Spring time

Well I think spring has finally sprung here in the central part of Oklahoma that is.  The grass is beginning to green up the trees and landscaping are coming out of hibernation and things are starting to look real good. I really like when all the Bradford pear trees bloom out as this is one of my favorites.  I am seeing people out in their yards and bed areas working them over.  This is a great time of year.  Well a little bit of update on the show home we are constructing in the beautiful Stone Mill subdivision in Yukon Oklahoma, on Thursday of last week the framing crew showed up and started laying out where the walls will go.  This sounds probably trivial but it is at this stage right here where you house gets squared up so that they are level and in correct relation with each other.  If a framer lays out the walls out of square it makes the sheetrock stage hard to do, it will make tile floors grout lines not be parallel with the walls in other words nothing good will take place.  I find as a contractor this is a great time to spend at the job site because some times walls have to be shifted a little bit to make a plumbing line work properly or maybe make cabinets and trim fit into corners like they should.  After walls are chalked out on the slab the framers go to work putting down the 2 x 4 sill plate and we like to use  liquid nail under all the sill plates for a good bond to the slab.  By the end of the day of Friday about 2/3’s of the walls were framed up with window and door openings in them.  This next week I will be meeting with my cast stone contractor and we will be discussing cast stone mantles, hood surrounds and some details possibly for the exterior fascade.  The framers will continue on with the walls and on up from there.  Brick will be ordered this week and the windows are on order. We will continue to press on from here.

Show home update

Well we have returned from the Kitchen and Bath show in Chicago over this past weekend and wow was it a large convention. If you have ever been to the McCormick Convention Center there in Chicago the show filled up all 3 convention halls as I believe there were over 900 exhibitors. Got to see a lot of new products that are going to be on the market soon or have just come out onto the market in some areas.  Lots of attendees from all over the country were there to see the show.  My wife and I had never been to Chicago before so we did not know really what to expect.  I must say although it turned off very cold and that wind that blows in off of Lake Michigan does have a bite to it, we had a fantastic time as Chicago has a very beautiful architectural aray of buildings and high rises.  We took a architectural boat trip down the Chicago river to tour and hear the history of many of the buildings along the river.  We also went up to the observation deck of the Sears tower and that is way up in the air and what a beautiful site it was as we got up there about 7:00 and stayed until after dark to see the city lights come on.  So hopefully we can incorporate some of the new ideas and products into our show home that we are building in the beautiful Stone Mill subdivision that I started talking about in our last blog.  Here is what is happening on the job now, we got all the plumbing drain lines and water lines installed in the foundation area the 1st part of this week followed by our city inspection for plumbing.  Today, Wednesday we poured the concrete slab in the house floor and garage floor. In pouring the slab we like to install steel at every inside corner to help minimize the cracking issues and also the next day after it is poured we like to saw cut the slab so that in the event that the slab cracks we hope it will crack over to a saw cut area and stop there.  The saying about concrete is that it does 2 things 1 is it will get hard and the 2nd is that it will crack. So we try and do what we can to help minimize this.  The framing crew will be moving onto the site in the next couple of days and it will begin to resemble a house.  I will be ordering the windows this week so that we have all the necessary window measurements.  I will be taking some pictures and try to point out some issues that we here at Montgomery Homes Inc. feel are critical and not to be overlooked in the framing process.