Number One House Blog

It's been too long

2008-10-18T11:30:00.003-04:00

Oy. What a difference a month makes. We have had road trips to New York (Aunt Shirley's funeral) and Tennessee (Buddy Walk). And work, and life, and occasional sleep. The whole time, progress was happening on the house. Here's a catch-up. Pictures are from 9/4/08 through 10/2/08.

When we were picking out the stain color for the hardwood floor, we tried to get a balance between the new cabinet color and the existing table/chair color. The installers put down different colors so we could choose. They were going to sand off the colors afterward, so we wouldn't have color samples showing through the final colors.

This is the boundary between the hallway and the laundry room. You can't see it from this perspective, but there's a dip between the two flooring types. The hardwood floor guys had a disagreement with the linoleum guys.

And here's the result. I added in the sawdust for illustrative purposes, but eventually dust bunnies will migrate in and want to settle.

We think the two sets of flooring guys got it worked out so there's no Grand Canyon, but we'll have to check.

The hardwood floor guys also stained our vent covers so they would match. I understand what they did, but the way they did it looks like some piece of abstract art that is supposed to be vaguely disturbing.

We decided that we didn't like the hardwood after all, so we went with a paper carpet with blue accent lines. No, seriously, this is the paper used to protect the hardwood floor. We have picked up our own roll of it to protect the floor when moving.

Afternoon sun reinforces the correctness of the hardwood floor decision.

Shiny floor!

Down in the basement, this is our water handling/filtration system. The big blue tank is the water pump (I think), followed by (heading left) a water spinner (or centrifuge), a serious filter, and an ultraviolet light purifier. And we have no instructions on any of this, but they say it works.

This is our nifty remote sensor for the cisterns. It came from Australia.

Steve chillin' at the new place

and inspecting our only damage from hurricane Ike.

The hall bath, with covering still on the windows.

How NOT to do doorstops. The builder has replaced the door, and we purchased solid floor-based doorstops.

Nice floor, subtle problem. This is the computer room, with the sun flooding the windows at a quarter after 3. The sun will travel to the right, throwing the light to the left. Right onto where the computer screens will be, against the brown wall. No other way for this to be laid out, but I still think this is our one big design flaw in usability.

Here's how the driveway looked for most of the construction - dirt, and plenty of it.

Then the county told us that we needed an approach coming off the road, and the builder put up guard rails, and we got gravel. Much improved!

We have even passed the housing inspection!

(Steve is in yellow, hiding behind his dad, with his mom close. Our friends Dick and Starla are on the right. Bettie's behind the camera.)

And then in a moment of silliness, Steve and his mom got into a "duelling cameras" fight.

And as of this writing, we have passed our final inspection (Wednesday 10/15) and been granted our certificate of occupancy. The house is ours! There will be more pictures, including moving day(s), but wow - what a journey. Thank you, God. Thank you, Bettie. And thank you, Tag the builder.

Small steps

2008-09-06T09:35:00.003-04:00

The work these days is done in smaller increments. Big things - digging a basement, raising a wall - those are behind us now. There's still a lot happening, but on a smaller scale.

We have toilets! And the self-lowering lids work as specified. No seat slams.

We don't have a water pump yet, so we don't have running water. That's another step somewhere down the road. But one question I have is why the water heater is connected to the furnace . . .

I have mentioned that we're scavenging water from the roof. A preliminary calculation says that an inch of rain will provide about 1800 gallons of water, from the whole roof area.

A delivery of water is 2000 gallons, and about $65. We will be doing rather well, especially in the springtime. The two 5000-gallon cisterns are here, with round caps poking up above the ground. Bettie calls these "industrial". We'll have to do something to soften that look up.

Outside the house, they have finally covered over the leopard wall, at the carport.

Inside, the little closet in the master bedroom has shelves on two walls

We're still not sure what we're going to do with the sloped floor, if anything.

And saving the best for last, two views of the hallway. This is from the great room looking toward the carport, wood the natural color.

And now from the other direction, with stain, from Bettie's cell phone camera.

They will be putting on clear coats Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday next week, and the floors should be ready for traffic on Friday.

Most pictures from Labor Day, Monday Sep 1, 2008. Final picture from Friday 9/5.

Even when it doesn't rain . . .

2008-08-30T23:36:00.004-04:00

But first, the cistern. This is big. I thought it was going to be plastic, but it's concrete, and in two parts. This shows the first one. It's situated behind the house, next to the carport. That way, it's less likely to interfere with the underground electric and cable. And the underground geothermal. And it connects to the underground water collection system. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

These pictures are from August 12, 16, and 21.

When I saw this, I thought it might be a place where we could bury the Cardiff Giant. Yes, Mom and Dad, that made more of an impression on me than the Baseball Hall of Fame.

And the cistern is big.

So big they build it in sections.

They seal the sections with green goop.

They use a specialized truck to bring it and place it.

And the truck needs special bracing so it doesn't tip over when the boom is extended. I'm glad the construction is done, so they don't use this board for anything else.

This is what it looks like when it's all put together. And remember - this is only half of it.

This is one of the two roof water washers.

We're scavenging the water that hits the roof and passing it through one of these washers before it hits the cistern. It's like the first stage of a reverse osmosis system - this is where the big physical stuff drops out of the system. The intake and outflow pipes are higher than the floor, allowing us several inches of gunk accumulation before it needs to be cleaned.

How does the water get here? Glad you asked!

It collects from the downspouts and then funnels along the side of the house, and along the back.

Here's the part about the pouring. We have a sidewalk on the front of the house.

And a front porch, and the beginnings of a side patio.

While they were doing all that, they poured the bottom part of the ramp. We decided to have a switchback and extend the carport, instead of having it be an L shape and take up space beside the cars.

They're doing work around the bridge, too. This is a retaining wall. We'll probably try to get some ground cover to hold the driveway edges in place. But it won't be kudzu.

Inside stuff: the tub in the hall bath has been taken over by flooring:

Neat sunlight at 6PM. The floors are not finished yet - they'll glow when they're done. And the difference in shadow height is because the doors slide past one another, and one comes down farther into the beam of light. If they were french doors, the shadows would be the same height.

This is the laundry room. The outside door here goes to the carport. The cabinet will have a utility tub in it. The shelves are for stuff - books, keys, mail coming in, things headed out. In this picture, your back is to the master bath.

Here's the same room from the hallway door. This is where the washer and dryer will go.

These shelves are in the little closet of the master bedroom, the one over the basement stairs.

And here's what those stairs look like. The light over the landing is attached to the bottom of the closet.

Yes, we have a safety wall, and a handrail.

On both sides!

The kitchen is shaping up nicely

and the bedrooms have the fans installed.

And yet from the outside, not so very much different.

Floors and walls

2008-08-10T23:44:00.002-04:00

The biggest changes this time were in the floors (hardwood is all down!) and the walls. All pictures are from Friday August 8, 2008.

The cabinets have been delivered, and are mostly installed.

This is where the fridge goes.

Tile on the floor of the hall bath

And the master bath

The master bath has a Smurf crossing marked:

Oh, wait. It's just a seam being held in place.

The hallway in all its glory

(but I found out that the nifty orange that's visible here will be hidden by the door to the computer room. Woe is me.)

This is the angled part of the little closet in the master bedroom, over the basement stairs. The knock-off Croc is included for size comparison.

Bettie makes sure a sliding door does its thing right

This is the view when standing at the kitchen sink.

And from a few inches over, which seems to be preferable to a chunk of window-frame

(yes, that's the front window reflecting in the window. Open floorplans are neat!)

Down in the basement, the electrical panel has been completed, down to the regulation cardboard map

Some of those wires will be connected to the contents of this pile-o-lights

And I'm hoping, real hard, that this isn't the final configuration for the air filters for our system.

On the outside of the house, we have working porch lights

What we don't have is wire. Some enterprising individual snipped a coil of electrical wire from the outside of the house. The builder had to disassemble the wall to patch the wire so it would be long enough again.

These pictures show that we live in the bottom of a sunlight well. The first is the line of sunlight hitting the trees at about 8PM. The second is the wall of trees that blocks the light.

And that's the latest update.

In living color

2008-08-08T15:09:00.004-04:00

This post has pictures from Saturday, July 26. There are two flavors of stuff here, wooden floors and painted walls, with a sprinkling of weather conditions tossed in.

The floors were about half-way done when we stopped in on Saturday. This one is looking at the dining room from somewhere near the front door.

The stuff under the wood is this:

We decided to get the wooden registers that are flush with the floor, instead of metal registers attached to the top of the floor. Better looks, and fewer snagged socks when Bettie or I go sliding across the floor.

The gloopy junk that patches the holes is

And the floor looks good, even before it's all down, and before it is stained.

This is where the hallway (wooden floor) goes into the laundry room (vinyl floor). We call this picture "the meeting of the toes".

Yes, those are flip-flops on my feet. It was a rainy day, and I didn't want to get my knock-off Crocs messy.

How messy was it? I think Bettie's qualified to be an off-road racer now.

She's also a window-sill color picker

And a room inspector

Which brings us to room colors. The blue room above is the spare bedroom. The orange one is the computer room. The spare room is all blue. The computer room is not all orange. The computer room window faces south, so there will be lots of good light coming into the room. The wall opposite the window is painted white, to splash the light around. The wall with the window in it is painted green, to complement the trees and field through the window. At the carport end of the room is the brown wall, for a nice background to the computer screens. And the orange wall is where the closet is, to give a splash of brightness to the whole thing.

It wasn't intentional, but the orange wall is visible from the carport door entering the house. I think that's neat.

For other rooms, we're having a brown in the great room (kitchen, dining room, living room). You can see that they saved paint by leaving the walls bare behind where the cabinets will be.

The hallway is a lighter brown. This is the coat closet down near the carport door.

The master bedroom. I didn't want a light purple, so we compromised on this cream color.

And the laundry room, just inside the carport door. The doorway you see the edge of here is into the master bath.

Color details may look different in real life as opposed to these pictures. We try, but the shadings (especially the brown wall behind the computers) look very different based on flash/no flash, outside light, and phase of the moon. Something like that.

Coming together

2008-07-25T22:15:00.004-04:00

Folks, the house is coming together. It's really amazing to see the different parts of a house as it is being built, the different systems that are made live at different times. The house is not a unified whole, but it's a bunch of different parts that interact with each other. More like Unix than like Windows.

Anyway, these are from July 15 through 19, 2008.

The drywall has been mudded.

Here's the hall bath. It almost looks like it's been hit by amateur graffiti artists who only use white.

The kitchen ceiling got hit by the geometric guys:

and then by the squeegee guys!

This is soft, rounded texturing on the ceiling. It's not the hard, sharp, pointy, balloon-popping texturing. That was intentional. We want to live in a balloon-inclusive house.

They even did the ceiling of the basement stairs.

But not safely:

Not at all safely.

We now have power at the place (after all the intensive power-tool stuff was powered from generators)

That makes me wonder why there's an ice chopper present. In July. Indoors.

Probably not an ice chopper, but I don't know what it is. That's just my northern up-bringing showing through.

Do we have slugs crawling around in the master bedroom?

Nope. We have electricity, so we have a shop-vac.

We're going to have to be careful shutting doors. We didn't work out the line-of-sight too well on this one. The picture is from outside the house in the carport, looking through the laundry room, into the "throne room" of the master bath.

This is where they ran out of matte black spray paint while finishing the air vents.

And the storage side of the basement. Clear evidence of electricity in the house!

Bettie got caught by the paparazzi

We are having hardwood floors finished on-site. Here's the delivery of the raw materials.

Because of the weight, they wanted the boards stored over the center support beam of the house.

We will be able to get by without socks and shoes . . .

They installed a septic tank just outside the carport. I think they want it to stay buried.

Some flora and fauna.

(evidence of raccoons, if not the critters themselves)

The creek is drying up.

But the place looks like a vision at 8AM. I really like this photo. The end of the road, the end of the trip, the promised land. Thanks, Bettie.

Catch-up #2

2008-07-12T14:53:00.003-04:00

Be sure to see Catch-up #1 below.

These pictures are from June 14 through July 10 - almost 4 weeks. That's why there are so many of them. I'll try to keep this better updated.

This post will tend to show contrasts across the month, instead of a purely time-sequential view.

Here's the kitchen - electrical outlets on the walls, but nothing spectacular:

Bettie with Ron Hammonds, who will be putting in our hardwood floors.

The kitchen with some plumbing and HVAC work done:

And then dry-walled. What a month it's been!

Now driveway views. This is before the carport was added:

Here's the framing for the carport.

And a roof!

Here's the trench for the underground electric.

And the transformer.

Speaking of electric, here's how the power company remembers where things go.

Can't fault them, though - it worked. Here's the new pole, across the road from the driveway:

For the foundation holes for the carport posts, here's one method used to empty the dirt:

And here's another one:

Then after all that work, they went and filled the holes up again.

But it was for a good cause:

The carport is neat. We're going to be able to have dinner parties out there.

This is where the ramp is going to go. We're not building the house to be strictly ADA-compliant, but it's close.

You can see one side of the ramp here. Because of the distance from the house to the ground, the ramp has to turn at the carport wall and double back.

We could call it the leopard house

We have had some visitors. This guy Bettie shot out in the field.

Our niece Caroline was a good helper.

Edison passed the sobriety test. Which was good, considering the shirt he was wearing.

This guy was an unwelcome visitor. He was at the house on the evening of June 30. He tried to pass himself off as a carpenter, but our builder and Brad the head carpenter haven't heard of him. The county sheriff has, now. No information, but the guy hasn't been back.

More things leaving - but these should stay (the stones, not the belly). the builder will shore up this area and put up a retaining wall.

The finishing of the porch roof. This is how I think the bad guy got inside the house. There's no interior roof on the other side of the window.

We finally got a front door to replace the plywood. Bettie took this one through the deadbolt hole.

Afternoon sun in the great room. Bettie did a good job of arranging the rooms in the house.

Somehow Bruce the electrician makes sense out of all this.

The geothermal system will dump excess heat in the summer, and warm up air in the winter. It attaches to the back of the house.

and then turns a corner and comes out past the great room.

We're having a lamp post out in the field, so Bruce is making use of the ditch that's already there.

More inside work. After Bruce the electrician was done inside, they added insulation and put it behind plastic. And invited in the dry-wallers.

They worked everywhere. This guy is doing the top of the basement stairs. Standing on a board.

The computer room.

The finished great room.

The master bedroom. On the left is the doorway to the master bath. The closet is in the center, with the door to the hallway on the right.

Here's the great room end of the house, with a big pile of drwyall leftovers piled out front.

And then how the house has changed, from June 19

to July 10

That's a lot of changes!

Catch-up #1

2008-07-12T14:13:00.003-04:00

These are pictures taken June 3 through 10. They are posted up here later than they should have been. They are still posted, and that's good.

From June 3, a view coming in the carport and looking through the hallway to the great room. The lawn chair is not permanent.

Looking down the stairs to the landing. The kitchen is on the left, and the master bedroom is on the right.

It was muddy that day.

And here's the reason why. Looking from the front porch along the front of the house towards the driveway.

The house wasn't sealed yet, so there were leaks.

That didn't stop us from being cozy. this is from the front door, looking diagonally across the great room to the dining room.

A side view of the stairs. The landing exists because there wouldn't have been enough room at the bottom if we did steps all the way down. And yes, a pool table can make that turn.

Did I mention that it was muddy?

The great room from the outside.

Now from June 7. The front door had not arrived, so the builder screwed a piece of plywood over the doorframe. Functional, after a manner of speaking.

The start of the electrical work. This is in the master bedroom, looking through the wall and basement stairs into the kitchen. Yes, that's a shower in the kitchen (temporarily). This is before we had them add a closet over the landing on the basement stairs.

Still some leakage in the basement.

Careful of that first step!

Bettie's knock-off crocs, kicked off.

Siding on the back of the house. The windows, from left to right, are the master bath, master bedroom, kitchen, and dining room.

And the front of the house. Living room, plywood door, hall bath, spare bedroom, computer room.

Now from June 10. This is where the carport will be.

Cool! They added the little closet over the stairs.

This is our furnace/geothermal heat exchanger. You can tell it's good because it has that swoopy blue thing on it.

The sump room. The house's electrical panel will be located here, too.

We branded the house. This is from the master bath, which has side-by-side sinks.

Just like flood-water, the siding is rising.

The back is all sided, and most of the roof is shingled.

We're not going to have a yard jockey holding a lantern. This is as close as it gets.

We'll see this guy's off-spring in 2025.

Basics

2008-06-01T23:00:00.000-04:00

This is the first of 4 blogs about the house. Steve is catching up from a horrendous work schedule. The pictures have continued, though, and are reported here.

These pix are from May 22, 2008.

They have started the wooden part of the house. The floor is on now.

Bettie happened to catch the builders raising the first wall.

It's up - and it's good!

It almost looks like theater scenery - but it's real. The yellow board over the picture window in the living room is a laminated board.

And they're working on the back wall. This carpenter is kneeling in our master bath.

This is what it looked like when Bettie was leaving:

That's all for this day. Tomorrow is a whole new adventure.

Shazam!

2008-06-01T22:00:00.000-04:00

This is what Bettie saw when we arrived the next day (May 23, 2008):

Four walls, and a roof! Maybe that's a normal day's effort for the builders, but for us it's incredible. They have the front porch framed, and the plywood on some of the walls.

Steve standing at the front edge of the porch. The picture window and front door open onto the porch. To the right of the porch are the hall bathroom, the spare bedroom, and the computer room (window covered over by plywood).

Steve and Bettie in their new house (and future home). Yes, I did carry Bettie across the threshold the first time.

Silliness: Steve is showering in the master bath. Good thing there's some plywood for privacy!!

The view out our picture window. The builder patiently explained to us that the dirt piles and diagonal boards are not permanent (yes, more silliness).

What is it with this silliness? Now Steve is pretending to be sitting reading in the "throne room" of the master bath.

It's our house, not public property, so this is not graffiti. This is inside a window frame of the master bedroom.

This is the other end of the house. There will be sliding glass doors in the big opening. Steve is checking out the acoustics of the new basement. Long reverb time - about five seconds.

And no wonder - there's nothing down there except for hard, flat walls.

Look out - that first step is a long one.

This is the carport end of the house. The yellow stuff is to help water drain down the outside of the foundation walls, instead of trying to go inside.

And that's it for today!

Cristo

2008-06-01T21:00:00.001-04:00

That's right - our house got wrapped. I think we should apply for some arts funding. If that guy can get millions for wrapping buildings and sea coast, we should get some for wrapping our house.

These pix are from May 26, 2008 - Memorial Day.

The house as we saw it:

Inside, with nephews Joe and Paul. The house looks so spacious!

Interior lumber, plus a hole into the basement.

Aaaah - so that's why there was a hole in the floor - no support here! Note the Oriented Strand Board (OSB) supports.

Whew! They didn't cover up the windows!

We're going to have a very light, bright living room/dining room/kitchen

Bettie and her brother Dan check it out

Bettie and I had covered the front door with plastic, to ward off rain that might want to enter the house. So people had to use the "other" front door. This is Bettie's sister Karen and her husband Ron.

Visual effects: why the front door was unusable.

Silliness: Steve and nephews Paul and Raleigh take the house out for a ride.

Severe silliness: nephews Paul, Raleigh, Mark, and Ross jump on the bed in the master bedroom.

The back of the wrapped house. In the foreground are the rafters for the carport.

Silliness. Not sure what inspired this - if you could call it inspired.

This was imprinted on one of the pieces of plywood, and it reminded me of the posters that get splashed all over the plywood around construction sites. This one looks like it's listing all 72 bands that will be playing a concert.

The niftycool camera caught this bumblebee playing around some lumber stacked outside.

And that's it for Memorial Day, 2008.

Windows and walls

2008-06-01T20:00:00.000-04:00

From May 29, 2008.

We have windows!

This also shows the wrap of the house better. Not sure why they use two colors of washers with the nails. Perhaps it's a Protestant/Catholic thing - it comes out to 15 green (Catholic), 14 orange (Protestant). We're happy to invite in people of all faiths.

The front of the house, including tar-paper on the roof.

The end, showing sliding glass doors.

This is our siding. It's called Pebblestone Clay, and it's a nice neutral brown. We wanted something that would blend in but not disappear.

Interior walls. This is looking down the hallway toward the carport.

This is from well inside the front door, looking into the kitchen. The stairway to the basement is the first door to the left as you enter the hallway.

And how it looks from a distance. The outside will change as they get the siding and the roof on, but most of the future work will be inside the house.

Recap

2008-05-22T23:41:00.003-04:00

This is a recap of where they are on the house, just before it gets real interesting

We started out with the driveway to nowhere (April 10, 2008)

Here's Bettie and Tag (the builder) discussing the layout of the house, using our makeshift window markers as a reference point. (April 14)

Then came dirt day (April 30). This picture shows from the computer room looking through the house to the dining room.

We got footers on May 1.

The next day, they filled in with gravel

By May 6, the basement walls had been poured:

Iron got added May 7

On May 10, the day we got back from Orlando, we took a walk around the place. I'm standing on top of a dirt pile.

May 13 saw the basement floor poured

The basement walls have rounded inside corners! (May 18, just after seeing the second Narnia movie)

Switching over to the septic side, here's a shot from May 6 that shows the bottom floor

The next day saw fine gravel, footprints, and pick-up pipes

By May 12, it had been all filled in

These pix are from Narnia day. This is our sump pump (a county requirement). That's the lid leaning against the wall.

And a couple minutes later, it fell down. Bettie thinks we may have a drafty basement.

Whaddaya know?!

2008-05-13T22:46:00.003-04:00

Who'da thunk? Not only did they dig a big hole in the ground, but they're putting stuff into it as well. (Pix from May 3 2008)

They have footers and gravel

as well as the footer for the front porch

Even the place where electric is going to come in

(that's the edge of the sump pump in the lower left - a county requirement)

And to keep animals from falling in to the hole, we put up signs

More coming soon - they get vertical with this thing!

Can ya dig it?

2008-05-02T00:51:00.004-04:00

Someone can. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. Pix from April 30 except the last one (a day earlier).

And just one comment: Bettie is my stunt driver. It's hard on the tires. But she can grab a parking space faster than anybody I know.

It lives!

2008-04-18T15:24:00.005-04:00

Well, at least the driveway part of it.

Bettie says (in her best Veggie Tales voice) "Have we got a driveway for you!!".

Bettie took some of these pictures on 4/10/08, and we both met with our builder on 4/14/08.

Here's the lower end of the driveway.

The pile of gravel is to keep out random trespassers. The poles and the yellow tape are to help the heavy equipment stay where it should be (up, not down, not part down). And the rest of the driveway is real rocks! They're big, and hard to walk on, but this is a real driveway.

This is just coming out of the first curve. They did some serious cutting into the left wall (going up) to get the driveway flat.

This is around the next curve, opening up onto the property. Nothing's been done up top yet.

This reminds me of David Macaulay's Locating the Vanishing Point. But that's the way it is right now.

Here I am walking down the driveway. And the little walls on that little bridge don't look so impressive when I think about a car going downhill on snow or ice.

It's getting real!!

This is our "Bettie, Steve, and the driveway" picture. As if you couldn't tell.

We had to place the house on the property, so they can start digging the basement. Bettie had the idea of basing the placement on the view from our living room window. These are tent poles with paper grocery bags providing visual differentiation. We're inside the house, looking out over the property.

Looking at the house from the outside. That's Steve on the right.

And Bettie on the left.

I didn't change positions.

Bettie and the builder. The orange-topped stakes are the corners of the house - living room up close, dining room farther back.

And to wind things up, a far shot, from the end of the property. You can see the grocery bag banners in the distance.

Homage

2008-03-21T23:41:00.002-04:00

Bettie visited the house site Thursday 3/20/2008. Still no progress. She took many pictures of the same places, documenting the water that fell earlier this week.

The water in the creek had mostly gone down, but this shot pays homage to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

More of the same

2008-03-08T19:37:00.001-05:00

More "nothing" happened this week. And imagine the picture below with the snow almost a foot deep.

I guess that's much more of the same.

Nothing in the wintertime

2008-03-05T23:13:00.001-05:00

Here's a portrait showing nothing going on - but in the wintertime!

We're thinking of entitling it "Very Still Life".

Picture from Thursday 2/28/08

Mirror

2008-03-03T19:23:00.002-05:00

The lack of activity on this blog mirrors the lack of activity at the building site. Real updates soon (we hope).

Another SYRMW so NHH

2008-02-24T20:21:00.002-05:00

That would be Snowy Yucky Rainy Muddy Week, and Nothing Has Happened.

Wet and yucky, but panoramic

2008-02-15T22:43:00.005-05:00

The past few weeks have been pretty bad, weather-wise, and the builder hasn't done much on the driveway. There will be a few pictures up soon, but we're talking about new piles of rocks, or piles of rocks with snow on them. We don't have grandchildren, and we don't have cats, so we show people pictures of every incremental change on the property. Eventually.

But the down-time has allowed me to create a panorama of the property. This is from pictures taken February 2, and is put together using a program called AutoStitch. And it's neat - I tossed it 17 pictures, tweaked a few settings, let it go, and came out with this. I added the point-of-interest captions (in yellow) later. The pic is about 5 meg, so it may take a bit to load. And it's best viewed at full size (or maybe 50%) to read the words. If you try to take in all its goodness on a single screen, you'll see yellow blurs where something happened. And I left the scalloped edges of the pictures in so there's more information, and to keep the tops of some trees.

When you zoom in (the blue magnifying glass toward the upper right) you will be standing in the master bath, looking out the back of the house. This is the center of the panorama - the tour starts on the far left of the photo and continues to the far right. Downloading the pic will let you use your favorite viewer (or editor, if your initials are DW).

Next time, I'll go portrait mode and use more pictures. That should allow both earth and sky to show. And doing it on a tripod will provide some uniformity.

Tech note: uploading a 5.8M picture directly into Blogger resulted in an 85K panorama, with less-than-perfect translation. Bzzzzzt. Using Picasa's web album and linking to the picture (uploaded at largest size) worked just fine. Thanks, Google!

Quiet week

2008-01-26T23:02:00.000-05:00

The builder said nothing happened this week, so we reciprocated by not going and taking pictures.

When it's frozen, nothing changes

2008-01-24T22:53:00.000-05:00

These are pictures from Saturday, January 19, 2008. It was very cold outside - probably single digits. That did make the mud easier to walk on.

The workers hadn't done much (if anything) since the last picture-taking. The bridge is curing, and that takes time. So I took pictures of places I couldn't get to last week.

This is a better picture of the bridge. We have expressed our concern to the builder about the low shoulders on the bridge. He says that when it's all over, it will be right.

A better view of underneath. This is looking upstream, towards the corner.

There's some serious support on this bridge. Looks all nice and shiny.

There's one place on the wall where there's some fill showing through. I'd rather the void not be there, but I don't know if it's a problem.

I decided to get artistic and go for the low angle. Looking downstream.

And then I did it again. I like this one better.

A bridge over quiet waters

2008-01-14T21:42:00.000-05:00

They have finally made it into a real bridge. It has a top on it now.

You can see that they have left mounds of gravel to keep people from driving on it.

It looks nice - the sides are ramped up to keep people from driving off.

I got to be king of the hill.

They'll keep cars off it for a couple weeks, but we walked on it.

It was raining when we were there, so the camera had to stay under the umbrella. That's why I'm dark, and is one of the reasons Bettie is so bright.

It is a real thick bridge.

A better view of the ramping up on the sides.

We're still not real comfortable that this will keep a car from going off the side. We're talking to the builder.

A bridge to Mudville. I didn't see Casey.

I tried to show the thickness of the bridge with my standard foot. My ankle didn't bend as much as I wanted it to (which is probably good).

Up top, near the carport, looking out the length of the property. I took the picture to show the standing water, but happened to get the septic system (the red flags towards the upper right) and our flower bed (with white plastic covering it, at the right edge, beside the red flags).

The top of the driveway. Messy, muddy, and ucky.

But that didn't stop me.

Once I got most of the way down the driveway, I took pictures of Bettie in the car. Here are the far and near shots, with me in the same location.

Neat camera. Thanks again, Mom and Dad.

As I was going down the driveway, I tried to stop every few feet for a picture. I'm going to see if I can combine them into a movie. If I get it done, I'll post it here.

Time and tide

2008-01-12T15:59:00.000-05:00

Time never waits, but tides come and go. The work on the bridge moves forward more slowly than time.

From Saturday the January 5 2008:

They have added gravel between the road and the first concrete pour. Now it looks more like a driveway.

The bridge is solidly built. I have a standard foot-sized foot. (That's a dozen inches, not a baker's dozen)

Looking upstream towards the corner

And then from Tuesday, January 8, 2008: they're getting ready to pour the deck of the bridge.

We think the pieces in the middle of the gap are there for temporary support only. You can see the pieces of rebar bent over to be embedded in the deck of the bridge.

Every time we go over, it looks more like a real driveway.

Part of the reason we think the center supports are temporary

We're planning on going over again on Sunday. I think the top deck is supposed to be poured. It cures for two weeks after that.

Bridge-building

2008-01-03T22:48:00.000-05:00

Fresh pictures from January 3, 2008. Bettie had to stop by her dad's house to pick up some things, and she had the camera with her.

This one gives some perspective on the size of the bridge.

A neat shot along the stream. Yes, the water is frozen over.

Balancing act

They wear boots for a reason - this is messy!

End-of-year update

2007-12-31T15:07:00.000-05:00

The bridge is coming along nicely. These pictures are from Saturday, December 29, 2007.

Here Bettie surveys the one poured footer

And here it is from a distance. I'm standing in the creek, on a rock.

One of the reasons it looked good is that they're drinking Sprite instead of something harder

There's more work on the septic system, as well. Mostly those are pictures of holes in dirt, but here's my leap for life

It was starting to get darker, so the pix are a bit grainy, but they're still good. Here's Bettie and I standing in our dining room, with the driveway hidden behind our shoulders.

And a couple more to round out the sampling. Different views of the footing.

The first looks downstream, the second upstream.

Big equipment does big work

2007-12-24T23:24:00.000-05:00

We stopped out at the property on Sunday afternoon 12/23/2007. They are making good progress on building the bridge, and the driveway, and the septic system.

Here's the overview of the bridge. We're looking down the stream, towards Bettie's dad's driveway. The light rectangular things are the forms for the concrete bridge. The gray rock has been dug out from where the footers will go.

Here's a closer look. You can see the rebar sticking up on the road side of the bridge, and where the gray rock was dug up on the other side. Each side of the bridge will be cast into an opened U shape, bases pointing at each other. The water in the creek will flow between the bases of the Us.

Here's another overview, looking up the driveway. The bridge will be perpendicular to the road, and then we'll make a bend to the right before going up the hill. You can see where they have done some clearing and cutting into the hill to make the driveway level.

The house will be on a corner lot. This is the other road, looking up to where it Tees into the main road. The guard rails are where the creek crosses this road onto our property. The builder has put a temporary driveway up to the property from this road because the main driveway is still being built.

Here's our protected flower garden. The Lamb's Ear is doing real well. Other stuff, not so well. Some of the places where we buried bulbs are now sunken and holding water.

Early work on the septic system. I was going to comment about the negative and the positive, the figure and the ground, but it's all ground. I do think that the backhoe dug a scoop of dirt from one side, wheeled around, and deposited it on the other side. That would explain where the dirt came from, and the big tracks down the middle of the two dirt features.

Bettie up at the top of our driveway. It was cold that afternoon! She's facing down the driveway. Our carport and house will be at her back (and about fifty feet farther up). That's our flower garden just off her right hand.

A view from the top of the driveway hill. Yes, this will be interesting in the wintertime.

I'm walking back across the driveway. It had been raining, and it was really gucky and muddy. Behind me are some of the trees that they took down. The top of the driveway is to my right, and the bottom to my left. You can see a bit of the yellow of the backhoe down there.

The top of the temporary driveway. This is towards the back side of our house (dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom). It's late in the day - the shadows are starting to get long.

REAL long!

A deer and my dear. That's a hoofprint on the left, and Bettie's boot print on the right, from our walk up.

Some neat winter berries we saw as we were walking back to the car. They might be from honeysuckle - the tree looked like a weedy shrub. But the berries are neat!

We're standing on the little road, looking down the creek parallel to the main road. The stop sign is just out of the picture to the left. You can see the criminal instrument of Steve's mugging sitting on the ground.

That's all for now!

In which Steve and Bettie build a house

2007-12-05T21:09:00.000-05:00

This is it - the official house blog for Steve and Bettie's new place.

The ground-breaking (September 17, 2007):

And the first flower bed (but definitely not the last) from November 17:

Now they're doing stuff. With physical machines and everything! Here's the driveway

And here's what they made the path with:

These last two from December 3.

Updates as they are available. But it's getting real!!