Week Two Framing 2.0

This process continues to amaze me.

Sara and I went out to the land after work today. It is noticeable that the days are getting longer, and it is nice that we are able to see the progress in the daylight after work. This is the first day where you can really kind of see the shape and size of the home as it is situated on the lot. You can almost see the walls as they are in this picture, forming the shape of the sketch in the header of this blog.

There are temporary steps leading into where the front door of the house will be. The staircase up and down stairs are in place so you can see the flow of the house. It was fun walking around the main floor and looking out into the woods from where the dining room will be. We went upstairs and walked around throughout. I've included a picture of Sara checking out the bedroom part of the master suite. In all of the rooms, we can see where we'll enter closets, where hallways are and where we'll walk from room to room. In fact, with the exception of one closet (OUR future bedroom closet where there is currently no evidence of a door or entrance), we can see clearly as we walked around how the layout is what we put together so many months ago. (I guess we'll have to ask if they're planning to add a way in and way out of that particular closet).

For basically the only time this week, we're home tonight with some time to talk about plumbing and other upcoming decisions.

I'm anxious to see tomorrow how much they accomplish as they wrap up this work week and approach 50% completion of the framing.

Week Two Framing

Yesterday I had a chance to swing by briefly towards the beginning of the morning.

Monday was a bust because of the weather, and although Tuesday was really really cold, there was a team of guys out there framing away. It sounds like they are going to get another full week in this week despite the cold.

We've been working electronically with the TJB team to figure out some appliance, plumbing, exterior and door decisions we have to make very soon.

Sara has colleagues in town this evening from North Carolina, and after an insane couple of days at work I'm getting ready to go to a Wild game.

Tomorrow night, Sara and I actually have time at home to sit and talk about some of these decisions. So that's the plan . . .

Week One Framing 2.0

On Saturday, Sara and I spent a little time at the land before heading off to birthday parties and babysitting. As you can see, we went there in the rain.

It is remarkable what they've been able to complete in a week as you'll see below. I've been in DC for a few days, and they've made incredible progress since I was here last.

The house is really coming together with walls and floors, etc. We can start to see where we'll be cooking, relaxing and getting together with friends and family not too many months from now.

On Sunday, Sara and I went over to Mary and Clark Arneson's house in St. Andrews in Blaine. This is such an "it's a small world" story, but here it goes. Clark Arneson is the city administrator in Blaine. He was the city administrator in Bloomington during the Mall of America development, which means he is good at what he does. I'd never met Clark, but I know the Arneson family well as they were right across the street from me growing up in Crookston. Clark was a little older than me, but I did know his youngest brother Scott. Clark and Mary built recently with TJB, and she is an awesome interior designer who know helps TJB clients out with their design work. We've been through a million model homes, but it was very cool to see Mary and Clark's gorgeous home and get more ideas as we have to start thinking more and more about the inside of our house. Going forward, we're going to be able to work with Mary as we have questions about anything from flooring to lighting, and everything in between. We are excited to be able to utilize her expertise to help make the inside of our home everything we hope it can be.

Our first big color choices still revolve around the combination of stone, shakes, shingles and siding. Mary gave us her initial thoughts on those based on the path we're currently going down, and yesterday we sent her some pictures to look at that should help he give us further advice.

Week One of Framing

We're happy to report there has been a lot of progress with our house over the past week.  Chris and I went over to the land yesterday morning to see the progress in the day light.  Below is what we found:

Progress...

I stopped by the land last night after a long day so I'll warn you that the pictures were taken in the dark.  Chris is traveling now so I wanted to take some photos for him to see.  Hopefully this weekend we'll get to look at the land together during the day. During this stage of the process it's very easy and fun to see the progress that they've made.

The first picture is fairly dark but a view from the curb.

The next picture shows the opening where the door from the inside of the garage will lead to the mud room:

The next two pictures show the view looking into the hallway, living room, and office:

The last picture is looking down into the basement:

I'm still getting used to the blogging so I can't quite figure out how to center this last picture.  I'll have to ask Chris to help me when he gets home.

We received a pretty cool seven page color spread yesterday by room of all of the items we've chosen from the plumbing place.  Now we need to do more research before we made our final decisions.

Plumbing and Framing

Sara and I met up yesterday at Pipeline in Hopkins towards the end of the day for another marathon of looking at plumbing hardware. Ok, we aren't quite up for selection "marathons" at this point, so maybe it was more like a "plumbing 5k."

After staring at faucets and toilets and shower heads for too long, your mind goes numb. We are finding we're good for about 2 1/2 hours on any one topic before we get too close to the "yeah, we'll just take that one" point. As I wrote in the last post, we're building this so we can create "our house" (within the context of a budget of course) so we are always taking a step back when we reach the point where settling for something seems expedient.

This was an extremely productive couple of hours. Last time, we had basically settled on toilets, but that was about it. We worked through all of the bathrooms, the laundry room, our master bath and the kitchen last night. We are very very close to knowing exactly what we want for plumbing and plumbing related products. We've been very fortunate in that we definitely have very similar tastes in what we DON'T like. So we've been able to eliminate a whole host of options right off the bat.

Most of (of course not all) the products that would be way outside of our budget happen to be gaudy and obviously "not us." That has narrowed our choices down in most cases to a few options, of which we like most or all.

With only a few exceptions, we now have our wish list for all of our plumbing. Adam is putting it all into a list for us with pictures and prices so we can really sit down and look at what we have in the spec book vs. what we want to have in the house. From there, we can actually come to our final conclusions. Adam said yesterday that we can expect to get this list later today or tomorrow. We'll likely set up our next (perhaps last) meeting with him for next week or the following. We still have a lot of research to take care of on this front, but last night was definitely successful.

Being south of Minneapolis we took a little detour after Pipeline to go to Centennial Lakes in Edina where we got engaged almost two years ago (Feb. 8th, 2008). It was a little colder that evening, and this time we didn't hop on a plane for the beach. But it was fun to go there in the winter where people were skating and just be there together.

We had a nice dinner at Crave in the Galleria, and then headed home. We had separate cars because we had met at Pipeline, and Sara had a few errands to run.

I thought I'd swing by the house just to see what they did Monday. I was amazed.

I'm excited to go to the lot during the daytime and take pictures. Although that will likely not be until Saturday because I'm heading to DC tomorrow. And who knows how far they will be then.

They have the beginning of all of the basement walls up, and the structure for the main floor all in place as of yesterday. I was thrilled to see what they had accomplished. I met Sara back at home and we both went out to the land together to look at it again and snap some photos (yes, in the dark).

I almost don't want to miss the next few days in light of what they accomplished yesterday. But I suppose gaining clients and new business is part of the long term plan and might even help with these short term goals. So alas, I'll have to see the results of four more days of construction when I return.

Framing and Stone

Sara and I had a chance to spend a bunch of Saturday working on our house project.

As I wrote the other day, they began framing the house Friday. They worked until noon Friday, so they didn't make a huge amount of progress. But as you can see from the pictures below, they did all of the prep work they need to really start moving. This includes getting the wood placed around the base of where they had already poured the cement foundation.

Along with the exterior stone, we discussed with Glenda options for fireplaces. This is a decision we can push off for a bit yet, but there are a lot of cool options. We even like the one that is currently in our spec book, which is nice.

Afterwords we made our second trip to Condor where we met up with Glenda, one of the owners. They had put together a couple of boards for us to look at based on some pictures we sent them of stone work that we think we like. They didn't hit the mark with what they put together, but Glenda was great and said she'd go to the manufacturer to find the components she thinks she needs to add to the current boards to get the colors and style the way we want it. We're clearly getting to the point where we need to sit down with someone who has an eye for the color combinations so that we aren't matching up stone with shingles with siding in a way that doesn't match. That's something that we'll have to do in the upcoming weeks.

We spent several hours after leaving Condor going back through many of the models we saw very early on in this process. Looking at model homes has transitioned in its usefulness over the course of the last 8 months. We started out looking at models to make our decision whether to build or go with an existing home. Next we went through many of those same models to decide on the structure and layout of the home. We're now finding it important to go back through all of them to look at the multitude of component pieces we're going to need to decide on in the next weeks and months.

Little things like where to put the switch for the garbage disposal or garbage disposals are now important. And those are things we didn't notice or care to pay attention to in June or even September. But we get to create this place (the whole reason we decided to build in the first place), so now we really need to focus on getting those little details exactly right.

Monday, Sara and I are making our second trip to Pipeline in Hopkins to look at plumbing. We were productive there last time. Having run through a few models again will certainly make this next trip even more fruitful.

Framing Starts

I was able to swing by the lot this morning. Today is the day when they start framing. I spoke with the guys a little and it sounds as though they are only going to be there until about noon today. But they should be able to make a good first dent on the framing process.

I'm anxious to run by there either this afternoon or during the day tomorrow to see what they were able to make of the stack of wood that you see below.

We're going to see some dramatic changes to the lot in the upcoming days and weeks, which is totally exciting.

Of course this means more and more decisions are going to have to be made during that time period.

We're planing to head to Condor Stone tomorrow again to look at some boards they put together for us of samples based on concepts we gave them. Maybe we'll post some options here tomorrow for people to look at.

Framing Starts Tomorrow

Thanks to everyone who gave us input on the in-floor heat for the basement. We decided to put it in the basement. I know we made the right decision and will enjoy using it for many years to come (that is once the basement is finished).

I got word this morning that they will start framing our house tomorrow. I drove by the land last night and saw a bunch of wood piled on the lot. We're excited for this next stage it will be much easier to image the layout and all of the plans that we've dreamed up once it is framed. Depending on the weather it should take about 5-6...so let's hope for a nice mild rest of January and early February.

This weekend we'll be looking at some custom stone boards they created for us along with doing more research on our plumbing selections. Research, research, research.....Thank goodness for the internet!

I only have a week and half left until I start the final semester of my MBA program. Our goal was to accomplish as many house decisions during my school break as possible. We've made good progress so far and expect to make more progress between now and the 25th!

Appliances

After a great, but somewhat exhausting first stab at plumbing, Sara and I spent Wednesday evening meeting with Karen with Sears Commercial in Coon Rapids.

We'd been in Sears several times prior to this and had a pretty good idea what we wanted to look at and what we needed advice on.

Karen was awesome and very very helpful. She helped us with potential alternatives to what we were already considering, and helped us narrow down our selections on items we were less certain about.

We spent several hours at Sears Wednesday and are pretty much certain what we intend to purchase.

On Friday, we drove up to Leech Lake for a weekend with my side of the family. On the way up, we placed a preliminary purchase order on a variety of kitchen appliances that we really liked. We have a few minor decisions left to make on appliances, but this looks to be one of those sets of selections where we know what we want.

Looking ahead, we're expecting a significant warm up this week.

It sounds like by mid-week that they will be starting the framing of the house.

I'm in TX Wednesday and Thursday. I'm excited to see the house Friday during the day as it sounds as though we'll see some significant progress.

Well . .Toilets At Least

The snow and cold have delayed the build a little bit, which is totally fine with us because we have a ton of decisions to make.

We had some more house guests on Sunday. Our friends Stacy, Matt and Carrie were over for the huge Vikes win, and we went over to the land with them after the game to check it out.

Sunday evening, ABC aired the episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition from a build in St. Paul done by our builder TJB Homes. We attended a TJB event in Blaine for the airing of the show. It was very cool to see the family who really had their lives changed by ABC, TJB and all of the volunteers that helped with the build. The mother runs a daycare out of their St. Paul home, and they were at risk of being shut down because their home was literally falling apart. TJB built them a gorgeous new place to call home, and run the daycare.

We met some people who will be our new neighbors down the street, Dianna and Mark Peterson, the couple who hosted a holiday party a few weeks before Christmas that we weren't able to make. It was awesome to get a chance to visit with them about their build and get some insight and advice on navigating through this process. They are great, and we're looking forward to getting to know them better throughout this process and especially once we get moved in and become a part of the neighborhood.

Dianna had done some significant volunteer work on this build with the Junior League. We, through WeberJohnson Public Affairs, had assisted TJB in getting a few local and high profile MN politicians to go to the work site during the build. WeberJohnson was featured on their "thank you" board at the showing, which was really nice.



Last night, we made our fist foray into the world of plumbing. Pipeline Supply in Hopkins is where we're going to make all of our many, many, many selections, and we can already tell that it is going to take multiple visits. The place is wall to wall tubs, sinks, toilets, faucets and every accessory you can imagine.

We are trying to accomplish the doable when we go into these appointments, so we knew right away that we were going to have to take the entire plumbing concept in chunks.

We started with toilets.

I'd rather you didn't, but imagine us literally sitting down on toilet after toilet to decide what might be comfortable. Measuring the width and depth to make sure they will fit nicely in the places we've designated.

We've learned a lot about each other throughout this process. One of the things we learned last evening is that we have remarkably similar taste in toilet style. I'm not going to say last night was a home run in our overall selection process. But we took a crack at choosing toilets, and of all of them that we looked at, our first choices (color, size, hardware and seats) were identical to us. So for anyone who was thinking of giving us toilet advice, we're done with that. Our toilets are selected.

We went on to faucets, bathroom sinks, kitchen sinks and tubs. We narrowed our selections significantly (especially as it relates to kitchen sinks), but clearly need to do some Internet research and another visit or two to Pipeline before we lock those things down.

After two and a half hours, our minds numb from all of the options, we decided to call it an evening. With toilets selected and other plumbing narrowed down, we decided that was enough for one day. We are scheduled to meet again with our new friend Matt on January 18th after we've had a chance to go back to the Models, and have had a chance to look at faucets, shower heads and sinks on the Internet and in Consumer Reports. We're planning to spend a few hours back in Hopkins that morning in hopes of making a few more solid decisions.

Tonight, we're heading back to Sears to lock down our appliance decisions. We're almost there, and are going to sit down with the consultant Karen to have her help us with our options and finalizing our choices.

Stones and Appliances

Last night we had more house guests. Tim, Amanda and their daughter Claire came over for a New Year's Day dinner. Before dinner, we all went out to the property to show them where we are building. Nothing has changed since the pictures in the last post. But it was fun to walk around in the snow and show them the foundation of the house.

After dinner, we spent some time showing them the plans and talking about the layout of the house.


Today, Sara and I had a wonderful day spending most of it doing stuff for the house. We're still debating the in-floor heat. We'll probably come to a conclusion on that before the end of the weekend. It has been nice to get a lot of different perspectives on this topic. Thanks Adam for your texts and call. I appreciate it. We'll see how the rest of the weekend goes, and see what we end up deciding.

As I wrote earlier, this Saturday was about stone and appliances.

We were at Condor Stone in Spring Lake Park for a few hours this morning. After driving around other parts of the lakes, we've come to some basic conclusions on what we want the stone to look like on the front of our house. Between the stone, brick and boulders, Condor has a great variety and it seems like we'll be able to customize a front for our home that looks awesome. We had one minor issue in that when we were talking to the sales lady, she up and left to go talk with another customer. We thought she was going to answer a question or two, but she was gone for what seemed like 10 or 15 minutes. Just up and left us. Interesting theory on customer service.

We have a good enough idea of the style and color we want, so we decided to get her email address and send pictures to her, Mary Arneson who will be helping us with decorating, and the boys from TJB. We'll leave it up to them to come up with some samples based on what we like.

While at Condor, another couple was there looking at stone for their new home. After the kind of small pleasantries one has when making similarly huge decisions, we came to learn that the couple is the same couple building just down the street from where we will be in Aspen Bay. They are closing in late January or early February, so they are a lot further along than we are. I think they are about our age, with two young children. I'm not sure why they are just now looking at stone (although part of their visit was about their fireplace). But it was very nice to meet another new neighbor, especially ones who are going to be new to the neighborhood in 2010 just like us.

We took a quick break for lunch and Bloody Mary's. Applebees has a decent Bloody Mary bar and a location between Condor and the Sears we are going to for appliances.

Because we are building, we have to talk with a Commercial Appliance consultant with Sears (and of course, she's not their on Saturday). Nonetheless, many of the other sales people were very helpful at Sears today even though we won't be able to get them a commission by purchasing from them.

We'd already looked at stoves, ovens and fridges at a past visit. We went to Sears today to revisit those items, and look at dishwashers, washer/dryer sets, and microwaves. It was a lot of fun looking at all of the appliance options. We're really close to selecting a nice Electrolux washer/dryer set. I think we found an awesome Samsung fridge (it is huge and one of the must usefully designed fridges I've seen). We found an LG Dishwasher that we are 99% sure is exactly what we want. And we are leaning towards an Electrolux stove and ovens.

Apparently Sears almost "never" has Electrolux on sale, and it is the one brand that builders don't get special rates on. But until January 10th, all Electrolux appliances are 10% off. Karen, our commercial consultant, gets back to the office on January 4th, so we hope to schedule our meeting with her early next week so that should we decide on Electrolux, we can get the 10% discount they are currently offering.

We know essentially what we want for almost all of our appliances. These decisions might end up being pretty easy. We just need to sit down with Karen and make sure (especially with the kitchen) that our options mesh well with the way we envision our home looking. We'll probably discuss with her a few of our options among a much narrowed list of choices. But we are very very close on all of these decisions.

What an awesome day for us along this journey. We were out and about for about 6 hours, and got a ton accomplished. What we didn't accomplish we narrowed down significantly.

Who says this is hard??? :)