I spent another weekend working on the farmhouse project. The framers are nearly done and now all of the trades are coming in to do their rough-in work. Monday will be a bit crazy as the framers will be working on the second floor while the electrician, plumber, and geothermal contractors all have the first floor and shop area.

Since there will be a good deal of electrical work for the shop area, I really did need to finish my framing. I had all but two of the bays done but the two remaining were horrific because they contained large steel cross bracing plus one had a door and the other had a window. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to borrow a nail gun from one of the framers so at least I would not be hammering everything together. Unfortunately, all of the special cut-outs for the cross bracing meant every stud was a custom cut. In the end, the two bays took as long as all the others. That was Saturday.

I expected to spend Sunday working on paperwork and updating the floor plans. Then, when I woke up on Sunday I thought about all of the “filler walls” and considered that framing nail gun just sitting idle. So, I made another run to the lumber yard and got back to work. I framed out the end wall for the paint booth and framed the side wall near the hangar door so the electrician has a place to run the control wiring for the “big door”.

I did manage to get some of the floor plan work done. And, since I got a comment asking about what it looked like, here it is. If you compare it to the draft design, you will notice a few changes. There is an extra window in the kitchen. Also, in the early draft, the residence was 33’-6” x 46’-6” (exterior dimensions) so with the small footprint of the actual construction, quite a few things changed inside – well, actually, early everything !

The actual framing shows the front of the residence at the bottom. The kitchen is lower left and the living room is lower right. Along the doors to the office and the bedroom are on 45° angles with the wetroom in the middle. In the kitchen, the long narrow area is for the pantry cabinets and the deeper pocket is so a standard refrigerator will be flush with the pantry wall. The spiral stair is just for reference. The real spiral staircase requires a full 360° to ascend to the second floor. The very top of the picture actually represents a portion of the shop. Across the top from left to right is the utility room, the shop-side bathroom, and the paint booth.

I’ll get around to updating and posting the floor plan with the kitchen cabinets and appliances in place as well as the bathroom fixtures. After that, I probably won’t have much free time to do the 3D rendering and such as I own a number of the subcontracts and will be very busy !