PSST – If you’d like to see photos of the house progress in chronological order, check out the Flickr set I created!
I thought I would do weekly updates, but I think I’m just going to update as the mood strikes me. Because sometimes it will be obvious that something is changed, but other times not so much. So, here’s a January update and the progress is pretty striking since we’re going from zero to framed out house in a matter of weeks.
Last time we left off, things were looking like this –
The first picture shows the cut outs for the walkout door and large window the basement will have. In the second picture, that long rectangular area filled with dirt toward the front of the house is the future porch. And in the last picture, the area with dirt is the future 2-car garage (there is an area in the back for storage) and the gravel is our future driveway.
It was really hard for me to imagine how it would all come together at this point. This work was all done in early January and I remember thinking it felt like the house was going to be small! But that was only because the walls weren’t up yet. Before the walls could go up, though, we needed a floor –
This is the start of laying the floor – pretty crazy! In the second picture, there’s a gap in the joists that’s visible. That is a cut out for the stairs – one set going down, and another going up.
The next time I made it back to the house, things looked drastically different –
Like whoa.
Alex is standing there for some perspective – I took this photo from the curb. In a matter of a week (we shot the joist pics on January 12th and the pictures above January 19th), they had gotten an unbelievable amount of work done – even despite the crazy weather.
No detailed framing was completed upstairs at this point – just a basic outline of the exterior walls and a few interior walls. But all the framing was completed on the main level.
It’s a little difficult to get your bearings when it’s just pieces of wood up everywhere, so I’m only going to share this one picture for now. When we do our pre-drywall review I’ll get more shots of each room down to the studs. What you’re looking at in the pic above is the view from the front door. Straight ahead is the living room and kitchen combo – the kitchen is off to the left. Immediately to the left is the dining room, and the study is to the right. You can see the opening to go downstairs just beyond the study entrance, and the opening in the ceiling for the stairs that lead up.
And speaking of up…
Since there was no roof – yet! – obviously lots of snow gathered on the second floor.
The two pictures above were taken January 22nd and they had completed all of the interior framing for the second level at that point. But, because there was so much snow and I couldn’t see what I would be walking on, I just stayed at the top of the stairs and took the picture above, which is of the game room – it’s directly above the living room.
Our floorplan had the option to build out the basement, living room and game room by 4′ and we took advantage of that add-on. At this point, it didn’t really feel like it added much to the room but when the roof went on, you could really see a difference. Also, you might have noticed in the picture above that there are proper windows instead of blank cutouts. Some time between 1/19 and 1/22 most of the windows were installed –
Four days later we checked the site again and we were shocked to see the roof joists were up. These guys don’t mess around – snow or not! If you look closely, you can see one of them on the roof, haha!
Both of those pictures were shot on the same day! The first was in the morning; we stopped on our way to church and didn’t expect anyone to be working but there they were. And then we came back in the evening and they had not only completed the joists but added the subroof, too!
Here’s another view of the game room, with the roof. It’s a little more difficult to see what’s going on since now there is more wood sitting around but it’s still pretty amazing. You can also make out – since they removed a lot of the snow – the step up that leads up to the game room.
And that brings us to this week. I did not expect the crew to be working today and I planned on grabbing some more progress shots but … they were on site in this 20 degree weather. They had the tar paper down on the roof and were shuttling shingles up; some sections of the roof already had shingles!
Once the roof is completed and a makeshift door is put up in the space where our future front door will go, the builder will schedule the pre-drywall review with us. It really looks like everything is still on schedule for a late March-early April closing, which is so exciting! And crazy at the same time.
Don’t forget if you want to check out all the progress shots, in chronological order, you can visit my House Progress Flickr set. You can also click the Building with Drees category in the sidebar on the right to see all my posts relating to building our house. Enjoy!
[…] Whew, it’s been awhile since I updated on the progress of our house! You’re going to be shocked at what’s been going on since I last updated. […]