Time for interiors....

Monday arrived and so did several new areas of work on our new home...

In preparation for today's work, I was spent an hour and a half at the house on Sunday evening hanging some insulation in the walls between the master bathroom and the master bedroom. This particular insulation was installed just for a bit of sound deadening. This way hopefully one of us can be taking a shower or getting ready in the bathroom without waking the other one up when such a situation arises.

The yellow insulation is the stuff I put in... it's also the *very* itchy fiberglass stuff.

Once the insulation contractor showed up on Monday he went and did all the exterior walls. He put in the pink insulation everywhere and then placed a plastic sheet over that. The plastic sheet is to serve as a vapor barrier between the differing moisture levels from outside the house to inside the house.

master bedroom

den

living room

kitchen/dining area

looking down from the loft to front door

Lyndsey's room

 

Rachel's room

We were all amazed at just how different walking around inside the house feels now. Rather than ceilings that went up and up thru the exposed trusses, you now get a much better sense of exactly how big the spaces will be since the insulation covers walls and ceilings, etc.

While the insulation guys were doing their thing, the concrete company was here pouring both the garage floor slab and the front porch. The photos below show the concrete in both places about 5 hours after pouring. You can see it still looks pretty wet.

The last two windows we were waiting for (they were on backorder) also arrived on Monday. The arched windows above the front door and at the top of the Wall of Windows. Due to the concrete being poured that day they couldn't install the window above the front door yet, but the one in the living room got installed.

front entry window waiting to be installed

Wall of Windows complete!

the view from the loft thru the top of the Wall of Windows

Also Monday, the siding and trim pieces showed up on site. A very small area of siding got installed as well, but I don't have any pics of that as yet.

the boxes of siding and trim pieces

Also on Monday I began the search for someone to seed a new lawn (one of the requirements of being the Parade of Homes), and am also continuing to talk with several concrete contractors about pouring the driveway (another Parade requirement).

The well drillers also took their truck off the site where it's been sitting since late last week. They're officially done drilling the well now, only the hookups to the house and the pressure tank in the basement remain. The well driller called me and told me the well was drilled to a depth of 200', and his estimate from 6 months ago came in $4 (yeah, that's 4 dollars) more expensive than the amount he'd quoted me back then.. lol

More of the siding went up today (Tuesday) and several other things happened as well, but unfortunately I don't have the photos yet. Today's happenings will show up in my next post.

Paul

Rough-ins abound!

This week has been the week of rough-ins....

Plumbing, electrical, and hvac have been working like crazy all week running piping, wiring, and ducts all throughout the house. In the walls, under the floors, in the ceilings... everywhere.

a main run of electrical wiring in the wall

in-wall ductwork up to the great room

The next photo is looking into the kitchen/dining area.. You can see alot of electrical work has been done and some ducting in the kitchen wall for the microwave's vent fan. The blue boxes scattered all over the place are electrical boxes for outlets, switches, etc. You can also see the can lights in the ceiling above the kitchen area.

Also this week the front door finally was installed. That showed up on Thursday.

from the outside of the house

from the inside of the house

The well driller showed up that same day and began making a massive muddy mess drilling the well...

the well drilling truck

the big muddy mess...

This Monday  they'll be pouring the garage slab and the front porch slab. They're also scheduled to begin putting insulation in the exterior walls.

That will be followed up the next day by them hanging the drywall boards throughout the house.

Paul

We're good to go!

It's been a bit since my last post here.... Here's a brief rundown of what has gone on since August:

During that time we gave Dennis (who we've now selected as our builder for this home) the okay to go ahead and send out the house plans for bidding/pricing. The pricing came back at a favorable number (I had a range in mind I was hoping to hit and we were near the top end of that range) per square foot.

I've had meetings and / or phone conversations since then with soil testers, septic designers (for the mound system), and well drillers. Once we'd received estimates from those contractors as well it was time to run off to the credit union and see if we are even in the ballpark with being able to afford this house and get a loan for it.

...that appointment was Friday....

Without doing a credit check or actually going through all of the details of our finances (there were basic questions about how much we make and what we pay now on loans, etc) the loan office at the credit union told us that we'd have no problem qualifying for a loan for the amount we want! WOOHOO!

So then we ran some more numbers and found out the approximate loan amount that we'd need based on quoted value of the new home, approximate value of our current home and lot. (not including any additional cash we'd have available for a down payment)

At this point we came to realize that we need to cut about 10% off the total value of this new home. 

So I contacted Dennis over the weekend and talked to him about it. He said it's very common for this to be the procedure during new home construction and it's going to be relatively simple for him to come up with a list of suggestions on just how we can go about trimming the cost down just a bit.

With any luck he'll have those suggestions back to us yet this week. Once we decide on a route to take to this goal then I'm pretty sure Dennis will have to send out the plans to get re-bid depending on the changes made.

With Robin now working at Werner Electric (and thus being able to buy light fixtures at a much lower cost) we also took the opportunity to run a quote through Werner for the light fixtures in our future home. We came out very close to the allowance amount that was in the quote from Dennis, so that's good news as well.

I plan to watch those allowance numbers very closely and try to get us as close to them (or under them is even better) as possible.

Once we get an overall plan/design set that we can afford then we'll sign a contract with Dennis to build this home and then we'll have a bit of down time on this part of the process probably until after the holidays or so.

Recently as well, we've rented a storage garage to begin storing all the excess "stuff" we have in our house that we need to get out of there prior to putting our house up for sale/showing it (and we have a TON of "stuff" lol). This will be the single biggest part of what we have to do over the next two months in relation to our new home.

Paul