Our house....

The walls are waterproofed. This is cool to see because the silver wrap highlights the grade that we should end up with.... well, a little anyway. From the centerline of the porch to where you see Nick's car is about 35-40 feet. You can see the slope down in this area to basement level. That slope doesn't look too steep to me. This isn't the grade that has been concerning though ---- it is from the high point, shown here, out to street level (basement level). It is more like 100' (as I've written previously). Lloyd already demonstrated with his long string how the grade would work out, but since I didn't take a picture, I can't show it. But, this picture above shows the necessary slope in 35 feet. Imagine having 100 feet to make that drop, it isn't bad at all. I guess I really need to see that dirt on there to stop obsessing! I saw somebody digging a foundation the other day. I called and asked if I could have their dirt! I never thought I'd be coveting dirt! I even called the DOT because they are doing a bunch of highway improvements around here and I know in some places they are cutting dirt.... I would be kind enough to accept their dirt to "help." Unfortunately these DOT slackers have 1/2 days on Fridays, so I'll have to wait until Monday to talk to somebody! Why don't you just pay for dirt I'm sure everybody is wondering. Well, 20 tandem loads (14-15 yards) of dirt at $125 per load starts to add up. I have talked one guy into $90 per load, and that is pretty good. Lloyd is keeping his eye out for dirt deals too! This is in the budget, but who wants to skimp on dirt if I can get more dirt for less money?
We have a floor too! This is very exciting also. We made the kids take off their muddy shoes before walking on the slab, that is how excited we are about it! See that little pipe on the left. That is for our imaginary sink. Hmmm. Not sure what we are going to do about that! We did have an awesome bar area planned in the basement, but it was one of the first things to cut in "phase 1" to keep the costs under control. The cabinetry, sinks, granite, etc. were getting pretty pricey for this basement area, and I thought we'd be able to find cabinets, etc. for less, so we cut them. Now that the plumbing is there (floating in the middle of the room), I think we will need to do something about it! Instead of a big peninsula kitchen, maybe we should do a freestanding bar / island in the middle with a sink. Think we'll have to figure this out once the framing and drywall are up, or we'll just have to figure out a way to cover this pipe until we get to phase 2....

We did dream over the weekend of how we should do the acid stained concrete. In the wine room, we thought it would be pretty neat to make the floor cut like a pizza, with alternating colors of acid staining, and then put rustic beams on the ceiling, meeting in the center (in the same pattern as the floor). I need to find a cool light for this room too. Nick is definitely wanting a dungeon theme complete with a heavy oak dungeon door. I have seen several of these and just heard about a cool architectural salvage place in Gastonia --- maybe we'll have to go check it out.

I also met with the stair people this week. We are going to go with a pretty simple staircase --- but with walnut treads, like the rest of the floor, and painted risers. I think it will be great. I met with the cabinet makers this week too to get things started. We sat from 10 am until 3 pm working on the design, but I have to say I am thrilled with it! The guy I met with, Chris, drew the butler's pantry with cabinets, with a row of upper deck cabinets. They looked good, but in the glass front cabinets the mullions were vertical rectangles in the bottom and squares in the top set. I explained to him that not only did I want them all the same size, but in addition I wanted them to be vertically proportioned, so that the width was smaller than the height. After raising his eyebrows (translation, "OK crazycakes"), he got out some CAD sort of software, plugged in every dimension we were working with and got to the perfect proportion! The boxes are taller than they are wide, which I have made a big deal about in all of the window mullions as well. This makes me very happy, I just hope it all gets carried through when they make the cabinets! I don't know why little things like this are so darned exciting to me....

Final things....they have the crawl space filled in with dirt, and the pilings set up. The garage is filled in with gravel/ rocks. That looks low, so we might have 50 steps into the house, not sure.

Expectations for this coming week.... Framing to start by the end of the week.... Whooo hooo! I don't have any concept of how long framing should take, but that is when I expect I'll know if everything is going to work out as I envisioned from the paper house. Can't wait!