Building A Farmhouse - Our Custom Home Construction

This was a text exchange with our builder from 2 weeks ago...COVID is essentially over but we're still dealing with the effects... A week after the text above this was done. They really only put the joists above the kitchen, dinning room and the formal living room area and finished the plywood walls.  Above is a picture from the entrance hall looking through the main living area (where we will have vaulted ceilings) and into the dinning room/kitchen area.  Kitchen looking into the dinning room.  Stairs will go here. Front of the garage. You can see the stairwell poking up behind the garage. Full frontal... Looking from the dinning area down the hall to the master. Wood burning fireplace will go between those windows.  Looking at the main living area from the kitchen. Looking from the house out into the garage. Same as above just panned right. Exterior garage. In all likelihood nothing will really change until the week of June 14th-18th and from there I bet it'll be a...

  Well, we have made some progress! On Monday and Tuesday they had finished the floor and laid the tops and bottoms of all the rooms out. The floor boards were glued and nailed down and they are tongue in groove type of boards, which I thought was cool.  The next day they had half the bottom floor framed. They still haven't done the garage walls for some reason.  The next day, Thursday, they had the entire first floor done except where the staircase is. This view is the south half of the east facing side of the house (looking at the front - the ramp off the the very far right of the picture is the front entrance.) This is north side of the house. If you look close you can see the ramp into where the front porch will be.  This is the northwest corner of the house. The two little boxes are the concrete posts where the back patio will be. Here is the back of the house.  This is a panoramic picture of the front of the house so it looks a bit "fish-bowly" if that's a...

  Not a ton to report this week. They are working on backfilling. They have to backfill the garage with compactable soil and will then pour the slab in the garage. They also have to fill the areas where we will have our front porch and back patio with the compactable soil but the rest of the stuff can be backfilled with regular soil. Here are some pictures of the progress.  You can't really tell from this picture above, but there is quite a slope down from the house into the back yard and I'm going to have to figure out how to landscape that... The weather was spring-y and crappy this last week so I thought the blue sky was a nice one to end on. The weather is supposed to change from 50's and rainy to the 70's and sunny come April so we are looking forward to that! This last picture is the most recent one from earlier today. 

 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 sc...