It's been a busy couple of days...

...both at the lot and for us!

Friday saw the forms come off of the concrete foundation walls and the plastic vapor barrier and exterior insulation board (styrofoam) get put into place. 

You can see the light blue insulation board, and the clear plastic vapor barrier sheeting behind it.Also, you can see the ends of the rebar (steel reinforcing running inside the concrete walls for strength) sticking up on top of the concrete walls.

In the pic below you can see all of this as well as you can now clearly see the cutouts for the garage doors.

Saturday the concrete guys visited the site again and added bracing to make sure the concrete walls don't fall over while they're curing (hardening) for the next 5-7 days or so.

Also on Saturday they installed the drain tile around the perimeter of the basement walls... the drain tile is flexible plastic piping that's intended to help collect any ground water (either from natural ground water tables, or heavy rainfalls/snow melts, etc) and direct it toward the sump pump that will eventually be installed in the basement floor. (you can see the drain tile piping mostly buried in the gravel on the bottom of the hole)

...and of course the girls are having fun climbing around the massive piles of dirt that are all around the site for now (until they backfill next week).

While the above was taking place Saturday at the lot, the four of us were busy running around up to Green Bay first and then back down to Appleton for meetings with the cabinet supplier and then the flooring supplier.

After about 8 hours of driving, meeting, making decisions, we arrived back home with most of the decisions made for our cabinets and the flooring for each of the rooms.

You can see in the following photo all of the material samples we came home with... 

The items in the above pic are:

• The cabinet door.. maple with a glazed "monarch" stain. That will be the finish on all of the woodwork throughout the house.
• The stone sample is the stone that will be both on the exterior of the house and on the fireplace from floor up to mantle
• There will be tile flooring in the master bathroom and the front entry.The master bath with also have a walk-in tile shower that we chose the materials for too.
• A laminate-like flooring in the kitchen, dining, and back hallway. As well as in the laundry room and the half bath downstairs, and the girls bathroom upstairs.
• Carpeting will be in the girls bedrooms, our bedroom, the den, and the living room.

The girls had a large say in the carpeting that will be going into their bedrooms.. and in this photo you can see their selections...

We only have one initial supplier meeting left. The lighting supplier. That one is a couple of weeks away yet.

In the meantime we have to get most of our "final selections" on materials and other items back to all the suppliers we've met with over the course of the last 3+ weeks.

One thing we're still waiting to find out (hopefully this coming week) is if, with the Parade discounts included, we'll be able to afford granite countertops in the kitchen.

Once we find that out, and get the revised bid back from the cabinet supplier meeting, we can go ahead and use the materials selected at the flooring meeting to meet a second time with the cabinet supplier to pick out all of our countertops (laminate and/or granite).

Next week should (weather permitting) see the backfilling of the foundation walls (that's when they'll move all that dirt back up against the foundation walls and we'll actually be able to walk around the exterior house without the huge trenches all around.), and then right after that the framing should be starting.

Paul