A quiet time...

This past week only a couple of things have been going on, so I didn't write at all since last Sunday.... 

You could say it was a quiet week at the house, when in reality it was anything but....it was just that there was only about 4 people at work on the house this week.

The drywaller finished his work in the house on Sunday, and then drywalled the garage on Monday. He left Monday and is now finished in the house and the drywall looks good.

Drywall is up on the garage

upstairs in the loft area

looking from the front entry into the dining area

Tuesday saw the plasterers show up and begin their work. They worked for parts of three days on plastering all the walls and the ceiling with a "semi-smooth" type texture we chose.

the master bedroom

looking into the dining room

the living room

overlook from the loft into the living room

While the plasterers were finishing up in the house and garage, the siding guy was putting up more siding, the soffits went up on the front porch, and the front entry columns (which will be covered in stone in the future) got framed up. Also, the fireplace "black box" is now completely in place.

fireplace

soffit above the front porch

garage plastered

Also, this past week we've selected the contractor to do both our new lawn install and the concrete driveway (Ken Stencil from Denmark).

Monday will see the arrival of the painter!  Robin and I have a meeting with him and Joe (Dennis' on-site guy) Monday morning before work. We're going to run through and discuss what colors go where on the walls and ceiling.

What the painter does per the contract is he comes in and spray paints the entire room;  walls and ceiling one color. If he has to pick up a brush or roller he charges extra.

So in a few rooms he'll be spraying the entire room the color we want the ceiling and we'll be painting the walls ourselves.

Any painting we need to do in areas that will have hard-surface (i.e. - non carpet) flooring we will need to do Tuesday and Wednesday (any carpeted rooms to be painted by us we'll have about a week to do) because the flooring supplier is schedule to show up on Thursday to install all the hard surface flooring. Once they're done with that, I believe they'll have a two man crew on-site for an entire week doing nothing but building the tile shower in the master bathroom.

Exciting things are coming!

Paul

Whew!

My apologies that I've not updated this since earlier this week.... It's been a very busy week at the site.

Tuesday came and so did the drywaller. The siding also was getting some more attention this week. The well driller came back and finished the hookup to the house from the well too. I had several meetings with both lawn installers and concrete contractors for the driveway along the way.

First, the drywall...

The supplier delivered the drywall on Tuesday. They opened up Lyndsey's bedroom window and used the truck shown below to unload all the upstairs drywall thru that window.

yeah, all the drywall on the truck is for our house!

carefully.. carefully...

While that was going on, the girls found entertainment in playing with the muck that was left after the well drillers capped off the well that had been running onto the ground for 3 days.

At the same time, the siding installer was putting up more of our siding, and the concrete contractor came back and sawcut the joints into the garage slab and porch slab.

Wednesday saw the siding guy make some more progress... 

...and, it saw the interior begin to get alot more "finished" looking as well when the drywall began going up!

the living room - fireplace wall

the Wall of Windows

patio door in the dining area

hallway behind the kitchen

stairway divider wall

piles of drywall up in the loft

looking down over the front entry foyer

the view from the front door

 Down in the basement a third type of insulation went in;  spray foam insulation is used down here at the exterior wall end of the floor joists.

The top arched window is now in place.. the Wall of Windows is complete!

Thursday the drywalling continues...

view from the front entry

hallway behind the kitchen

stairway divider wall

kitchen wall (stove)

the girls wrote on the drywall, leaving notes for the workers :)

Friday was more of the same.... drywalling and siding.

fireplace wall

the Wall of Windows

looking into the kitchen/dining area from the living room

the overlook above the living room

the kitchen/dining area

the master bedroom reading nook

the master bedroom tray ceiling

Rachel's room

Robin and I were scheduled to be insulating and drywalling the garage walls on Saturday. I took Friday afternoon off and bought/delivered all the insulation to the site. The drywall for use in the garage showed up that afternoon as well.

In talking to the drywaller early Saturday morning (he arrives around 4am each day) on-site, he said that his boss had ordered 24 sheets too few of drywall! D'oh! So he had to use the stuff that was supposed to be ours to use in the garage for the house instead.

I called the builder about this... he was a bit ticked. He told us to just get the insulation put up in the walls and he'd make certain the drywaller's boss felt compelled to hang the drywall himself at no charge due to the slip up in order.

So we got out of that part of it anyway.. lol

Robin and I worked our butts off in the heat that day. At least it was overcast most of the day. But we got the insulation put up.

The siding guy got a bit more siding put up.. in the front of the house this time. You can see both the siding and the dark bronze colored trim together now.

Sunday (today) the drywaller was scheduled to come back and finish the drywalling the house. I'm assuming he'll be doing the garage then on Monday.

The plasterer is going to be starting putting the plaster up on the interior walls tomorrow (Monday). Things will begin to appear to move much more slowly from here on out.. but the differences should be very apparent in most cases nonetheless!

This past week I had meetings with 3 concrete contractors to get an estimate on doing our driveway. Also, I met with 2 landscapers to get prices for installing our new lawn. Once I get the last of those numbers in we'll have to make a decision on both of those items.

We met with Debbie the interior designer on Saturday. She's also a Parade "requirement". We'll get to keep the window treatments (blinds, curtains, etc) that she installs. She also is responsible for basic staging of the house during the Parade, and we'll get the opportunity to buy anything she uses in the Parade if we want to afterwards.

Paul

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