Thursday, May 22, 2008

Brickwork, check. Drywall, almost check.

And so now the biggest update, in my eyes, so far. The masons have finished the brick and stone work on the outside of the house. All that's left for them is the fireplace, which obviously comes sometime down the line. It's all detailed and everything's in place for the next step to take place...the drywall. And they're actually almost done. It's all hung and they've got another day or two to finish it out. With this in place, I was finally able to see exactly how everything is going to come together with the few minor changes we made, like taking out the standard bench seating and the half-wall upstairs instead of a railing, as well as the niche above the fireplace that is larger than normal (not our request, but we like it). The garage doors are in and the whole house is definitely looking like what we ordered. Never seeing the brick and stone with our mortar choice on any other house made us second guess ourselves a few times after driving by some other houses and saying, "Hey, is that our brick and stone with our mortar? That's ugly!" Thankfully, I don't believe they were. Others were laid out all funky anyway. Seeing our choices come to life on the outside is very satisfying. They are good choices, at least to us, and blend in well with our neighbors, but still allow us to not be just another cookie cutter. You can view the full, updated album here, now with captions to explain things! Also, some good news: it appears as though the guys are ahead of schedule and we may be in earlier than we thought, which is good. We'll keep ya updated.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Address

It is amazing how much the house changes in just a few days. I went by the house after church on Sunday and realized that we have a mailbox and an address number on our house. Everything seems to be going up just fine. Also when I was at the house on Sunday there were workers putting up dry wall.



Friday, May 16, 2008

Yet even more bricks...

I got a chance to stop by the house today and saw the guys out there closing in on the finish line for the brick work. I'd say it's about 64% complete, including the sanding and other finishing work. You can see one of the guys on the scaffolding working on that right now while a few others are on the opposite side of the house laying brick. Now that the rain has stopped, they're able to get back to work and hopefully finish up here soon. Andy said he gives them 5 days to complete the job, from start to to finish. Seems a little stringent to me, but maybe that's why I'm not a contractor. This is also the same amount of time he gives the drywall guys to do the job, which should begin on Monday. Time will tell. In the meantime, enjoy the updated brick photos.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Bricks, stone, and insulation ... oh my!

Here are some photos of the house as of 5/14. Tyler talked to the builder and the brick will be completed once it stops raining. Dry wall goes up on Friday.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

House updates

Well sorry for such a long delay with house updates. Tyler and I have been so busy this past week with my trip to Alabama and his shoot in Plano. During Tyler's last visit to the house, they were putting on the bricks. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of rain in the Dallas area so we are not sure how far along the brick work has gone. Tyler is stopping by the house today and we will post pictures later this evening.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Super High-Tech Advanced Wonder House (almost)

I went out yesterday and grabbed a bunch of photos. So many photos that I'm not going to post them in this blog, but here you can find them all. In this album, you will find pretty much every picture we've taken having anything to do with the house. A lot of what I took yesterday was for documentary and informational purposes. Now that all the plumbing, electric, and low voltage communication lines are run, it will make it super easy [crossing fingers] for me to go in and wire everything for surround sound and TiVo. That'll be sometime early next week once I get the configuration figured out, but before my pre-drywall meeting with Andy on Wednesday. I left this past visit feeling very satisfied in the quality of the house, which is the subject of today's blog. One of the things that's standard in our house is this little product called Tubes-In-The-Wall. It's basically a system that allows a pest control service to come once every 6 months and inject a pest-deterrent chemical from the outside of the house into these small tubes you see here that are built into the walls. It's a pretty crafty idea and it's kinda nice to know that people think of these things beforehand. Why wouldn't any consumer want it (it comes free for the first 6 months)? You can see it here to the right. It's the tiny blue and green tubes that are within two feet of the slab. I'm guessing that the two different tube colors correspond to different chemicals. We also get the next "in-thing" in the plumbing industry. It's these color coded flexible plastic pipes for running water lines that are used in place of copper. It kinda makes more sense, which would be a good reason for them to switch. For one, the cost of metal, especially copper, is the only thing more ridiculous than gas. And two, these are flexible, so you/they don't have to solder elbows together or make level holes to run pipes through. Just unravel from the reel of pipe and shove it through. It makes them more efficient which would, theoretically, save us money. Plus they come in sweet colors like blue and red. We first saw them on Holmes on Homes and thought they were the coolest thing, next only to Tubes-In-The-Wall of course. So these are just a few more reasons to feel good about the new home build decision over an existing home. No home built over a few years ago would've had these features. Granted, it's not saving me any labor or anything like that right now, but these PVC pipes are way less maintenance...so I'm happy. You can see all the inner workings of this super high-tech advanced wonder house in our album.