One step closer to play dates

The house marches on and we are one step closer to Ian having a street full of friends! Can you believe how quickly the block is shaping up?! Remember in my last post the 2 houses to the left were nothing but a hole in the ground.

Here's the latest progress: the windows are in, most of the walls are framed, and they are beginning to install insulation.  Oh, and I went inside again to scope out that progress...

Up close and personal

The living room....looking towards the fireplace

Standing in the dining area looking towards what will be the kitchen/wall of cab's

Looking towards open staircase and living/dining

And if you want a little sneak peak at what else we have planned for the interiors you can see that here!

Raise the roof

I hope to have 5 minutes to post a quick recap of our holidays, but until then... I thought I'd share some progress on the house. Last time we drove by we pretty much just had a hole in the ground and a poured foundation. So we were shocked when we drove by on New Year's Day how much progress had been made...

WOW! The whole first floor is framed up!

Of course I went running inside to check it out.  I love seeing it all come together. 

looking towards the corner of the living room

Standing towards the back of the house looking to the front

Panoramic of the street view (it's a little "fish-eye"). Unreal how quickly it's coming together.

Then we went back yesterday on the 5th, and we are almost under roof! In just a week span. These guys are rocking and rolling. In fact they were all on-site working on Saturday so I resisted the urge to go inside and check it out.

Raise the roof baby! 

A street view of the progress. (Note: the house to the right of ours wasn't framed earlier in the week and now the 2nd story is almost up). 

Check out my hole

Lookie, lookie we have a hole!! Pervs get your minds out of the gutter... I'm talking about the hole that they just dug for the foundation of our new house! That's right we broke ground!! David Weekly (the builder) promised us that it would be in the month of November, and they just squeaked in on the 30th, but kept up their word nonetheless. John asked if he could drive the backhoe for the groundbreaking; and unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) was not allowed.  So, Our David Weekly sales coordinator, Liz, of course took this as an opportunity to tease John a bit and instead bought him a bright-yellow toy backhoe...Ian will enjoy it!

So without further ado, take a peek at our fresh hole...

Ain't she a beaut!

A view down the street 

And soon enough, we will have this....

Well, not exactly this (this is the builder rendering of our model),
but our paint, brick, etc aren't the same colors. 

In the meantime we've picked out all of our finishes, which was quite a feat. It only took us 3 meetings at their design center instead of the standard 1 (maybe 2). Thankfully our coordinator, Shelly, at the Design Center turned out to be a friend of a friend so she was super patient, and even got John a beer mid-way thru our first meeting when he about choked over the cabinet numbers.  It's funny, I could pick out finishes all day for my clients without thinking twice, but for myself it is so stressful. I find myself analyzing every decision. When push came to shove there were very few things that we went with the "builder" options, and somehow we did it within our max budget that John determined.  Come to think of it I think the only places we went with the builder finishes are Ian's bathroom (he doesn't care, right?), and the laundry room. I'm thrilled though because that means that our place will be unique. When we met with our superintendent, Scott, for our final builder pre-construction meeting and he was going through the list of things for our place he must have said "huh, never done that before" at least 10 times. 

The one thing that I learned in this process is that I am not the only one in this family who wants to be a designer. John, was VERY into picking everything and absolutely had an opinion on just about everything. He kept pushing me to pick colors.... I'm a typical designer...we live in shades of grey,  but I won, and we won't have blue counters much to John's dismay.  We are going for classically modern and sophisticated. 

John getting busy picking tile

I'll upload pictures of the finishes and selections we made in another post very soon. It's exciting to see it all come together!