vanity, toilet, baseboards, etc.

Merillat Masterpiece custom-order vanity with sliding cabinet shelves, tip-outs, slow-close drawers.

My wife stenciled the wall in the water closet.

Mock up for the tub filler.

But now the weather is getting nice again so some outside items were tackled.

Needed to trench a line to connect the septic to the original at the rear of the house.

This turned into a septic tank replacement job once I got it uncovered:

So paused on that and on to siding and trim to match the house. The original intent was to do stone facade wrapping the front and matching on the garage. More on that later.

Then while still waiting to get the septic fixed I was put on a week's furlough at the start of Covid (now up to April 2020) so I stripped and reassembled the walls in the bedroom to get ready to place doors and doorways.

Continued next post.

 

[OnlyOneDR]

I stripped and firred out the other (now only) exterior wall to 6" to match the insulation in the addition. I intend to replace the window but have not as of yet. I also added an outlet near the night stand on that side while I had the wall wide open.

I also stripped the ceiling of popcorn, my wife decided that chair rail and two-tone paint would look nice and I wanted to put crown moulding in to match the new bath as well as replace the baseboards. An entire room re-do.

But back to the septic. I had a new 1000 gallon poly tank installed and paid a tad extra to have their plumber tie in my lines using most of my fittings. It worked out pretty well in the end.

So while that was going on I had to finally finish the supply line tie-in by switching over from the PB coming from the water heater to the PEX. I was gladly able to demolish the PB coming in all ghetto through the ceiling where it had been that way since probably the early 1990's. Of course that meant that the utility room needed repairs so we fixed all the sheetrock in there, I cleaned up some bad wiring and we stripped that ceiling and repainted as well as added more shelving. Of course this was all while my HVAC unit died so that needed to be replaced in the midst of all of this!

Back to the bedroom, it was coming together but now ready for doorways.

Continued next post.

 

[OnlyOneDR]

And the shower, let's not forget the tile work:

And carpet in the closet:

Oh and that pesky tub that was in the way elsewhere in the house:

Need to trim out the outside of the house.

And gutters:

The bay window seat needed tile covering.

The closet needed shelving so I made all that too.

Then we caved and I vinyl covered the rest of the addition because contractors are retarded. I will learn how to do cultured stone facade myself. A glance to the right at the garage shows that I had actually stripped and prepped that for stone as well (an entire project by itself since I discovered it was sheathed with fiberboard and not properly flashed) but I have left it as you see it rather than re-cover since I did not need it for inspections.

Continued next post.

 

[OnlyOneDR]

Let's wrap this up.

The wife picked out these table top size decorations to use as shelving, had to blind hole mount them to the wall.

We applied frosted privacy film to the large window pane and the lower panes on the sides.

We went with LG manufactured quartz for the countertop and I put in Kohler undermount sinks and Vigo wall faucets.

Delta Monitor thermostatic shower valve, just set the temperature and forget it. I wanted one of these for years.

Did a fancy trim out for the attic stairs just because.

Bedroom all spruced up:

The closet swallowed two other closet's worth of clothes plus two chests of drawers. 30 feet of shelving and 18 feet of closet rod.

There are a thousand other things I could mention but no one wants to see all of that. Inspections are passed, we use it every day. I am tired. On to the next project. We are nearly done renovating the back bedroom like we did the master and I am halfway done building a 10x16 shed. Life is busy.

 

[DonYukon]

Looks good man I like the tile work in the shower a lot .

 

[OnlyOneDR]

Looks good man I like the tile work in the shower a lot .

Thank you. I can only take partial credit for the showe tile design; my wife came up with the idea of the mosaic as a "waterfall" of sorts. That stuff is definitely difficult to work with if the wall is not dead flat.

 

[JedGrant]

Looking good bud!

 

[Sangster]

Nice!

 

[Bebop]

That's so badass !!!! Love it !

You did good man, looks awesome!

 

[BurgPath]

Nice work! I understand frustration with contractors.

 

[OnlyOneDR]

Thanks all. Long battle with too many other distractions along the way but we are enjoying it now. All I have to do is pay it all off...

 

[OnlyOneDR]

One last item. Finally installed the track and barn door a couple weeks ago. Now it is finally possible to shut out all the light that comes streaming into the bedroom in the morning! Also helps with sound deadening.

 

[88bronzetrooper]

So the house looks great! Any updates on those project trucks?

 

[OnlyOneDR]

So the house looks great! Any updates on those project trucks?

Thanks and no! I wish.