Day 45 - 03/31/2007

Rafters, rafters, rafters!

That's the name of the game this week. With Mandy and I stretching walls all over this floorplan, our rooflines changed...some a little, most a lot. The highest ridge of the roof had to be raised over three feet!!

With only a few rafters left to string, they should be able to begin decking next week.

Once we extended the great room and the bedroom toward the back of the house, the roof over the back end of the house took a totally different shape. There was supposed to be a witches hat piece similar to the front of the house over the breakfast nook, but that went away when they started stringing the rafters for that section.

Day 40 - 03/26/2007

WOW! It's amazing what can be done in 2 days! There are just 3 guys on the framing crew and the top of the roof is about 28' above the first floor. I just hope they don't fall while they are working up there!

The house is really starting to look like a house. Now that they have the main supports up for the rafters, they are really going to make some quick progress.

Here is a shot from inside the bonus room.

No other items have been decided upon as of now. They did get the water meters tied into the main. It will be a while before they tie the water into the house, but it's still neat to see our water meters showing 0.0 gallons used.

Day 36 - 03/22/2007

I hate to be redundant, but the guys are making huge progress each day! The drought conditions we are battling right now are giving the guys a great deal of dry days to work in.

We have picked out our brick and rock color. Once we get a sample of the brick and rock, I will put them together and get a picture of it.

They are about finished with the second story walls and will begin stringing roof rafter soon. Once they begin that, the house will really begin to take some shape from the road. Right now, it is difficult to walk through the house and get a true idea of the feel of the house as everywhere you look, you see the outside. Once they get the roof up and the walls wrapped, it will begin to really feel like a house.

I'm just checking things out! (That window and the front door are still not lined up!)


This is the first remnants of a ceiling over the great room. This ceiling will be about 18' tall for most of the room and will be vaulted toward the back of house.


This is the window in the front bedroom. This ceiling will be vaulted to accommodate a rectangular transom.


Our office will have 12' ceillings. Maybe we'll have enough wall space for all of Mandy's actuarial certificates!

Day 35 - 03/21/2007

The carpenters are really making some big progress this week. They are not setting any land-speed records, but their pace is steady. They have most of the second floor interior walls up and have begun to frame in the walls for the great room.


Here is a shot from the bonus area, looking toward one of the two upstairs bedrooms.

Here is another from the bonus area...

This next picture is taken from the great room looking up toward the first upstairs bedroom (this is the room shown in the two pictures above.)

Here we are looking toward the front of the house from the great room. Again...looking at the first bedroom upstairs (on left side of picture.)

This picture is taken from the office area, looking into the foyer and dining room.

Here is Mandy sitting in the opening of the window above the bathtub in our bathroom.

This is the first picture of the back of our house. On the very left of the picture is the screened porch area. This will be a great space to relax, bug-free. The builders have given me an over-sized opening to the crawl-space below the house to store things like the lawn mower etc.

Day 34 - 03/20/2007

The rain held off today letting the carpenters make good progress. It is a little difficult to see what was completed, but they have framed the office (on left side of picture below), finished the stairs, decked the second floor and finished the tray ceiling in the master bedroom.


The weather looks great for the week. At this rate, they will have the house under roof in 2 weeks! Here is a westerly view from the bonus area above the garage. The office is on the left in this picture and you can see the tray ceiling on the right in the back of the picture below.


Mandy is trying out a new grill...floor screws might not be so comfortable!

This is another view of the office from the front yard (or what will soon be the front yard.) It will be neat to have such tall ceilings in this room.

This was a neat shot that Mandy took from inside the office.

We should be posting quite a few pictures this week and I'm trying to stay on top of this. They are making a great deal of visible progress. Once they get the house under roof, the visible progress will slow down, but that does not mean that the pictures will slow down!

Slack...

Just about the only word that comes to mind in terms of my updating the blog. Hopefully, it won't become regular practice that there are long lags between updates. If you notice I'm slipping up, rest assued....Mandy and Kathy are on top of the harassment!

:)

Day 30 - 03/16/2007

Despite the rain yesterday afternoon and into last night, the carpenters have made substantial progress this week. Some of our friends, the Harpers and the Copelands, joined us at the lot this afternoon to check out the progress, take some pictures, and offer some guidance and counsel.

I was pleased to see our newest project manager, Ty Harper, on site and barking out orders. Taking care of business, just like momma taught him!!

Welcome to our new home...it's a bit drafty, but you'll get used to it!

Here is a picture of our laundry / mud room. Our view will change when we have neighbors building outside this window, but for the time, we'll enjoy it! It will still be a big improvement from our current laundry room, which is in the dug out basement!!


Here is a picture looking into our kitchen / breakfast area. The carpenters removed the wing-wall that was not supposed to be there. The doorway in the back of the picture will lead off of the kitchen to the screened porch.

This is wall inside our office. I'm not sure it is supposed to be that tall, but we'll see. (Notice how it is about 4' above the other wall!!)

This shows our closets...yes, we will now have separate closets. The one on the right is Mandy's and the one on the left will be mine. We decided that it was in both of our best interests to have separate closets, although I believe that each of these on their own is larger than the one that we are currently sharing!

We finally have stairs! Here is me checking out the view. I won't have many more opportunities to see this. We will soon (likely in the next two weeks) have a roof on the house and I won't be able to do this. Bill is at the bottom right of this picture.

This is a picture from atop my perch, looking into the kitchen.

Another picture from up top...this one is looking into our master bath.

These are the floor joists for our bonus room above the garage. These should have decking laid early this week, which will let them put up walls later in the week.

Another picture from the stairs...this one is over looking our bedroom and the tray ceiling (on the left.)

While Ty is our newest and most fierce project manager, he is still in training. Below you have a picture of the REAL boss.

Day 26 - 03/12/2007

It is amazing how much work can be done with some nice weather and a great crew of carpenters. Keep in mind that they started framing last Thursday (3/8) and now it's Monday afternoon and we have walls around 60% of the first floor and OSB on about 30% of the exterior. They are moving quickly; I only hope that Mandy and I can keep up with them!

Here are a few pictures that I took today. Don't forget that you can click on the pictures to see a larger image.


This picture looks into the kitchen and breakfast area. There will be a wall where the Wendy's cup is... :)




This picture is taken from inside the great room. This is looking toward the kitchen and breakfast area. The doorway on the left is not supposed to be there. We'll talk with the builders tomorrow to get that taken out. We want to have an nice open flow between the great room and breakfast area and the little wing-wall is not going to help!

Here is a view into the back corner of our bedroom. The back corner is where the sitting area will be. There are three windows (you can only see two of them here) that look at Signal Mountain. There is a beautiful notch in the mountains that reflect some awesome afternoon sunlight!

This one is from the back corner of the master bedroom, looking toward the front of the house. It's amazing how beautiful this March sky is.

This picture is taken from the entry-way looking into the dining room.

This is a picture of the front of the house taken from the front porch. The opening to the right is the windows in the dining room. The opening on the left is our front door. We're going to have a single door without any sidelights, but we will have an arched transom above the door.

Here's a few pictures of the house from the road.

Day 22 - 03/08/2007

Start the clock! We had materials delivered on Wednesday afternoon and the carpenters showed up on Thursday morning to begin framing the house. If we have good weather, they should be able to get the house "under roof" in 4 - 6 weeks. It looks like we will have good weather this coming weekend, so I think the carpenters will work.



Here's a picture of the floor joists. They have not laid any of the subflooring, but they should have that done by the end of the weekend.

Day 14 - 02/28/2007

In just 2 short weeks, we have closed on our loan, broke ground, poured footers and now have a completed foundation. We will have to wait until next week (week of 3/5) for the framing to begin. We are expecting some rain tomorrow and it does not make much sense to deliver materials on Friday to have them sit there over the weekend just begging to be a part of someone else's house :)

Here's a picture of the finished foundation...



A few neat things that played out with the foundation:

• We were able to (barely) squeeze two 9' garage doors in the garage space. Since we had to change from a side-loading garage to a front loading garage, there was some concern that we would be limited to 8' doors or a single 18' door. Anyway, our brick mason was able to get the 9' doors with a reasonable amount of space b/w the doors.
• Also, due to the way our lot sloped, we were able to get almost 6' of headroom in a portion of the crawl-space. This will let me store the lawn-mower and things like that under the house so that they will not be taking up much space in the garage.

The carpenters should be able to start early next week. Mandy and I are deciding on brick and roofing colors right now. Once we get our decisions made, we'll try to post some links to the products.

But....to pass some of the time, we have been able to get an image of our house plans. When we went to get this picture, we found out that we could dimension and place furniture in the rooms. This was actually a great find...we determined that the window placement in our master bedroom was not going to let us put all of our furniture in our bedroom...well, not without blocking half of a window.

Anyway, here's our floor-plan. You will probably notice that I am in the kitchen working while Mandy is lounging on the couch and Daisy is sleeping in the chair...typical!

Front of House



First Floor - Click image to super-size




Second Floor