Day 36

After a few days of crappy weather (enough already, winter!), our building team got right back to work on Monday and made some significant progress, I thought. The framing for the first floor is mostly up now. It was so fun to walk through our house and imagine our furniture in its exact spot and seeing what the views from each window will be.

The back of the house:

And the front of the house:

* As far as I'm concerned, this room is my office. Don still insists on calling it "the den" and does not yet understand why I need an office. I'm not sure why I need an office, either. I just know that I do.

And finally, here I am playing 'Where's Waldo', minus the striped shirt and hat:

One Month Down

We've officially hit the one-month mark since we first broke ground on the new house. In 30 days, it's gone from this:

to this:

That's a FLOOR!! Or a ceiling. I'm not sure. And really, that's not the most impressive part, I don't think. Check this out.

That's our basement! With walls and windows (well, almost) and doorways! I'm still amazed at just how much they get done in a day. Especially when the weather we've had has been pretty awful. We have a renewed appreciation for our builder, Darryl, and his team. We're so pleased with the work they've done in the past few weeks.

I used my PhotoShop skills (and "skills" is being generous) to brighten up this picture and add some labels.



* WAY in the future



We do have plans to build out a wine room and put a hot tub out back (heart conditions be damned!), but we recognize those things are pretty far down on the list. Someday ...



A few more one-month pictures:

Progress!

Progress on the house is happening faster than we expected at this point. It's amazing to see what they can accomplish in just one day. We're thrilled with what's been happening out there, and we can't wait for our workdays to be over so we can get out there and see what changed each day.

These pictures are from Day 29, January 17:

Because it's a walk-out basement, most of the activity is in the back of the house right now. The view from the front doesn't look like much at this point, but we expect that to change in the next couple of days as they finish up framing the back wall. If only we didn't have this to contend with:

Day 22 - 24

There's still a hole in the ground. That's a good thing, of course. We didn't expect a lot of progress this week, outside of backfilling the basement. That's what these pictures show.

There have been a few more communication missteps with Estridge over the past couple of weeks. We recognize that not everyone who builds a new home wants to be involved in each step of the process. We do. And while the supervisor on our project is very responsive to our questions and comments, it's been largely reactive and we've requested some more proactive communication to help manage our expectations. We're cautiously optimistic that that will improve moving forward.

And then on Day 24, there was lumber.

Lots and lots of lumber.

One of the problems the builders have had in the past couple of weeks is that the roads in this neighborhood are not well-plowed, and we've had some decent snowfall. In fact, Indianapolis is now just 4" away from the average snowfall for an entire season, and we've got a good eight weeks of winter left. We're hoping that the town steps up their plowing efforts next season when the community is more developed. For now, the trucks delivering materials have had a difficult time maneuvering through the snow and ice. I suppose that's one of the drawbacks of building in the winter. 

We're thinking that framing will begin early this week, weather permitting. The next pictures should hopefully show the beginnings of a stick house!

Day 20 - January 8

The basement walls on Day 10 - December 29

I don't understand all the ins and outs of it, but we had about a week where there wasn't much activity at the house. The basement walls needed to harden or something. [Side note: I should really show Don how to update this so he can include the technical stuff that I haven't bothered to absorb.] We did go out and look things over on Day 10, though I don't think much had visibly changed.

On New Year's Eve, temperatures reached 60 degrees so we ventured out to see how things looked when they weren't snow-covered. Our quick visit turned into a couple of hours of chatting with our new neighbors. We're excited to spend more time with Bob and Mike and their families, and we're grateful for the standing invitation to the Friday-night bonfires in the cul-de-sac.

A week of very cold temperatures and attempts at getting back into some kind of post-holiday routine followed, and here we are at Day 20:

The basement floor has been poured, and there's a window well!





Here, I've wandered over to the other side of the garage.

Taken from what will one day be the back patio.

Don and I agreed that the basement felt smaller than we'd pictured in our heads. Standing in the yard looking down on it, we wondered how we'd possibly fit all our basement furniture in there once the basement bedroom is walled off. But once we climbed down into it and started pacing off where the couch will go and which way the treadmill will face, we determined it's bigger than it looks and that we should just trust our builder and their to-scale drawings with furniture!

Day 9 - December 28

Yesterday, Don went out to the homesite in the middle of the afternoon to take some pictures. He sent all 31 pictures, and I flipped through them pretty quickly because, honestly, the piles of dirt and big holes in the ground kind of all looked the same to me. It had been difficult for me to see real progress, mostly because I don't understand everything that's going on in this step. This picture is from yesterday, Day 9, but you could've told me it was from Day 4 and I would've believed you.

And then I came to this picture, and thought, "oh hey - those look like real walls!"

And then, this one. The window in the basement bedroom! It's just like it's a real house!

I've told Don and others that even thought I know this will be our home, it hasn't felt real to me. Yes, we picked out every little detail and I think I could draw out the floor plan, to scale, from memory. But it hasn't felt like the home where we'll be living. I haven't been able to picture myself driving there after work, cooking dinner on the stove we chose, or sitting out on the upper-level deck as the sun goes down. It hasn't felt like ours. It's almost felt as if we've spent months designing a house for someone else to live in. And somehow, that picture of the basement window got me a little bit closer to believing that it's ours.

December Update

While we'd hoped to be "under roof" by Christmas, that just didn't happen. The delay was the fault of both us and Estridge. Several weeks ago, we had a meeting with our builder, who assured us he'd be in regular communication with us about the digging schedule, a few simple changes we'd requested, and next steps. Unfortunately, that didn't happen the way we'd expected.

Our biggest concern was that the angle of the house on the lot. We didn't see the plot plan until after we were on the schedule to begin digging, and we weren't happy with it. We decided on the homesite that we did because of the water view (among many other factors), and it was important to us that our home face the water rather the back of another house. It seemed like common sense to us, but apparently not to the surveyors. After several rounds of edits and negotiations on the cost of rotating the home a few degrees, we were satisfied.

After much deliberation, we also decided to have them rough-in the electrical and plumbing for a washer and dryer in an upstairs closet. I've spent more time than I care to admit reading up on both sides of the argument for or against second-story laundry rooms. Ours is on the main level, just off of the garage. But, just in case we may want it upstairs someday, we'll be prepared.

So, with all of the decisions made and agreed upon, we waited for the weather to cooperate enough for us to start digging. We had intentions of sneaking out of work and being there for the first breaking of ground, and we thought that was made clear in our meeting with our builder in November. But, on December 20, we discovered largely by accident that there was giant hole in the ground on our lot.

I had a lot going on at work last week and wasn't able to get to the homesite until later in the week (one of the biggest downfalls of building in the winter, we've learned, is that it gets dark so early and there's very little daylight outside of working hours), so I relied on pictures that Don took on his cell phone.

Day 1 - Dec. 20, 2010

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4 - This is the first I'd seen it in person.

Day 4

Day 8 - Dec. 27 - We have basement walls! Or least forms of walls.

Day 8

Now that it's actually starting to be more than a giant hole in the ground, I'm excited to see the day-to-day progress and expect to updating here more frequently. Meanwhile, we're staying busy with showings of our current homes and contemplating how we'll use the (very generous) gift cards we received for Christmas. Ceiling fans? Shower curtains? Bar stools? So exciting!