Progress. Barely.

Everything is going very slowly on the house right now. A modular might be faster than having a construction crew come out and build a house right on your lot, but it ain't fast. They do about 2 or 3 hours worth of work about 2 or 3 days each week. I'm sure they're busy and we're not the only people, but some communication would be awesome. We never know who is going to show up or what they're going to do. Especially fun if they need us to be here or need to communicate with another part of the process. Like when the plumber needed to talk to the hvac guy but didn't know when he would be here to do that. It's hard to get the hvac guy to come out with no notice. So anyway the garage is coming along (my husband and his brother are doing most of the garage). It still needs shingles on the roof and siding, plus the overhead door, walk-in door, and windows (which match the house windows)

view from the north side-no openings on this side at all.



view from the west-there will be one more window and on the very left side, a walk-in door.



from the south



and the inside of the garage-the basement stairs are at the very end of it and the door to the house is right next to them.





The carpet was finally laid-here it is in one room (all of the carpet is the same). I would rather have less carpet or none but someone insisted on it in the bedrooms and living room.



And the floor in my sewing/craft room. I love black/white checkerboard floors and wasn't able to get them in the kitchen or bathrooms using sheet vinyl (which I wanted to make it more waterproof) so I got it in here. I love this floor.





And the porch. We're just getting a small 6 x 6 front porch and will be putting a medium size deck on the back of the house next summer. This porch is not done-there will be a gable roof over it and some posts, and a step on one side.

Painted kitchen

The kitchen is painted. We still need to add the backsplash behind the cooktop and also the cooktop and oven (those will obviously be added right when we move in since I still need them in our old house). There's still a lot of dust, plastic, cardboard and other project paraphernalia but here is the kitchen so far. The color is Sherwin Williams Retiring Blue and for the kitchen we used a semi gloss finish. It doesn't look a lot different than the satin though.

The oven and stove area.


The view from the dining area (left doorway goes to the master bedroom and the one on the right goes to the laundry room).


Sink area (fridge obviously will go on the right and the dishwasher to the left of the sink). I am getting a different faucet because I'm spoiled that way. I want one with the built in pull down sprayer. Only one sticky-outy thing to clean around.


The island. This end has solid doors...


and this end has glass doors (taken before the walls were painted).

Painting

We've started to do some painting. There's plenty of masking in every room and that takes more time than the actual painting, I think. Anyway, pictures.

dining area (sherwin williams retiring blue)


here is my craft/sewing room. I'm super happy with this color which is the same as the dining room even though it looks different in these pictures. It will also go in the kitchen and kids' bathroom.




and the kids' rooms (we ended up painting all three)
sherwin williams teaberry:




sherwin williams potentially purple:




Behr Windsurf




and just for fun, this is Phineas and Daisy sharing a bed. We ended up buying a second one, because Daisy is too afraid to get up there when Phineas (who is the cat, by the way) is sleeping on it. And we originally bought it for the dog because she has arthritis. This time we told her to get up there so she did. Phineas was in his usual bed-hogging spot. The middle.


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Arrival and Setting...

We've seen a few of these lately:


On Wednesday they brought the two halves of the house. They wanted them here a day before setting so they would be ready first thing. Here are the halves on the flatbed trailers





Then bright and early on Thursday morning, they started getting it ready to set. I didn't see the beginning of that. I woke up at 8 and they were already hard at work. I went out with 2 of the kids and we watched them getting it ready for a good hour before one of them got bored and went inside. Jake stayed with me though. Around 9 am the crane arrived and by 9:30 or so, they were getting it started. The weather couldn't be more perfect. Here's video of the setting. The first one is 8 minutes and the second is about 10. It might be boring. The voice is my son's-I didn't talk because I have a cold and if I talk, I cough.


click here to watch at youtube (better quality)


click here to watch at youtube

After all that, here's how it looked-in the first two pictures you can see the crane they used right next to it. It was huge and they had to pull out the legs to stabilize it and had to put counterweights on it. It was quite an ordeal.







Here's the opposite end:


then they had to finish the roof



Now there is a lot of finish work to do. They don't seem to work on it every day so it'll take a few weeks.

Backfilled - and some paint colors

Here are the pictures of the foundation after the backfilling. Not all that exciting, really. But the garage is filled up now and looks more like a floor.







Here are the paint colors we've bought so far. I'm pretty sure by the time we get done painting these rooms, I'll be ready to leave the other rooms off white for now. Not to mention-paint is expensive-even at 40% off! These are all Sherwin Williams colors.

the kitchen, kids' bathroom (maybe master bath too) and my craft/sewing room


and the girls' rooms




...

The 2nd (and last) visit

We were able to walk around in the house a bit last week. I had a cold so I didn't really take as many pictures as I originally planned. It was very dusty (you can see the orbs in some of the pictures caused by the flash on the dust) and I wanted to get out of there. I took a few though:

Kid's bedroom (there are two that look the same-only opposite)


Another kid's bedroom (only one window instead of two in this one-same as the others though, other than that)


Kids' bathroom


My craft/sewing room (Looks small to me. Looks big to hubby. What does he know)


Living room-the biggest room in the house at about 21 x 15


Master bedroom closets (otherwise it is a smallish bedroom with 1 large window). We chose to use a regular closet rather an the walk-in that was in the original plan. We added the extra foot to the living room. It's still a nice sized closet.


Mudroom (just the corner with the sink). Steve will clean away a lot of dirt (and I don't want to know what else) in this nice deep sink.


And last and most certainly not least (only the most important room-we all have to eat, right?), the kitchen. I'm not 100% thrilled with the countertop color now that it's on-it's not easy to visualize an entire countertop just from a small sample-but we'll live with it. It's definitely nicer than what we have now and the best from the choices we had. Also, I want painted cabinets in the worst way but hubby is a typical guy and likes wood-tone everything so he insisted on wood. He chooses so little so I let him choose this one thing even though he almost never cooks. Also, the painted cabinets were an upgrade that would have cost quite a bit extra.


In the background of this picture, you can see the door to the laundry room. My vintage pyrex and ball jars will go on top of the cabinets, along with any other cute vintage-y stuff I find.




Cooktop will go in the middle and oven to the right-we couldn't get them both in the same cabinet-I guess this company doesn't make one that will work like that. I opted for a counter height cabinet for the wall oven so we would have more counter space.


I didn't get a picture of the other side of it, but there are 8 more drawers in the island, plus two shallow door cabinets-one on each end. The narrow pantry does not have roll out shelves so my crafty self is hoping to make a few for it. We'll be adding our old pantry, which is about 4' wide, to the other side of the refrigerator. It won't match so I do get to have at least one painted cabinet.

The house is due to arrive on Wednesday and will be set on Thursday. Then I can take more pictures. In a day or two I will share our paint colors (we'll be painting the girls' rooms, my sewing room, the kids' bathroom and the kitchen to start with).

Waterproofing and the first visit

Last week they came out and sprayed some black tar substance onto the outer walls of the foundation. Waterproofing. It stunk for a day or two but we definitely don't want water in the basement.



current view from the end (this is the garage end)



They also poured the basement floor. See that beautiful sump pit in the corner? I love that. Why? because our current basement, which is 9' deep (maybe more) has no sump pit. In addition, our house was built on one of the lowest spots on our property. PLUS there is a creek just across the field. All this means that if we get a lot of rain, the creek backs up, floods the field, and it backs up into the drain in our basement. And when that happens, since we have no sump pit, my husband has to pump it out manually. He uses an electric pump but it's not automatic at all. So if it's a pretty big rain, he has to pump it every few hours around the clock-including overnight. He doesn't even bother to sleep in bed during those times. Even when there isn't a ton of rain, he has to pump it out two or three times a day. Still a pain. And all this also means our basement is pretty much useless for anything. So yeah, that sump pit is a wonderful sight to me (and to him). And this is also the reason the new house looks like it's sitting way up high. It's because it is-the basement will only reach about 5' into the ground and the house will sit well above the ground.



We also visited the house today. There isn't much to show-the inside was all plastic covered floors and drywall. We go again on Saturday and hopefully there will be innards to show. In the meantime, the back of it (with and without kids). The spots are from the flash hitting the dust that was flying all over the factory.

There are two entry doors on the back-one goes directly into the mudroom and one goes into the dining room. That small window will be above my sink. I haven't lived in a house with a window above the sink in about twenty years. I can't wait.



See that double window? That room is going to be my new craft/sewing room. Lots of light-I love that.