67 Days and Counting Down....

Chris and I got to go to the house together this morning.  They have the first part of the Hardi siding up on the front of the house.  We spent many hours picking out the colors for the front of the house and it was fun to see what it's going to look like.

As you can tell it was a beautiful day today.  We were excited to see that they had broken ground on the other house in our circle.  Our new neighbors will be in shortly after us this summer.  Our builder also just started another house down the street from us and the framers were out all day today framing up that house.  We're hoping that we'll get to close on our house right before Memorial Day - which really isn't that far away!

I'm not exactly sure what these are for but I'm guessing it's for something to do with the siding that will go on next week.

The garage:

The living room/kitchen:

The living room windows:

The dining room windows:

We spent another four hours at Village Floor tonight.  In the past seven days that brings the count up to about 13 hours (not that we're counting)!  We had a pretty good grasp of our selections before today and were thankful to have Mary along with us to help finalize some decisions.  Shelly from Village has been helping us thru the process and has been very patient.  Having both of them together today was very helpful.

We had many, many different samples of carpet, floor tile, wall tile, subway tile, mosiac tile, grout, cultured marble, laminate and paint out today.  Here is a picture of Shelly and Mary looking at our options.

Are we there yet?

I have to be honest here....this process is long and hard and I'm ready for it to be over.

I do love day light savings time since it means we have more opportunities to see the house in the day light.

Justin is awesome and we now have a easier and cleaner way to get to the house.  Sorry to Stacie, Dee Dee, and Kathy for making you trek thru the mud last weekend!

Next is a good picture of Chris admiring the progress of the house.  It looks like siding will start tomorrow based on the materials on site tonight.

We decided to invest money in our unfinished basement in anticipation of using it down the road.  Below are some pictures of the tubing that is being installed into the ground (aka mud) for the Wisbro system.

Tonight we spent time in the model look at different styles of base and casing.  Then spent more time at home discussing the change order for the cabinets, plumbing, doors, etc.  Each change order = more money  -->  I'm tired of change orders!

Sorry for not having more fun news to report tonight.  Being the detail person that I am, I tired of dealing with all of the details.  I guess I need to be careful for what I wished for.  We wished for a totally custom home and that is what we are building.  Hopefully it will turn out ok.

Sheetrock, Flooring, Cabinets and Fortunes

I can't believe it has been a week since we've been able to update the blog. Both of us had a chaotic week at work. And this was State Hockey week, so I spent a little time at the Xcel on Thursday and Friday. In the meantime, a lot has happened at the house, and we've spent a lot of outside time with the slew of decisions we're going to have to make in the next couple of weeks.

Sara was at the house one evening this week to check it out. On sight, it was primarily sheetrocking this week. They've completed a pretty significant chunk of the sheet rocking, which you can see from the pictures below. The yard is like walking in quick sand right now because it was raining all week. I wasn't sure we'd even be able to get in.

We had our first extensive meeting at Village Floor on Wednesday evening after a series of meetings downtown. We had a pretty successful first round of looking at tile and wood. We set up four more meetings in the next week or so so that we can try to complete all of our selections from Village before we go to DC on the 24th.

Early Friday morning, Sara and I drove up to Ramsey to TLM Cabinets to go through all of the work that they've done on the design of cabinets throughout the house. This includes everything from the lockers in the mud room, to the desk, to the island and walls in the kitchen, to all of the work in the bathrooms. After our electrical walk through (TLM was with us), we got virtual pictures of a first draft of what they envisioned the cabinets looking like. For a first stab at it, they were very well done. We literally sat down with them for three hours Friday morning and moved doors and drawers, staggered kitchen cabinets, and adjusted sizes. The guys had some awesome advice, and I think when we get the next set of drawings, we're going to be very happy with what they come up with. Our hope is to get the final drafts in the next week so that they can start building them (which will take at least a week). In the meantime, we're going to have to decide on all of our hardware so we can bring it out to Ramsey to be installed on the cabinets.

Saturday morning, Stacie came over to spend some time with us looking at tile, carpet and other flooring options. This is the next big set of decisions we have to make, and Stacie is awesome at bringing styles and colors together. I think the last time Stacie was out at the house, they had just started digging. Obviously, what she saw was dramatically different.

Before we went to Village Floor, the three of us went out to the house. I didn't think we'd get in as the first path we took would have put is in mud up to our knees. We did find a path that worked, and we saw a huge change from the last time I was able to walk through the house.

This is what the main wall of the kitchen looks like. You can see all of the outlets that are up high, some of which will be over the counter, others will be behind appliances.



Here are Sara and Stacie at the top of the stairs. Behind them are the doors to the laundry room, and our future bedroom (with the window visible).



Here I am looking at where the fireplace, television and bookshelves will be. The first drawing of the cabinets here had the shelves entirely enclosed by doors. We changed that to have some of it closed for components and storage, but much of it open for pictures and books. The actual fireplace is already installed below, and the space above in the center that you see is where a TV will go eventually.


This is the vaulted part of the ceiling in our master bedroom. We added a sofit around the vault where we will put some sort of rope lighting. That opening you see is for an electrical outlet for the lighting that will be controlled by a switch on the wall. It was supposed to go in the vault. We're in the process of getting that fixed. It will be incredibly awkward if we have to run a cord out from the vault to plug into that outlet. Justin is going to get that fixed for us.




This is the master bath. It is incredible how much they've been able to sheetrock in a week.


This is the office off of the front door. They are storing all of the mud for the sheetrock in here.



This is one of the windows in the other bedrooms upstairs. We're really going to like these double hung windows.



As you can see, the basement is still a disgusting mess. They are running heat into the basement because they are going to be roughing in the in floor heat for when we finish the basement down the road sometime.


After we left the house, we spent a few hours at Village Floor in Blaine where we will be getting our flooring and a few other items. It was incredibly productive. We basically decided on all of the tile, carpet and other flooring for the entire first floor and the steps and upstairs hallway. We also picked out some very cool tile and glass for the back splash of the island, and the hearth behind the stove. It took a little mixing and matching, and some advice from the Village staff, but we are seriously very very close. There is going to be some awesome tile and a glass mosaic used in the kitchen with some greys, blues and blacks. Everything really came together nicely, and we basically stayed at or near all of the standard selections except where we knew in advance that wasn't going to be possible.

You can see here Sara and Stacie hard at work with samples.




Dee Dee and Kathy were over last night for dinner with Sara and were able to go out to the house for the first time. I was playing hockey and then watched the Sioux game and the High School Championship game out with my team, so I wasn't at the house with them.

After church this morning, Sara and I took a trip to Sherwin Williams to look further at paint. As I wrote, we came to conclusions on the main floor and up into the hallways upstairs. We're starting now to look at trying to do something unique or fun for our master bedroom and bath. We have another meeting with Shelley at Village scheduled for Monday (and again Wednesday and Saturday), so hopefully we can pull something together over the course of this week.

We went to Home Depot in Maple Grove after that to look at more cabinet hardware. Today, and earlier in the week we purchased some knobs and handles so that we at least have some options at home with us. I think we are very close on finding what we like for hardware as well.

The Spring Parade of Homes has started, so we took in about seven houses out in Maple Grove that we hadn't been to before. Our real goal was to see some cool bedrooms. Most of the Parade homes are pretty neutral. I guess they have to keep it pretty boring to be attractive regardless of the clientele. We did learn that our gut feelings on our carpets we looked at Saturday were correct and that we can switch it up a little between the office and the stairs and the great room.

Sara met up with Angie, Alicia and Kate tonight back out in Maple Grove. Before that, Sara went to Costco and was able to pick up some cool lights for the bathrooms above the vanities.

Sara and her friends went to PF Changs for dinner, one of our favorites. I wish I could have staged this because it would have been incredible to pull this off. But I didn't, and what Sara read as she opened up her fortune cookie brought a smile to her face. It wasn't even the cookie that was placed closest to her. Which makes it even more incredible.



Sara and I are heading back to Village tomorrow late afternoon and are looking forward to making further progress with the flooring.

Plumbing, Sheetrock and New Neighbors

It was a nice little Saturday today. I went to Home Depot. No time for Bed, Bath and Beyond however (That's an allusion to a movie. If you didn't catch it, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to explain it).

We got a couple of packages of plumbing supplies the other day and I just got around to opening them this morning. You can see the interest that Belle is showing. This boxes constitute one of the shower heads for the Master Shower, several toilet seats (you will recall that we made the toilet decision early on), some hooks and towel holders. I/we still have to inventory this, and we are anticipating another shipment or two, but its kind of cool to start getting this stuff shipped to us.


I went out to the house for a while this afternoon to see what they did with the sheetrock delivery that was made yesterday. I have the code now for the lock box, so I was able to go look around.

This is a picture of the ceiling looking from the kitchen into the dining room in the back of the house. I took this picture because you can see the insulation that was blown up into the corners and other recesses of the house (as opposed to that which is rolled between the studs.


There are now stacks of sheetrock in the rooms around the house. They moved a lot of material into the house yesterday.



I'm not exactly sure what this stuff is, but there is a lot of it.


I hadn't noticed this when I was out at the house last night, but they've installed both garage doors, the garage door openers, and the wall units outside the garage entrance to the house to open both of them. I think the plan is probably to leave them white, but that will be a decision we finalize in a month or so. This was one of those areas where the upgrades were actually really unattractive to us. Many of the new, "trendy" garage doors look like weird barn doors with crazy hardware that is purely decorative. We liked having some windows in the doors, but I'm really glad we kept these simple.


The immediate next door neighbor (Eric) who I spoke with last night, and the neighbor two doors down from him around the cul-de-sac (Tom) were out playing in the snow with their sons. I spoke with them for a little while. The lot next to Tom is the last lot on the cul-de-sac and has been sold and now surveyed. You can kind of see the steaks out in the yard (one of them, presumably mistakenly, was almost right up next to Tom's driveway). This is the home that is being built for a couple moving (or moving back) from New York. Word on the street is that they'll be moving in sometime in July. So we won't be the new kids on the block for too long in our little corner of Aspen Bay.



I spent time the rest of the afternoon at Home Depot, Menards and Lowes looking at sinks and hardware. We are likely getting this new granite composite sink for the kitchen that is pretty cool. But we chose a granite for the counter tops that has a lot of brown in it. So the grey eGranite sink we were looking at won't work with this counter top. There is a particular vendor that the plumber is requiring us to get the sink through, but I looked at the retail stores anyway to see what the sinks in shades of brown look like up against our granite sample. It actually looks pretty good, and I think it is going to work just fine.

The cabinet hardware we've been looking at at Home Depot is on sale right now fur most of March. That was one of the other reasons I went to the stores today, to see if they have any sales that aren't listed in the paper. Sure enough. Assuming we can't find out that they are having a similar or better sale in a month or so, we'll probably try to estimate how many knobs and handles we need and purchase them sometime before the sale ends.

All in all a pretty good day today running around.

Insulation and Sheetrock

I had a 7:30 breakfast in St. Paul this morning with Rep. Paul Kohls, and had planned to head to the house prior to see the insulation. Sara is gone this week, and I've been slammed with work (been at work until about 9pm every night). I set the alarm, but didn't turn it on, and rolled over at about 6:45am. I made it to my breakfast, but obviously had no time to check out the house.

We have a client coming in next week from Chile, and have spent the entire week preparing. Most of what we needed to do we finished late yesterday, so after breakfast I came back to Blaine to see the house. They were supposed to get much of the insulation done yesterday, and I didn't want to miss that before they started putting up the sheetrock. I'm very happy I took the time to come back out here as they got a lot done yesterday, and the guys delivering the sheetrock were already busy at work.

This post has a lot of pictures in it because they got a lot done yesterday, and the whole look is going to change dramatically after today.

I arrived at the house to blaring Mariachi music coming from the garage and the basement. These are the only two parts of the house that weren't completely insulated, and these are the two places where the insulation crew was working. I'm pretty sure that unless we have a Cinco de Mayo party next year that this will be the most Mariachi music for a while.







You can see that they have blown in insulation where the rolled in stuff doesn't go. The pictures above are both from the stairway near the second floor of the house. You can start to see here where they have put the plastic taped up in front of the insulation. We met the owner Tom's nephew Jereomy shortly after we got back from our Honeymoon last year when we started thinking about houses, and he told us then how TJB is known for a particularly tight house. They take great steps to insulate the house with top notch stuff, and have a very efficient home. Looks good to me.


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This is one of the guys jamming to Mariachi. This is the front of the garage, and one of the last portions of the house that needed to be complete as of this morning.




This photo was taken in one part of the modified Jack and Jill bathrooms we have set up for future children. I'm pretty sure they'll be pleased with the insulation you see here. If he or she ever complains about it, I'll let you know.


Earlier on in the process, we were debating putting the Wirzbo infloor heat in the basement. We ended up deciding to "rough it in" with the anticipation of hooking it up when we finish the basement in a few years. That means having the builders put tubes in the floor once the get to the point where they pour the cement, so that they can later hook up the boiler and run heat through the tubes. Above, you see a picture of the entrance to our Master Bath. I took this photo because in it there are wires running down the wall from a soon to be hooked up switch that will turn on and off a mesh heating system under the Master Bathroom floor. This is the only place in the house we're running this mesh, but we're excited to have this in floor heat in our Master Bath.





This is our bedroom going into the bathroom. Just a good photo of the insulation, plastic and tape they are using for efficiency.





Here is the fireplace, and the future book shelves next to it. It almost looks like red marker on the walls, or a photoshopped picture with red lines. But that is actually where they've taped around the plastic wrap in front of the studs and insulation.





This is the garage again. This was about 9am, so you can see they were very close even then to finishing up the insulation.


This is much of the sheetrock for the house. When I was walking around upstairs I ran into one of the guys delivering the sheetrock. I talked to him, and he said they don't do any of the actual sheetrocking, just the delivery.


This is the machine they are using to move around the sheetrock. You can see a chunk of it being picked up by the arm on the machine. They are actually moving it up near our Master Bedroom window which they are using to get the sheetrock into the second floor. The guy I met was bringing a cart up the stairs so when they swing the sheetrock in through the window they can move it around on the second floor.


You can see here the sheetrock being swung in through our Master Bedroom window.

It was another pretty late night at work. I have some briefing books we put together this week that need to be in Toronto by Monday morning for a client who is meeting with the Governor on Tuesday. I was at the Blaine Kinkos around 7pm this evening working to get those printed and bound so FedEx can pick them up Saturday.

After I left their, I decided to swing by the house to see if they got all of the sheetrock moved.

There was no sheetrock left in the front of the house, and the house was locked up. The garage door that I had been using was locked, and the front door now has a lock box on it (I now have the code for tomorrow).

I talked to the next door neighbor (I think I've talked to him every day this week). He is such a great guy, I'm excited to get to know him and his family more when we get moved in.

Apparently some dirtball was dumpster diving for copper today, and after twice telling him to leave, the neighbor called Justin and they put the lock box on. That's all we need is to get our pipes stolen by some desperate punk right as they start to seal up the walls.

Anyway, the place is locked. I'm going to go by tomorrow before I go to FedEx. I anticipate all of the stacks of sheetrock laid out in each of the rooms. I'm curious if the sheetrockers were here today and if some of the sheetrock is actually up.

More tomorrow

First Day of Insulation

I drove over to the house before heading into the office this morning to see if anything had changed since they finished the inspection.

Some of the framers, and the guys from the insulation company were standing around when I arrived (it was almost like they worked on for the state Department of Transportation on road construction the way they were "leaning on their shovels"). They all scattered and looked busy when I pulled up.

Actually, they were all very nice guys, and they were just starting their day and getting ready to get the insulation started. The framers were there to put in the front door frame and to put up a construction door for the rest of the process.

The insulators said that they'd get most of it done today. In fact they made it sound as though they'd get to everything but the garage.

They should wrap up tomorrow, and the sheetrocking starts either tomorrow or right away Monday.

The door part of the front door will be a lot different than what you see in the picture. They use a construction door so that the real front door doesn't get damaged. But you can see the sidelights that we'll have in the house. We debated over and over about those, but I do think they look pretty good.

The other picture is just a photo of the city inspectors sign off on the framing job.

I'm going to try to swing by again tonight if I ever get out of the office.

Framing Complete and Inspected

I received an email from Justin today saying that the inspectors were out for their final inspection of the framing, and they apparently passed.

Now that a government agency has deemed the framing up to its standards, I guess I get to be confident in it. I write that in jest, I suppose the fear of government not placing its stamp of approval forces some level of minimum quality. Although I'm pretty sure TJB stays a ways above the minimum.

Rewind to this morning.

Sara read an article in the Parade of Homes magazine (there is another Parade starting shortly) where one individual wrote about taking pictures of the entirety of the interior of his new walls at the completion of the framing. His theory was that having a good visual record of the interior of the walls would be helpful should their be issues. He'd have photos of where all of the wires and pipes ran within the walls.

Perhaps a little excessive (I think those were his words, although I'd echo them), but I like going out to the house and watching the progress, so I did the same. I think I documented everything through pictures pretty thoroughly. Although "thoroughness" is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes this beholder's version of thorough may be slightly less than others. Right sweetie?

I haven't posted all of those pictures here as there were about 120 pictures.

This was the last opportunity to do this since the completion of the successful inspection means tomorrow they will start insulating, and shortly there after sheetrocking. It sounds like if I'm able to make it out there tomorrow night, I'll see a generally insulated and maybe partially sheetrocked home. We were told in no uncertain terms from Justin that they "will be moving along at a decent pace now" and that we should make sure to finalize the remainder of our selections to keep on pace. While I reminded them that we are going to slow this down as needed, it nonetheless is going to change and move dramatically over the upcoming weeks.

The pictures I did include on this post are a few things they've finished up with in the last couple days that we (or at least I) are pretty excited about. We have a couple of places along the outside of the front of the house where we put recessed lights, including a few of them on the porch. I got a couple pictures of those.





Our fireplace is in and ready to have the cabinets built around it.



Where the TV will eventually sit above the fireplace in the great room they run a tube for the cable and electrical wires back into the book shelves where the outlets and cable are. You can see that here.



We (I) had the electrician put a few extra outlets in the garage. The intention (quit laughing) is to eventually place a work bench in the front left corner if you are looking in from the front (seriously, it's not funny, I'd like a work bench). It looked as though the outlets were a little low to be just above the future bench, but Justin checked it out today, and said it is set up just right for the typical work bench.

It was nice and warm out today, so I went in the back yard since it had been a while. Our back yard backs up against a little wetland area which is up against a woods that would almost make you think you were out in the country. You can see from the pictures the view up into the dining room off the walk out, and the view up into the living room and our master bedroom.




We received draft images of our cabinetry yesterday. I may try to put a few of those images into a subsequent post, although we have some work to do on the cabinets before we have him start building. I spoke with the manager today, and we are planning on meeting up at his shop next Thursday before work to move drawers and doors around and make sure the cabinets he builds are the cabinets we want in the house. That isn't to say the first iteration wasn't good, it is actually very close to what we want, and the images they created for us to look at are very cool.