They Broke Ground and Then Some

At the end of November, Shad and I met with our builder, at the empty lot, to discuss where on the lot we wanted the house to be built.  The lot has a high side and we were trying to decide how to deal with that.  After a good discussion and lot’s of words that I really don’t understand, we came to an agreement that seemed to work for everyone.  He was going to turn in the plans that day to the county.  He thought it would take about 4 weeks to get the building permits.  Shad, being in the contracting/construction world, told me that he highly doubted that the permits would come through before Christmas and even if they did, he figured they wouldn’t start working on our house until after the new year.

 

We got an email at the beginning of the week saying that the builder wanted to meet with us at his office to finalize a few things.  So, this morning, we did that.  While the kids played on the floor and made too much noise (thankfully, these meetings are very informal) we went over some details.  We decided how we wanted the stair case railing, the front porch, the rock detail to the side of the garage, the kitchen cabinets, the garage door, shutters on the front of the house, and interior wall colors.  It was exciting to see some things coming together.  I also decided that I want a gas range/oven in the kitchen.  I have always worked with electric except in our travel trailer.  I have to say, I really enjoy cooking on our gas stove in the trailer when we are camping.  It is so much easier to control the heat.  My only stipulation is that the oven must be self cleaning, which seems to be quite doable.

 

As we were talking, our realtor asked if we had been by the lot recently.  We hadn’t been by since our last meeting almost a month ago.  The builder informed us that they had taken out about 10 truck loads of dirt and that they were forming up the foundation as we spoke!  Holy cow!  This was exciting news.  After our meeting was over and the kids got a piece of candy from the builder’s stash, we drove over to the lot.  This is what we found:

 

 

You can see in this one that the back and the west side of the lot are pretty high.  If you look closely in the back right hand corner, you can see the pile of boulders that will be our retaining wall in the back corner (below the stop sign).  The house will be used as a retaining wall for the west side (the far side by the fence).  It still sounds a little weird to me, but my engineer husband and the builder both assure me that it will be very nice.  It was good to be out there today and get a little better idea of how that is going to look.

 

 

They were saying that we may have a concrete foundation by Christmas.  The builder said that they will even be working on Christmas Eve!  Anyway, I am really starting to get excited about our new house.  It has been an empty lot and a picture on a piece of paper for so long.  Our next task will be to pick our appliances, counter tops, flooring and exterior paint colors.  By the way, the house next to ours isn’t as close as it seems in the picture.  We have enough room for an RV pad that is 13 feet wide!  I will probably drive those poor workers crazy because I plan to go by there frequently to get lot’s of pictures.  I am so excited!!