Visible progress on the house has been a little slow the past couple of weeks. The workers are certainly making progress; it's just that the work they're doing right now is apparently so tedious (and dangerous - they ARE 30-something feet in the air) that there aren't many apparent changes from day to day. They've been working on building the roof structure. It's all "stick-built," meaning that they're not using pre-engineered trusses. It's apparently not possible to use trusses due to the design of the house, the varying angles of the roof, or some other reason that I don't care to take the time to understand. Anyway, they're hauling these massive boards up to the roof and putting each one of them into place individually. So yeah, it takes a while.
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| It cracks me up that this house makes our garage look so tiny. The garage is 1600 square feet on the main level. |
So, due to the freezing temperatures this week, the mud behind the house froze, and I was finally able to make my way down to the lake side to get a look at the back of the house. Oh. My. Goodness. This house is massive. Are we crazy? The house looks quite reasonable from the front, but it is so ridiculously tall from the back side with the walk-out basement. I keep having to remind myself that the basement won't be finished for a while and that I won't actually have to clean this entire behemoth.
They've also started building my stairs - FINALLY. I still haven't been up to the top level to check out the room sizes up there because there are no freakin' stairs! I'm really kind of scared of heights, so climbing a ladder to the upper level doesn't exactly thrill me, but I may have to resort to that at some point if these stairs don't get built in the next week or so (which Ben says they won't). I'm dying to see the upstairs. But at least we're getting started on the stairs.
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| View from the basement |
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| View from the main level |
As far as my fun, pretty allowance items go, right now the kitchen cabinets are causing me a great deal of heartburn. Our builder has a custom cabinet guy whom he highly recommends and who is very reasonably priced. We've seen his work and also heard from other people what great work he does, but when I called him when I was testing our budget numbers prior to closing our construction loan, he blew me off and said, "I can do pretty much whatever you want to do for the price I gave to your builder; I don't need to meet with you until you've broken ground." So he's kind of a jerk. In light of that, I thought, you know, I don't HAVE to have custom cabinets. A nice semi-custom will do just as well, and it should save me some money. "Should" being the operative word. So I've gotten pricing from reps at two different semi-custom kitchen shops, and both of their prices are at least $2,000 higher than the price from the custom guy and don't even include installation (which the custom guy includes in his price). Does that make any sense at all? But the custom guy is still not very responsive to my requests for a meeting to nail down details with him, so I'm forced to either pay more money for inferior cabinetry or deal with a guy who doesn't really appear to want my business anyway. So far, this is easily the most stressful part of this process.
Ben and I did finally decide on the master suite color, though. Naturally, my color won, mainly because Ben asked all of the women who were at our house for Christmas breakfast to choose the color they liked best, and they all picked mine. We did, however, go with a lighter carpet color than I had picked, also on the advice of those same women, and that appeased Ben. Other than the master suite, the rest of the house will be the same color as our current wall color. We've lived here for almost seven years and still love it, so why fix something that isn't broken? That is, of course, until Devon asks me to paint her room a different color. :-)
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