Wow - Look what can get done in a day if you get to it.

With a full days work on the house it is progressing very well.  Last evening the framers had 9 of the 21 exterior wall units in place.  Today all 21 are in place and all the interior walls have been framed.  With all the major rough in put in place, the HVAC guy (thanks for family with skills, David is awesome) and I spend the evening planning out the duct work.  The general contractor is thinking that the plumbing, electrical and HVAC work will happen starting next Tuesday.  David will have just 3 days to complete all the HVAC. Then a week from tomorrow we are suppose to have an inspection. 

If all goes well we can install the CAT-5 and coaxial cabling a week from Saturday and the insulation and sheet rocking will start the following Tuesday.

It is totally awesome how homes are built these days. The wall and trusses are mostly manufactured off site and then installed as units that are engineered to the specs on the floor plan.  This is how you can have a home 90 days from the day that the hole is put in the ground.  While our home is not a custom home, we have had some customization of the stock plans to include a full walkout in the basement, enlarged pantry, and modified master bath and changes to some of the exterior doors and windows.  With a 95% efficient furnace, 17 seer A/C unit and 6 inch exterior walls we are hoping to stay toasty warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  I may not be as cheap as heating and cooling our current home, we figure it will not be to much more expensive.  Our current home only has a 80% efficient furnace and a 12 seer A/C unit but it is only 2000 square feet and our new home is 3600.  And to top it all off we have a three car garage.  Hurray! no more scraping the windows on the vehicles in the winter or hopping into the baking heat in the summer.  (Yes the garage is also fully insulated.)

Welcome - we have walls around the front door.

Welcome to our humble abode.

Progress is coming along fast and while you may not want to live in the home at the moment we do have a set of walls around the front door.  One minor problem.  The large hole where the front porch goes.  The hole is 8 feet deep and entry via this opening will land you in the cold storage room of the basement.  Give it a few days and this will improve.  You will notice that the walls are going up fast. By the end of the day tomorrow, I would suspect that all the exterior walls will be in place and the interior walls will be taking shape.

As you can see, at eleven o'clock this morning the basement framing was coming together nicely.

And thanks to yesterdays windstorm we have a great start on the landscaping.  We figured that the best landscape is one that fits well with its surrounding, so we will be using a lot of tumble weeds in the yard.  With the piles that the contractor had to take out of the basement we figure that we have a good start on.

 Anyone got any ideas on arrangement and placement of these fine specimens?

Is it a home or a swimming pool

This past week our home has been progressing well.  With the foundation in place and the hole back filled it was time to pouring the floor in the basement.  But wait!  Is that sink drain in the middle of the room?  It sure looks like it. The second mess up in two weeks and the builder has been working on the site for just 3 weeks.  So the phone calls started.  (I hate this phone game. I call our realtor, he calls the builders realtor, who calls the general contractor.  Then the call comes back to our realtor, then back to me.)   After a second visit to the site later in the day to convince myself that I was not making things up, I called the general contractor directly.  When he called back I was not at home, so he spoke with Ginny.  What a blessing.  She has a way of getting her point across that I don't seem to have and as the saying goes, "If momma not happy, ain't nobody happy",  so also goes the process of building a home because we all know it is momma's house.  Before the end of the call the drain was promised to be moved before the basement floor was poured.

Wednesday I drove to the house on my lunch hour to find the drain had been moved and the concrete was starting to be poured for the basement floor.  In a matter of an hour the complete floor had been put down, but before I could get back to the office (10 minutes away) the rain started to come down by the bucket full.  Needless to say the concrete was not able to be finished for more than 6 hours.  In fact when I arrive at 5:30 pm the contractor was still waiting for the concrete to set enough to put the finish on.

Thursday I drove by to find that anywhere they could not use the power trowel to put the finish there was on a real disaster and I thought to myself  "well here goes another call to the builder".  Much to my surprise the builder called me to tell me that they would be re-pouring some of the areas because of the rain damage.

Today (Friday), I went by at lunch again to find that the concrete had been cut and removed and the plumber was there working.  Apparently our frequent calls to make things right have not gone unheard, because the general contractor had the plumbing there correcting yet another miss placed drain.  This one I did not catch, but rather the general contractor had discovered.  The fortune thing was the area that the plumber was working happened to be the same area that had to be cut out do to the rain damage.  The concrete had not been able to be power troweled due to the location of the drain pipes.

Also as you can see the lumber was being delivered while I was there on Thursday evening.

To sum it up, the builder has been on site for 3 weeks this coming Monday and we had have 3 mistakes that have had to be corrected, plus the rain pelleted concrete that needed to be re-poured.  Hopefully the builder is starting to realize that the Terry's expect quality workmanship, so problems can be fixed early when it is less costly or they will be fixed when the cost is much higher.  They get to choose.

I have always heard that building a house could be an adventure.  I am just curious when the adventure really begins?  Please don't tell me,  "It will be in a few more weeks."

Stay tuned to this same BAT (Big Adventure Thrills) station for more bat adventures in the future.

Our home starts on a solid foundation

We are now starting to see significant progress on your home, but not without a hiccup along the way.  On Monday April 5th, I took a drive to our property after work to find that the hole for our home have been dug.  It was about 10-12 feet deep, which I was surprised to see considering the fact that the ground level at the back of the house was to be at the same level as the basement floor.  In talking to the excavating contractor, he explained that they had to go this deep to get down to solid earth.  Everything above that was fill dirt.  I new there was fill on the property but I figured it was probably 6 feet deep.  With a very deep hole the contract would be filling it back in a layer at a time. Packing each layer to ensure that the home was on good stable ground.

At this point that I noticed that the garage was located on the wrong side of the house.  We had asked for the floor plan be flipped over, putting the garage on the east side of the house.  Well, the engineer did not flip the plans and I was not shown the plans after the engineers had made the requested changes.  The builder realized that the mistake was going to cost valuable time and money to correct, but this was not the home that we had asked to have built, so we worked out a compromise between us.  The builder is compensating us financially for their mistake and as of today we have a foundation in place, and the basement sewer lines have been laid out.  If progress continues as it has in the past 2 weeks we should see the framing of the home completed in the next 2 weeks.

Beautiful British Columbia - a chance to bond with family

This has been a great week.  It started off with Ginny, my mother and father and I flying to Seattle and then driving to beautiful British Columbia. According to Ginny no trip to the northwest is worth anything without fresh crab, so on our way north we stopped in Everett Washington for a crab. Between Ginny and mom they put down an entire crab, while dad and I enjoyed some fresh cod and chips.  Then it was on the road to the Ginny's friends Dave and Wendy Gorner in Abbotsford, BC.  We have to thank them for their hospitality and kindness, as they not only welcomed us into their home but they also invited us to have all of Ginny's family to come and visit.

For those unfamiliar with the Vancouver area, Abbotsford is about  60 miles east of Vancouver and only a couple of miles north of the US /Canada border.  For this trip we had bought a new navigation system that includes Canada.  This helped make the trip so enjoyable and we did not have to figure out what roads we needed to take to get where we were going. While the trip is very straight forward from Seattle to Vancouver the shortest route to Abbotsford involves taking several lesser known highways once you get to Bellingham, Washington.

While we had been invited to have Ginny's family over to the Gorner's for dinner we were not about to allow them to provide all the food for the tribe, so we stopped at Costco and loaded up on stuff for a BBQ and arrived at Dave and Wendy's at about 6:00 pm just minutes before Wendy arrived home from work.  It was great to visit that evening.  It was the first time I had ever met Dave, and he is a wonderful guy.

Saturday morning we started preparations for the BBQ and headed off for one of the main reasons for us to have traveled to this neck of the woods.  We were on our way to the Vancouver temple open house.  We had arranged to met some of Ginny's family at the chapel in Langley (which is only 2 blocks from the temple) and then to go on a tour of the new temple.

While our faith is centered in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for our sins and his resurrection, we feel that the family is an eternal unit that continues in the life hereafter and it is within the temple that that eternal bond is formed.  So this trip was more that an opportunity to see the temple, or just an chance to visit with family, but rather an experience that helps us appreciate and draw closers to the ones that we love and care about, our extended family, in hopes that by sharing a small measure of what we believe we can one day we can all be reunited as an eternal family.

While not all of those that we would have liked to come to the open house were able to come, we are grateful for those that did come.  For those that were not able to come, we understand and wished that you had been able to join us.   In any case,  we want each of you to know that we love and appreciated you.

After the open house we drove back to Dave and Wendy's for our BBQ dinner and when we arrived, Dave and Wendy had put the final preparation on our meal.  We just had to BBQ the chicken and a few things of that nature.  It was so nice to be able to relax and visit with everyone and the Gorner's preparation made this possible.  We can not thanks them enough for all that they did and we will always be grateful.

On Sunday we attended church and visited with other family that were not able to come to the temple open house. Once again out hosts where fantastic about opening their home and making everyone feel welcome.

Monday we drove to Stanley Park and to see the ocean. It was fantastic weather with a breeze coming in off the ocean as usual, but in the park the breeze was nothing to dampen ones spirits.  After visiting the park and the beach we drove down to Steveston, which is a docking point for the fishing vessels in the area.  We arrived in hopes of obtaining a couple of crab and some pawns. We found the pawns but no crab.  Ginny was pretty disappointed because she wanted to have a seafood feast for dinner.   With only pawns in hand we headed in to Richmond for a Chinese lunch.

This proved to be most interesting.  You see the Chinese food that Ginny remembers from her growing up years is not the same are the Chinese food of today.  Today's Chinese is very authenticate (dishes like Duck tongue, etc).  She wanted fried rice, sweet and sour pork, etc).  After trying two different restaurants she decided that non of us needed to be super adventurous and we were all very hunger, so we popped in to the closest place which was an IHOP.

Ginny just could not bring herself to settle for no seafood so we jumped off the highway and headed into the grocery store for a couple of live crab, clams, etc, so the crab fest did actually happen. The day was quickly coming to a close and we would be leaving in the morning and we promised to take Dave and Wendy for a geocaching experience, since they had never been before.  It was interesting, because by the time we got out of the house it was dark and there was a light rain falling.  Never fear, with flashlights in hand we found two of the three caches that we went after. Our flashlights, however, proved to be too much for their dog Lucy, who has a crazy fettish for light (she chases shiny reflections from the door opening or sunny reflections on the floor or yard)---and moving flashlights just made her crazy! She was such a fun dog, we will miss her!

We finished out our trip on Tuesday by attending the Seattle temple before flying home Tuesday evening, arriving home at about 11:00 pm, exhausted, tired and happy to have spent the time that we did with family and friends.