Batten the Hatch

hatch door from stairwell-this mother is HEAVY!!!  Steve always goes overboard to make things durable!  it will be nice to keep dust down during drywall

Because we are doing our house project in two phases and Red Rooster Remodeling is part of the FIR program for the first phase, we are required to build a hatch door over our stairs as one of the steps to close the initial permit. The initial permit includes everything that we are hiring our general contractor, Red Rooster Remodeling, to do.  This includes framing, structural, windows and exterior work.  

hatch door from upstairs

Steve agreed to build the hatch with scrap material from the dumpster to save on cost. He did this last Saturday-it only took an hour or two.
 The other step we were told to do to close the permit is lay insulation on top of the subfloor.  We were at first told it would have to be R-30 which was a huge bummer being that we wouldn't be able to re-use it and then would be faced with spending a ton of money on something (R-30) that we would only need to have down during inspection.  However, the inspector agreed to R-21 which we were ok with because at least we could re-use it in the walls.
Then of course we got to thinking about where we would store the insulation after we passed the framing/structural/Red Rooster FIR inspections until just before drywall.  It just all seemed silly.  Why should we go to all this work to lay insulation when we planned to almost immediately have plumbing/heating contractors start work? 
I guess that the idea behind the FIR program requiring this insulation is that because we are homeowners and acting as general contractors for the remainder of the project, we may never finish the project.  If we don't, at least the attic will be closed off and insulated.  The inspector had horror stories of this happening. I gotta tell you, we are not THOSE people.  We aren't spending this much money and going through this much stress/time/continuing to live in our basement to not finish this project. 
Luckily, Red Rooster and I were able to chat with the inspector yesterday.  He is a super reasonable guy, and I think he empathized with me.  I came up there with baby on hip and we chatted.  He said he understood.  He was willing to write orders that we don't need to lay insulation!!! He agreed that it was silly being that we had our sub-contractors on deck and he felt there was no need to expose ourselves to unnecessary work and toxins.  YEA for small victories and reasonable people!!!
He also wrote orders that we could have our permit issued without closing out the FIR program permit-DOUBLE YEA!!!! 
I hired a sitter last week and went down to the city to get our permit-I got a (very nice) BIG FAT NO WAY!!!!  They said we couldn't start any work (which would delay us 2-3 weeks) until the other permit was closed.  I was so upset last week.  I am just so happy that the inspector was so reasonable and willing to work with us.
So this week has been good (pending me successfully getting our permit at the city tomorrow).  Plumbing should start Monday and heating sometime next week.  We'll start electrical (doing ourselves) as soon as we can get our act together.  Doing electrical ourselves will delay finishing our project but save us thousands so it should be worthwhile in the end.  We do plan to hire a company to upgrade our panel.
We passed the framing and structural inspections yesterday!

Here it is all framed out with the roof!  There has been quite the gang of workers here since last week.  Luckily we've had the exterior staircase so that we still have the main floor of the house mostly to ourselves. 
At the end of last week and Monday, we had contractors working in the basement, on the exterior walls and upstairs-ahhhh!!!!  Kids trying to nap with that noise was quite the treat :)  Luckily, I think Q only skipped one nap despite the noise....so glad my kiddos are used to noise when they sleep!

Change orders to forgo insulation and issue our permit!