Materials Delivered

The house materials were delivered today. We noticed the longest piece of wood, some sort of fabricated beam, was snapped in half where the black banding holds it. You can just barely see it in the top left picture. It's the second band from the right that goes all the way around. You can see the wood is buldged a bit, under closer inspection, it actually snapped. We'll have to keep our eye on it to make sure they don't use it.

Rough Driveway Placed

Today they placed the rough driveway. The bottom layer is 3" brown stone. The top layer is a 2" blue stone. They also did some more leveling.

Still Leveling

Leveling continues! There's still a 2' drop where our property meets the public space... I'm really hoping they'll smooth it out.

Land Leveling Continues

Surprisingly, not much was done yesterday on the house. A small amount of leveling, but still not finished.

Leveling has begun!

They have begun leveling the house as of two days ago. Yesterday it was pouring all day, so I didn't bring the camera figuring no work would be done... but to my surprise they've almost finished leveling.

Here are the pics from two days ago.

Sewer Piping

Stopped by the house yesterday to find that they have installed the sewer piping!

You can see here that they have uncovered the water pipe, but have not run it into the house yet, they'll probably do that today.

You can see here the trench they dug to run the PVC underneath the footer of the house. The cross pipe is there just as a support until the PVC glue dries and they can backfill the dirt, without it, the torque may break the seal on the PVC connections.

Lastly, you can see the rough in for the basement powder room here. We didn't have a say about where they put it, I'm not sure if I'm happy about the placement or not yet. The bathroom will block some of the light going into the basement, but at the same time, the bathroom will have a window... so plusses and minuses. On the right is the drain for the main parts of the house.

Bilco Door Added

Yesterday, the bilco door was added to the rear of the house. I still say a walkout basement would have been doable, but it wasn't offered by the builder... perhaps in the future we'll make it into one.

Steel Beams Placed

Not too much done over the weekend, but they did put the three steel beams in. There's another beam laying in the front yard, I imagine that is the one for the second story that they will put in during framing.

The Basement Walls Are Up!

To our surprise, they put the basement walls up Wednesday. We didn't have our camera, so we took the pictures Thursday. By the time we got there, they had already taken the molds off the walls and put in the basement windows.

Kitchen Appliances

Theresa and I checked out a local appliance store for a refrigerator and double ovens this weekend. We get a nice hefty discount for being Lockheed employees! They had a scratch and dent section also, and happened to have a GE Fridge one model above the one we wanted... but since it had a small dent on the front, it was $300 cheaper than normal... we decided the dent was small enough and not noticeable to justify the $300 savings.
Here's a picture of the fridge off the GE website:

They also had the cooktop we are getting from the builder. It's a downdraft system, which means no hood is needed, the vapors get sucked down through the cabinet and through ductwork that leads directly outside via the basement. Here's a pic from GEs website:

We are holding off on buying the double ovens for now, but here is the model we've decided on. It's a Double Frigidaire Convection Oven. Both ovens are convection and in stainless. We originally wanted the GE, so all of our appliances would be by the same manufacturer, but the GE double ovens only have convection on the top oven, not the bottom, and cost $1000 more! Hence we decided on the friigdaire:

Update 11/07/05

We purchased a new dishwasher this weekend for the house. It comes with a black builder's grade, but Theresa wanted a better dishwasher.

Gravel Added

We stopped by the house today in the pouring rain, figuring they would probably not do anything because of the weather. To our surprise, they had poured the gravel in for drainage. I like how they put gravel on the outside of the footers also to help with drainage, that was an added surprise.

With rain predicted for the majority of the week, I'm not sure how much will get done... but we'll still continue to check in each day.

Footers Poured

We stopped by the house tonight. We pulled up to a group of 5 mexicans pulling the form beams off of our newly poured footers!

Overall, it looked like a pretty good job. There was one spot where they had stepped on the footer and there was no longer the indent for the middle strip where the walls will be poured... I etched it out with my fingers though, hopefully it will be good enough. Also, all around the foundation there were drain hoses, some of which were nearly fully clogged with cement. I cleaned these out as well as I could with my fingers, but a few of them had the cement hardened already, but I made sure to get at least 50% of the hole cleaned out.

You can see the big "blobs" of concrete in the middle of the house. I believe those are to support the main beams of the house. You can also see the garage is up on top of the hill... because there is no basement under it, it's on a slab. My guess would be that the actual base of the house will be about 1-2ft above the soil edge. We're hoping for the lower range, so we have a somewhat flat yard, but looking around the neighborhood, the builder likes to raise the houses up so as to avoid water problems.

Basement Dug

They have now dug the hole for the footers for the basement.... aka a big hole!

Land Leveled

We stopped by the lot this weekend and they have leveled the land. They should be starting to dig the foundation any day now! You can also see the one picture is a view out our backyard from atop the dirt pile they created. It should be the equivalent of looking out a second story window.