Messing About in Bobcats and Boats

Gary Sylvester backfills foundation

The concrete has cured and the foundation backfilled by Sylvester’s men racing around in their speedy bobcats. Tools and gear have taken over the garage. And lumber, 34 foot engineered joists and a bundle of 2x6 for the sills, was delivered yesterday morning by Shepley, along with some pink sill sealant. 

It has been a quiet 2 weeks on the construction site. Time for Chris and me to sit in our Adirondack chairs and try to envision what our new house will look like. Jerry, the architect, has assured us that we won’t even recognize it after the addition and the second floor is built. This is hard for Chris to imagine after summering in the same cottage for 50 years.

At last the weather has turned and we have had glorious spring days. Our minds have turned to the river and our kayaks.  Out of storage came the life preservers, paddles and the cushion I like to put at my back.  We paddled upstream to Craigville Village and  paddled downstream to East Bay. We looked at osprey nests built on the tallest chimneys then scanned the sky for these diving fishhawks. We recognized familiar boats once again tied to their docks for another season. We heard the cry of the little kingfisher as he forged ahead of us to the terminus of the Skunknet River. The barrier beach is covered with pink Rosa Rugosa.  I can never walk by without burying my face in the blossoms and inhaling deeply.

"There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."
Kenneth Grahame,  Wind in the Willows

 We have spent weeks looking at windows in showrooms and on the road driving up and down the Cape. Windows are a major budget line and we have been doing a lot of research. We found no agreement among vendors over whether aluminum or vinyl clad would perform better on the seacoast. We have considered Pella, Eagle, Woodwright even Green Mountain Windows. We have gone back and forth between the industry standard Anderson 400 series and the new Fibrex A series. Some days we  go with price and the next day with style.  Like concrete it’s a permanent part of the house that you can’t change so we are struggling with this decision. We really love the way the A series looks and handles but can we justify the additional expense?  Yesterday we sat down with Paul in our makeshift conference room in the garage and went over the final inventory of windows. We had learned to our dismay that the 400 series didn’t come in black. And now we discovered that the rough openings of the A series varied slightly from the 400’s for which the house design had been drawn. We will either have to love the 400’s in forest green or change the design.  Back to the Anderson catalogues to see if this can be worked out.

Paul Pacella, Post and Beam of Cape Cod and Team

While we are dealing with the esthetics Paul is dealing with the nuts and bolts.  He has been tangling with the next step of lowering the house back down on it’s new foundation. Currently there are 73 metal posts embedded in the concrete that must be bolted to the new sills, a tricky framing challenge because part of the structure is old and part of it will be new. Right now Sean and Quatro are “ sistering” engineered joists to each one of the old 2x10s. This is proving to be difficult because the old beams have sagged and the new ones are perfectly straight. We watch them stop and ponder how this could be resolved. 

Paul continues to bring us the best tradesmen on the Cape. The framers are arriving Monday.