A friend came to call, and I have new photos for you.
The siding is going up. No more yellow OSB look for our house. They have most of the gray vinyl siding up (it's atlantic gray) and about half of the trim (it's white). No shutters yet though. They will be black (as will the front door when they paint it). With the dark brick around the foundation, the whole color scheme looks really good.
Our first official walk through of My7 new home. Yesterday I convinced a friend from church to come out to my house and take a look, and am very glad I did! He is a general contractor for the BIG houses up on the lake, so I figured he could tell me
a thing or two to have fixed. On the good side, he said that, if anything, they over-engineer their houses. It's built to stay! The down side list was a little longer. Nothing major, but several things which over time would have become nuisances. The two best suggestions he gave us were that we needed to get them to put braces behind the pipes feeding the bathroom faucets and have the pipes clamped to it. Ever been to a house where, when you turn off the water, the pipes bang? Lack of bracing... The other suggestion was to get R-11/Sound insulation from Lowes and insulate the walls of the bathrooms. Nothing is more embarrassing than being able to hear someone in the bathroom... All in all our list had about 15 things that needed to be attended to. The walk through went well, and they assured us that all would be taken care of, and that we could do things like running speaker wire (Ian says surround sound is cool) and insulating the bathroom before the sheetrock goes up. We'll see.
Perhaps the single greatest step to transforming a framed house into something which you can envision living in, is the hanging of the sheetrock, and apparently it only takes 1 day to hang a pretty good sized house! Several years ago I had the pleasure of sheet rocking a house in Alabama during tornado relief work. It was a small house, and a crew of 8 of us took a week to hang the sheetrock and do the taping/muding. These guys just hung our house in one day, and my guess is that the taping/muding won't take but a couple of more days. Truly amazing. Fortunately we had the chance to run the speaker wire a few days before the sheetrock went up. As for the insulation of the bathroom... that's another story that you'll have to ask us in person, but it's a good one!
As a frame of reference, this picture is taken from in the kitchen looking into the family room. The ceiling of the kitchen is there in the foreground. Kristi is standing in between the two "extra" windows we got, they really make the room much brighter.
It's amazing what the joint compound does for making a house look really nicely finished. I stopped by the house this evening after a nicely grilled out dinner, and found that the second coat of joint compound has been put up. Now all the joints throughout the house are smoothed out, and all the screw/nail heads have been covered. From the looks of the stack of buckets in our living room we've gone through 75 gallons of joint compound and counting.
