The Waiting Game

I suppose this is the worst part about building.  We're in a holding pattern.  The weather has been absolutely beautiful this whole week, and yet, nothing has happened in terms of our new house.  We are waiting for the subcontractor to come pour the footings. Our contractor said the guy is sometimes difficult to pin down and when they finally did get in touch with him, he said he was a little behind...so that means now WE are behind.  Generally speaking, this would be okay, but the weather has been so perfect lately, and we know that won't last. It's sad to waste these beautiful days without making progress.  We also fear the four or five days missed this week will end up costing us another week or two later on.

Minor progress

At this point, I almost expect daily progress, but alas, that's not the case. In fact, nothing is happening right now; we are waiting for the guy to come dig and pour the footers.  In the meantime, Tim was out all day working because we had another guy come out and do some wiring on our barn.  While he was there, the porta-potty showed up!  Not sure that's exciting per se (remember...we have real indoor plumbing - for the most part), but the workers won't be using that, so it's the porta-pot for them!

The job Tim was working on was leveling a space for the central boiler.  We dropped three trees yesterday afternoon to make room (and boy are my allergies kicking today...ugh).  Today, Tim cleaned up, ground the stumps, and made an attempt to level out the ground.

If you look in the background, you'll see our lovely fence.  Tim worked on that too.  We are pretty excited about that because aside from the actual posts, we made that fence!  The railings are milled from trees we dropped and milled with our own sawmill.  

We've had to cut down well over 50 trees (and, truth be known, it may be closer to 100) and we didn't want the wood to go to waste, so we purchased a sawmill and a stump grinder. Both are really cool!  Anyway, here is the mill...

...and here are some boards!

And here is the fence. It is not finished. We are putting boards on both sides and blocking the middle. We also have to treat the boards, a job we intend to tackle soon.

Well, that's the progress for now...Hope to have more soon!

The House

HOLY COW...TWO posts in ONE day.

Don't get used to it! ;)

I realized I never posted a picture of the house. Granted, this is an artist's rendition...we don't have mountains behind our house, nor do we have snow. In fact, I'll be surprised if we ever have as much snow as in this drawing (or that we got this year)!

We are still working on the colors...we will have a metal roof and we are thinking brownish/tan house with a greenish roof...or maybe gray house with a green roof...or something along those lines. Hard to say. I know it's a farm house but we don't want it to be white.  Besides, there is a red barn not far from the house.

We won't have a chimney either. We went back and forth on this one. We will have a gas fireplace, so there is no need for a chimney...but then we thought it would look so much better with one. We decided to have the builder frame one and put stone on it. Then, the more we looked at it, the more we realized that the way the house will be oriented, no one will see the chimney anyway, (unless they walk around the house to look for it) so why bother with the added expense?!

A 'HOLE' lot going on

Get it? HOLE lot?  Cause there's a hole...in the ground...on the lot...never mind!

We have been so busy with the land and I have thought of a zillion posts to write, and yet, I've not written a single one.  That's not very good!  I want to try to be better about this.

We began the paperwork to build this house back in November. After five long months, we finally closed and were ready to begin. Luckily for us, the weather was not particularly cooperative during that five months and our builder was ready for us when we were ready to begin!

We met with the builder at the site to stake out the house. 

Luckily, the builder sees things my way, so we were able to angle the house a little more in the direction I had wanted to begin with! :)

The following day, we broke ground!  So exciting! Both Tim and I had to work that day, but our wonderful builder took a moment to snap a few photos and texted them to me!

I managed to run out to the property Friday after work (Tim had been out there most of the day) and got to see our basement...sort of! I hadn't anticipated it to be so much of a walk-out. I had thought we'd just have a door (dug out with steps) but our land is so hilly that we ended up with a regular walk-out. 

Today we spent a good amount of time researching our primary heating option. We have decided to go with a Central Boiler heating system.  

We will still have a regular furnace, but we will use this as our primary heat source. We will be able to have radiant heat in the floors of the basement and it will run through our furnace on the main floor. Not sure we're going to bother adding another line to the upstairs, as we prefer it cooler upstairs anyway. This system will also heat the water for our home, which is neat.  We have so much firewood already, and with all the trees we have on our property, keeping enough firewood will not be an issue! We always 'lose' some to the storms and/or ice in the winter, and there is also general maintenance of the wooded areas on the place.  Essentially, the system works somewhat like a geothermal unit, but for a fraction of the cost (and does not do any cooling).

There is, of course, a whole lot more to write, but I'm pretty tired and have quite a number of things to finish!