Septic and mound system

The biggest new arrival today (Monday) was the beginnings of the septic system and mound system in the back of the house....

Dion's crew arrived today and began digging a hole for the septic tank (a 6'x12' underground tank), the trench for the piping from the house to the tank, and the mound system in the back of the yard.

While they were making a mess in the back yard, the cabinet installers were very busy installing yet more and more cabinetry, including alot of doors and drawers.

living room built-ins

master bathroom almost done

kitchen...now with doors and drawers

kitchen.. there's even some glass

kitchen... soon a sink will live there

half-bathroom with cutout for the sink

lockers in the hallway

We also found two "oops" situations with the cabinets today...

They did a cutout in the countertops of the girls' vanities.... you may recall that we have "vessel" sinks there, which sit on top of the countertop, not set inside of it. 

This was due to a miscommunication between the plumber and the cabinet installers. The installers asked the plumbers for the template to cut out for the sinks and he didn't specify that these two cutouts were actually for the master bathroom, and not the upstairs vanities.

So, at the plumber's expense, the cabinet installers have to take those two countertops off, build new tops, and replace them in about a week.

Also, the built-ins in the living room are supposed to have glass doors on two out of the three doors on each cabinet so that the tv remote (etc) can communicate with the equipment. The cabinet installer will be fixing those (easy fix: they remove the panel on the doors and replace it with a glass panel) themselves.

 I wonder what Tuesday (today) will bring!

Paul

More cabinets... and stone!

We arrived at the house later on Saturday to find out that not only had the cabinet installers been working that morning, but so had the masons installing the first of the stone on the exterior of the house!

The two masons said it'll take them about 3 days or so to do all the stone on the front of our house. (I didn't ask if that included the stone for the fireplace or if that was over and above that number)

They started on the right side of the front and worked their way to the left...

While they were outside working in the early morning heat, the rest of the cabinets arrived and the installers were busy installing more of them...

Lyndsey's vanity

linen "tower" in the girls' bathroom

master bathroom cabinets

living room built-ins

more kitchen cabinets

Monday promises to be a very busy day here with several different sub contractors scheduled to be on-site working!

Paul

Cabinets!

The cabinets have (mostly) arrived!

They were schedule to arrive yesterday (Thursday), but due to the nearly 100 degree heat and obscene humidity the glue used to hold the cabinets together simply wasn't drying, so they were a day behind getting the cabinets to the site.

(not a problem since we still have almost a week of cushion built into the schedule)

The cabinet installers began by installing the base (floor standing) cabinets and the upper (wall-hung) cabinets. The doors and shelves (etc) will be put into place after that.

Downstairs we have the kitchen, laundry room, and half-bathroom all in need of cabinets as well as the master bathroom...

Kitchen: refrigerator area

Kitchen: raised countertop

Kitchen

Laundry room

Kitchen:  Raised countertop

Kitchen: Left edge of raised countertop shown above

Upstairs we have countertops at the girls' bathroom vanities....(Lyndsey's shown in the following photo, Rachel's isn't installed yet)

Also, our neighbor Matt was over and installed a few more pieces of the security system, as well as the smoke and co2 detectors.

More to come!!

Paul

Flooring and more!

It's been slow going.... more or less... as interior items get worked on.

Alot of the interior stuff is pretty labor-intensive so it appears to go pretty slowly on the surface. But they can be very substantial nonetheless....

The last few days on-site have seen the exterior (and fireplace) stone arrive and the beginnings of the "hard surface" (non-carpeting) flooring being installed.

We're going to have stone on the exterior of the house up to the siding level just below the windows, and only on the front face of the house.

Late last week large crates of stone and mortar showed up on-site....

...and here's a small stack of the limestone sills that go beneath the windows, they showed up the same day as the stone.

Also, the flooring began to be installed. They started with the largest single selection of flooring that we chose. This flooring extends throughout the kitchen, dining, adjacent hallway, half-bath, and laundry room. This first flooring type is an LVT (Luxury Vinyl Tile)... really the only difference between regular vinyl composition tile flooring is that LVT is patterned to look more like natural materials (i.e. - wood, granite, etc).

looking in from the entry foyer

main hallway

kitchen and dining areas

laundry room

They also installed the flooring in the girls' bathroom upstairs. (also LVT)

Robin brought the rest of our flooring samples out to this house this day as well.. She placed them in their respective positions next to the painted walls and tile already installed.

foyer flooring sample - ceramic tile

living room carpet sample

office carpet sample

master bedroom carpet sample

master bathroom sample - ceramic tile

Lyndsey's bedroom carpet sample

Rachel's room carpet sample

The flooring is scheduled to be finished tomorrow (Tuesday), and Joe tells us the cabinets are schedule to start being installed on Thursday.

While that is going on, there should be two guys from the flooring company working on the master bathroom's tile shower (for 5 days or so).

Also, the stone should be getting started being installed some time this week. And depending on when he gets the permits back from the County, Dion will build the mound system in the back yard.

The electrician is also slated to begin installing outlets, switches (etc), and temporary light fixtures very soon.

Things to come later this month:  The concrete driveway is schedule to go in some time after the middle of the month, and the lawn is schedule to go in about a week after that. Some time between now and then the excavator will have to show up again to do the final grading too.

Paul

Sold! (again)

Yup! It's happened!

We had three private showings of our current home this past week;  one on Wednesday, one on Thursday, and one on Friday. The couple who came thru our house on Saturday made us an offer that afternoon. 

We amended the offer to change the closing date from late July to August 21.... they accepted it by noon today. What that means for us is that they're allowing us to stay living in this house until our new home is ready to move into on the 20th. That's huge!

So we cancelled the open house we had planned today. I saw at least 4 cars stop out at our driveway (one person came up and knocked on the door even) that apparently were planning on attending the open house.

So that's the big exciting news for the weekend for us! :)  Now we can focus on construction of our new home and not worry about working to sell this one.

Speaking of our new home, Friday's progress had several substantial things take place.

As you can see in the following photo, pretty much all the windows are now in place. The notable exceptions are the front entry window and the backside top window in the Wall of Windows. Both of those have arched tops, so that must have something to do with them not being installed yet.

The bathtub for the girls' bathroom upstairs was delivered to the site on Friday as well...

In the next photo of the living room you may recognize the piece of paper nailed to the wall. I mentioned in my last blog post that it is the drawing of how that wall is going to be framed.... the part of that photo that is new is above the fireplace.

There are going to be three "nooks" above the fireplace on that wall. Each will be about 20" deep and will have a small can light in the arch at the top.

Also on Friday, the installer from the cabinet company was on-site. He went through the entire house measuring things up (and drawing them on the plywood floors with labels on them) so that the cabinet makers can begin building our cabinets. This photo is of the floor markings in the kitchen, with the raised "snack bar" on the kitchen counter.

Rachel's bedroom window got installed on Friday.....

....as did the smallest window in the house (bonus room).

This rather odd looking photo is taken from down in the laundry room looking up, through the trusses, to an opening in the wall above from the hallway to the future bonus room.

That opening is going to be one of four "attic access hatches" in the house. The builder has to have access to all attic spaces in the entire place. When Robin and I were walking past this opening upstairs in the hallway we looked at it and both said "laundry chute" at the same time. So I called the builder right then and there and asked him about the possibility of adding that in. In the photo above the chute would go just to the right side of the hatch opening shown, and right down in between those two roof trusses shown there.

He said he could do it, and that we'd need to talk to the cabinet supplier (which we just happened to have a meeting on Saturday anyway) about changing one cabinet to accommodate the bottom end of the chute.

So while the private showing was going on yesterday (Saturday), Robin and I were up in Green Bay having our final meeting with the cabinet supplier. We had to pick out our laminate countertops and the door/drawer hardware for all the cabinets. While we were there we told her about our idea of a laundry chute. She gave us some ideas on how to make the cabinets below work and then said she'd throw that in without any additional charge for the cabinets (yay!).

We then left there and went the other side of Green Bay to select our granite for the kitchen countertops. The photo below shows the granite (it's outside in the bright sunlight, so it's a bit washed out) with our paint color for the walls and the cabinet sample.

Monday is our big contractor walkthrough at the site. Dennis, our builder, and pretty much all of the sub-contractors will be there for questions, answers, etc. Pretty much anything any of us come up with.

Then Tuesday we'll be meeting at the bank to close on our construction loan so all the subs who've already done work on the house can finally get paid.

Paul