Finished At Last!!!

On May 2, 2014 Bo and I moved into our new home.  Five days later the movers moved all of our furniture and Crista, Rick and the children moved in also.  Thanks to Chris Unland and all the great subcontractors he hired to build our home.  He is a most efficient and competent builder who keeps things moving. In 10 months of building there were only a couple of days when no one was here working.  He builds a house for his customers as if it were his own and he was going to live in it himself.

Bo's Garden

We have a lot of windows in our bedroom and three of them look out at our neighbor's fence.  Something had to be done.  Bo worked with a landscaping company and finally agreed on something that would fit our budget.  At our other house we had a water feature of a little bronze girl holding a shell that water recirculated through and we decided to incorporate her into the landscaping at the side of the house.  Here is the result.

The garden path

The view from our bedroom

The Mud Room

We had first designed the mud room to have a cubical for each of us, but when we got the estimate from the cabinet company we had to regroup.  It was going to be way to expensive.  We decided we could live with a lot less.  I went on line and found a great web site.  ( http://ana-white.com/2012/07/mudroom-locker-and-bench-unit )  Ana White is a young mother who lives in Alaska with her husband and two children.  They literally built their house themselves and she has built practically everything in it.  So, she decided to share her ideas and started a web site.  She has a lot of project plans on her web site.  If you are at all handy and looking for something to build, visit her website.  I built the bench below from her plans.  One caution, the plans are not detail drawings.  She gives basic overall dimensions but you have to figure out the size of each individual piece and how to fit them together.

The back wall is bead board and the wall shelf is from Martha Stewart

Google Captures the Construction

A view from Google Earth. Late fall 2013.

What's That Smell???

The cedar closet of course.  In our other house we used the attic and a long, built in storage compartment in our bed room to store our out of season clothes. It became apparent after we began construction that we had not planned for out of season clothes storage so, we decided to put in a cedar closet in the basement. With cedar paneling on the ceiling and all 4 walls the smell is a bit overpowering.  When I was putting up the shelving I had to take several breaks just so I could breathe "normal" air.

Chris Unland installing the cedar paneling

Ready for clothes

How Do We Get From the Garage to the House?

When normal people build a house they put the garage on the high side of the lot.  If there is no slope on the high side, you can actually go from the garage to the house without a step up. We, on the other hand, for reasons too lengthy and boring to explain here, put our garage on the low side of the lot. And the lot slops a lot :-) So the door going into the garage is about 3 feet above the garage floor or five steps up.  If we only built steps to the door, getting into the house would be awkward especially if the one entering was to be carrying packages, so...we built a deck in the garage.

Six a.m. Patterns On the Wall

Wood Floors

The first floor has four inch wide red oak plank flooring throughout except for the mud/utility room.  At first we were going to use white oak, but then decided on the red because it has a more diverse color pattern and a lot more character.

The planks are put down in random order...

And then nailed to the subfloor

Preview of things to come

The finished product

The entry hall

Two Days Of Good Weather And...

We have gone from this...

To this...

Then after more delay and much hard work, to this.....

Fireplace Evolution

There have not been any posts for a while, not that there hasn't been any work done, but because the work that is being done is inside and while considerable, the visible progress from day to day is not all that noticeable. What I have decided to do is take different portions of the house and show progress in one post of that portion.  As work progresses, I will add pictures to each post until the house is finished.

I might also say that since this has been the coldest winter in St. Louis since the 1890s, work outside has come to a complete halt.  According to Bo, the Farmer's Almanac, which predicted all of this nasty weather, says that it is going to continue through March.  So, I don't expect much to be done outside in the way of finishing the driveway or landscaping for a while.

That said, here's the fireplace.  The black thing in the center, above the mantle is a support for a bracket to hold a television.  For a better view of any picture, just click on the photo.