Up Close & Personal

So, Courtney and I got to travel to Wylie (get used to it) to take a closer look at what these guys have going. From what we saw, we are very happy. Besides the construction looking like it should, besides the couple of "What's that?"s by me, we finally realized how large our backyard will be. LARGE (above). We're both very happy about that. Finally...grass that's ours and not the City of Tuscaloosa's or Dallas'. The guys have a little over half of the first floor framed up, not including whatever they did after we left. About a half-dozen Mexicans showed up as we toured our 2x4s, along with some radio station we didn't understand, at least I didn't. Courtney did take a couple semesters of Spanish in high school, but I don't think it quite held. I definitely know more French than she knows Spanish, as we found out at a local Chinese place that is about a mile or so from this house. We went to the local Albertson's and China Fang restaurant to check out what we were getting in to, and we were very satisfied overall. The Albertson's was just what Courtney was looking for and the China Fang definitely delivered, no pun intended. Here are some more photos of basically the same as yesterday, but maybe a little more detailed, including the even-big-for-Texas backyard. By the way, both of our neighbors are one-story houses while ours is a two-story. Who knows how far they'll get next week!?

Orientation/Day 4

Friends and family, welcome aboard to our new blog where we will attempt keep everyone that's interested informed and clued in on what's going on with our new house. I will be able to make trips more frequently than Courtney, as well as meeting with our builder to make sure everything is going smoothly and on time. Today was actually my first meeting with Andy the builder, and after going over all of our "options" to make sure they were correct, I am 100% confident that everything will go pretty easy as long as the project is in his hands. Our salesperson, Terri, was not able to make it to the meeting like he normally would because he's conveniently off today, which is coincidently a Friday. There were a couple things that still need to be ironed out, but for the most part we are good to go. However, Andy was unaware of one minor change we made with Terri and it's not just a "Oh, no problem!" like we were originally told. We requested to not have the bench seating in the breakfast nook area cause it's flat out just a waste. Turns out that it's part of a boxed out window that juts out about a foot, and without the bench seating, it has to come back in flush with the wall. Typically, that's not that big of a deal...just a change on paper. But when these guys have already started framing, it kinda makes for a bigger deal than it actually is. The burden's not on us, so I'm not sweating it. It's just an internal communication error. The good news out of all of it for us is that we'll likely to be able to trade that bench seating for an undermount sink, no extra costs involved. That's about it for now. The photos you see here are what I grabbed today, Day 4 of the build. They're a bunch of Speedy Gonzalezes out there. I think I'll just stick to sound.