Friday, June 13, 2014

The Estate of Waiting

We've waited to build for years. As in we're eight years behind when we'd originally planned to start. Then finally the planets aligned. I've become quite practiced at waiting, not that I enjoy doing it, but it seems to happen a lot. Hence the name of my new home.

While I'm busy waiting to hear back on submissions - I just added another ball to my submission juggling act last night - I figured I'd share progress on the house project.

This is what the site looked like last fall.

This is what a small portion of the site looked like at the beginning of April. My dog loved the freshly turned sand. He couldn't get enough of running on it. It certainly beats running on snow, so I can't blame him for celebrating the thaw, though I let him do the running for both of us.
And then we have the hole. And lots of sand. We did come across someone's trash pit, which contained a lot of broken glass (mostly jars of Peanut Crunch and Heinz 57) and one neat old perfume-type bottle that wasn't broken.
The basement walls were installed in one day. This sounds really speedy and productive but then there was two week delay with excavation issues and the geothermal crew and me spending an entire weekend out there leveling the basement dirt and digging footings to make things right.

Which brings us to where things are currently. The garage is going up today and the second story goes up next week. Can't wait to see it all framed in. Of course, that means more nights and weekends on site for me because that's where the work we're planning to do ourselves starts. 

Until then, I'll do some more editing, submitting and...waiting. 

5 comments:

  1. Good for you for building your house. Or helping? Seems like a mixture of both. Still, it's exciting.

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  2. We're self contracting. So we're going a lot of organizing (wrangling sub contractors) at this stage. Later, we'll be running electric, installing flooring, lighting, trim, cabinets and plumbing fixtures. We did a 1,000 sq ft addition to our current home fifteen years ago, so we hired out all the big stuff we know we don't want to do ourselves (ever again).

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  3. Woo hoo! That is exciting stuff, Jean. I love how quickly houses sprout from the ground once the work starts. Of course, that is then followed by all the real work involved in turning the shell into a habitable home. Good luck!

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  4. Hey! I want to build my own house. :/

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  5. What a great endeavour. It's going to look fantastic after all the crappy stuff like the hard work and the waiting is over!

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