Building A Farmhouse - Our Custom Home Construction

  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. 

  They poured the concrete into the forms early last week and took them off within a day. They then came back and cleaned up the job site and let the concrete cure for the rest of the week. I love the view here facing that sunset! While we were waiting for the concrete to cure we met with our builder and the distributor that they use for their windows and exterior doors. They had bid out the windows based on the plans and we were meeting to go over everything and clarify questions. Before the meeting I reviewed the plans and compared it to the bid and found that they had missed one of windows in a guest bathroom and the bid had mentioned that two windows shown on the elevation plans were not on the actual floor plans and so we had to be pretty thorough. They had the windows drawn in as casement windows but in my mind I had always imagined single hung windows. I didn't know what these were called but I visited the  Anderson Windows website  and as I looked around I found o...

 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...

The soil on our lot was not great for a foundation so we had to dig a deep hole and then back fill it with soil that can compact well enough to support the house. We had to put 3 feet of backfill in! We watched them bring load after load of dirt and then smooth it out and compact it and then do it all over again until the full 3 feet were filled in. Last night I took my daughter up there after soccer practice and we walked around on the final grade. Footings and forms should be going up next week!

 We have made some progress! After two years of planning and getting ready today was the day! We signed bank documents a few days ago and our builder told us late this week or early next week they would start digging.  Every day this week I drove by the property to see what was going on and I was always disappointed to see nothing. No tractor, no hole in the dirt. Nothing.  Yesterday morning, Friday, I drove by and there was a tractor but nobody in it and I figured they were just getting ready for Monday. I drove by last night just to check and nothing had changed.  Today, I was out running errands and I was in the area and thought, "What the heck, why not just drive by and see what's going on? Maybe they've done something." though I doubted they would come on a Saturday.  It was about 2 PM and I drove by and saw this: I came home and shared the news with the family. We ran over later in the day and it was WINDY and cold. We made sure the kids knew not to climb ...

  Well, spring is coming, we have figured out our financing situation and we are moving forward. We plan on starting excavation in the next 2-3 weeks!  We met with our builder to choose some of the exterior colors and such to submit to our HOA for approval before we start the building process. We colored our plans to try and get a feel for what it may look like.  The house will have areas of stucco and board and batten siding with brick accents and stained wood posts on the porch.  Color of the stucco is Sherwin Williams - Alabaster White We had fun trying to pick a color for our brick. General Shale has a ton of options but you have to double check to make sure the brick you like is manufactured at a plant close to where you live or the shipping costs can be REALLY high. I think they also have stone if that's the look you're going for. We are going with the Cambridge 6060 because we like that its red but that it has variation.  We are planning on staining the...

 The builder heard back from the engineer a few weeks ago. We can get rid of the column in our garage. The beam shouldn't add much of a cost to the build so we've decided to go with the beam!