Month: January 2021

Week 3 Progress

What a week! It’s been exciting to see all that Lyndl and team got accomplished this last week. We have roof trusses and deck supports! I love seeing our roof line from the road. And the deck! Oh my…I am dreaming of drinking coffee in the morning and sunsets in the evenings.

Monday a few of the roof trusses went up. A fork-lift issue caused a bit of a delay, but by Tuesday afternoon almost all of them were up!

  • Trusses starting to go up
  • Trusses up on Tuesday!
  • Sunset Tuesday

Wednesday and Thursday they worked on adding the face-boards on the over-hang and deck roof trusses up. We were fortunate that the weather was fairly nice this week so we got to watch the sunset a couple of evenings.

  • Looking to the West
  • View from my kitchen window
  • Face-board on back side of the house
  • Deck over the walk-out basement
  • Front deck over-hang
  • View from my kitchen window with deck over-hang

I forgot to take any pictures Friday but the rest of the face-boards for the deck roof were up and it looks so neat and tidy. The weather is supposed to be lousy the first part of this week again. I obviously know nothing about construction so have no idea when they’ll be working on. It’s like Christmas morning going out every afternoon.

Week 2 update

This last week was crazy busy and I didn’t post day by day updates, so you’ll get it all in one here.

Last week the majority of the basement was framed and they’d started on the upstairs. This week the rest of the main floor and garage were both framed. It was neat to see it come together and walk into each of the rooms. It’s one thing to see it drawn on paper, but a whole other ballgame when you can see the walls and walk into doorways. I loved being able to ‘look out’ my windows and envision the layout of each of the rooms.

  • Entrance from garage
  • My kitchen windows. There will be 4 windows here.
  • West side of house with walkout basement
  • Main house is framed early in the week

They also poured the concrete for the deck piers and the walk out basement patio. We are looking forward to many evenings and sunsets from the deck and patio.

  • Patio is formed and ready to pour
  • Fresh concrete!

We were delighted to see the roof trusses delivered on Wednesday. Every step makes it feel more real and we get more excited to live there.

  • Trusses

Thursday and Friday were crazy windy so we knew the roof trusses weren’t going up. The appraiser went out to do a construction appraisal on Friday. This is the last step we’ve been waiting on to get all of our paperwork complete and in line. The appraisers have been busy due to the real-estate market in our area, so we were thankful she was planning to get it all wrapped up Friday afternoon and sent to our bank.

  • House and garage framing mostly complete this week

We can hardly wait to see what week 3 brings…

Week 1 progress

Things changed so much in a week! We started this week with a giant concrete hole in the ground and ended the week with most of the framing in the basement, sub-floor down upstairs and the framing started on the main floor. It was like Christmas every evening we got to go out and see what Lyndl and his team had done.

It was fun Friday to go out and see my laundry room, pantry, Lily’s bedroom and main floor bathroom framed. I can’t wait to see where we are at the end of week 2!

We did make a couple of changes ‘on the fly’ this week after we saw what it would look like laid out and with some of the walls up. For example, in the basement we switched the walls the closets will be on in the bedrooms. Upstairs we bumped a wall over and moved Lily’s closet to make a little more room for the half-bath in the laundry.

It was bitterly cold towards the end of this week and I can’t count how many times I prayed and thanked God for our builders and also prayed they’d stay well and warm during this cold week. I don’t know how they did it, but I’m grateful they did.

We meet this week with the designer at our lumber yard to finalize a plan for the kitchen design. I had designed it somewhere else, but we’d like to support local businesses if possible. It looks beautiful and I can’t wait to see it in real life!

What an exciting week it was for us!

  • End of day 1 — Basement walls marked
  • End of day 1 — Basement walls marked
  • Day 2 — Basement framing starts
  • Day 3 — Majority of basement framing done
  • Day 4 — Sub-flooring and walls marked
  • Day 5 — main floor framing started
  • Day 5 — main floor framing started
  • Basement with sub-flooring above
  • Basement bedrooms
  • View out of the basement spare room. I love this view so much…maybe it will be my second office. 🙂

Floors…

It was cold, rainy and gray today…a typical winter day in Kansas. I wasn’t sure how much our builder would get done today, I know I WOULDN’T want to be working outside in this weather.

Just as I was about to walk away from my desk for the day I got an email from our builder asking us to go take a look and make sure everything looked good because they were going to start framing the main floor tomorrow. What!?!

As soon as Kerry got home from work we headed out to our site. As we walked around to look at the markings for the main floor and imagining how it will all look finished it was so surreal. We walked from room to room and looked out the ‘some-day’ windows, placed furniture and walked the ‘would-be’ halls.

Thankfully our builder is super flexible because we decided on the fly we wanted to make one “tiny” change to a wall placement. I’m not sure anything could be any more low-stress than building a house with Lyndl!

Here are some pictures from today:

Our hallway coming in from the garage is just to the left side of this picture.
Standing in my planned office.

We had the privilege to watch our friend’s boys today for a bit. We just love having them over to play and they fall in with the rest of the crowd! Today the kids played Legos, built with blocks and picked locks. 🙂

Here we go!

After our basement was poured, it was a long month of December while we waited for the concrete to cure. It was fun to go out and sit on the west side of the basement to watch the sunset a few of the nice evenings. We also found may have used the big giant dirt piles as a back-stop for target practice once or twice.

This week the progress has really felt like things were moving along! We’ve gone from the basement, to seal plates and marking off doorways and walls, to seeing the basement take shape and begin to be framed.

Monday evening

We didn’t make it out on Tuesday, but I was thankful my mother in law sent a picture of the first frames going up in the basement.

Tuesday

Unfortunately I had to take one of the boys to ortho so wasn’t able to go out in the afternoon on Wednesday, but Kerry drove out to sneak a peek after work. Looking at the pictures he sent brought tears to my eyes. It’s getting so real and so exciting. The floor joists are in and most of the basement is framed!

Wednesday

We also got a little more rock on the driveway today. The weather has been wet enough and since we’re building a house in the middle of a field, it gets a little muddy. I can hardly wait to see what happens tomorrow!