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Forms and Footings



 Things are moving right along. This week they poured the footings. They got the forms up and poured footings within a day or two. One day later they took the forms off the footings and started setting up the forms for the foundation walls. 





Here the common foundation is not slab like I'm used to from homes I worked on back home when I was in college or high school. We will have a crawl space but it will be about 4 feet tall so its more of a crouch space than a crawl space. This picture below is my daughter who is 4' 6" tall walking around with me on a site visit after soccer practice.


In other news, the price of lumber keeps climbing and we have a new estimate on cost, which stinks, because it's a bit higher than the first estimate. Because we had the delay with the financing issues in November/December and we pushed the start date out to late February/early March the costs went up about 35%. This totally sucks but we really have no choice at this point. Below is a screen shot of the lumbar prices I've been following on nasdaq.com - I have no idea how it actually translates to lumber prices at the store but, clearly, things have gone up on the website and compared to the prices when we got our first estimate in October 2020 ($482.4) vs now ($867.10) apparently the price at the store has gone up too. 


Luckily, we made some other changes on the doors that will save us a hefty chunk so that the increase in lumber cost is negated somewhat by the savings in some of the other areas. We had the plans drawn up showing several exterior doors but really we just wanted them to be windows and the windows are expected to cost significantly less than the doors.

We are meeting with our builder this coming week to talk windows and doors and get those all picked out and ordered so when they start framing they have the exact specifications when it comes to those items. 

Things keep moving along and I'm pleased with the pace thus far. I hope they can keep it up. They told us they expected 10 months from day 1 until the day we move in but I'm hoping it will be faster than that. 


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