Coming together

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

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!