Shoveling out the house AGAIN

I just love snow. *sigh* Mother Nature blessed us with 2-3 inches of the white stuff and then threw in some nice sleet on top of it. Lovely! So this is the second time in 4 days that we've had to shovel out the house. And it started snowing when we got there! It stopped a short time later, thank goodness.

The view out our front door (the sun appeared long enough to set...figures!):

And finally our snow shoveling assistant:

Our beam problem

We've been trying to keep track of things happening at the house, but we do live 40 mins away so getting there every single day isn't always possible. Well...Joe decided to stop by on Wednesday after work. The framers had started framing out the second floor and had finished putting the plywood on the garage walls. Excellent! There was just one problem....a drop beam that wasn't supposed to be dropped! We specifically requested that the great room be one large open room (we removed a wall to accomplish this). Through the whole planning process, no one mentioned that if we removed the wall, we'd still have a 3 inch drop from the engineered beam in the great room! Ugh! So we stopped construction on the house for the first time (and hopefully the last!).

Here's a photo of our lovely beam:



So a few phone calls later, Titan decided they'll change out the beam with two smaller ones at no charge to us. We even got a call first thing in the morning from our sales guy on his day off! Now we know how to get answers quickly...just stop construction. ;)


And I'd like to add that shoveling 4 inches of wet, heavy snow out by moonlight (and headlights) is NOT fun. They can't get that roof on soon enough!


They'll be more photos early next week, I'm sure.

Framing - First Floor

This might be picture overload....but this is the most exciting thing we've had happen in awhile! :) Our first floor is framed! Yay! Photos below are "clickable", if you want to see a larger version. And yes, it was raining! Ready to use your imagination??

Front of the house, garage to the right:


Side view of the garage:



Walk-out basement side (there's more windows that haven't been cut out yet):


Back of the house:



Standing in the kitchen, looking at the fireplace and great room:

Standing in the kitchen, but looking at the laundry room:

Still in the kitchen, but turned 90 degrees to look at the dining room (pantry on either side):

Great room:

Kitchen:

And that's it for now...

Framing begins! :)

It's not pretty yet....but they finally started! Yay!

Uh oh....snow!

Well, I guess it's a good thing that they didn't start framing yet. We woke up to snow today! There's probably about 4-5 inches on the ground now. :(

We have a basement!

I've been admittedly slacking on the updates. It's been fairly quiet, though. Once they start framing, I'll be updating frequently, I'm sure. Anyway...the latest update, we have a basement! Photos are below.


Front:

Back:

Inside:

The whole thing from above:

Basement forms are set

The forms for the basement walls are in. They're pouring the basement walls on Monday.

We have footers!

They poured the footers yesterday and are pouring the frost footers today. Thursday, they're pouring the basement walls. Moving right along! Here's the latest pics:

First day of construction!!!

FINALLY!!! *happy dance* :) Oct 25th is our official first day of construction.










Some of the Fall scenery:





I'm sure I'll be posting updates a lot more often from now on. ;)

So it's been awhile...

I know I haven't updated this in a month.....but I've been SO busy! A lot has happened so I will fill everyone in as quickly as possible. We closed on the construction loan/mortgage last Friday. We ended up with a rate of 6.25% so not horrible, but not awesome either. If we would have done this a year or two ago, I bet we would have been at 5 something. Bummer! We got our permits back and they were partially denied. So they were fixed by the builder and should have been resubmitted yesterday. We SHOULD have those back in 2-3 days. So we're on the builder's schedule to break ground end of next week. Yay! My next update should have pics. *fingers crossed*