Christmas 2006

We had a relaxing Christmas as I had over a week of vacation to use and no house to work on as planned. Beau has enjoyed the Christmas season - the lights on the houses in particular. He is very excited to let us know every time we drive by a house with them. He also enjoyed opening gifts, but without a doubt his favorite gift this year was this kid-sized trampoline. He calls it his "tram·bou·rine". On the construction front, today all of our lumber for the construction was delivered. I'm guessing that it was ordered some time ago and our Contractors thought they'd be further along than they are. Over the last couple of weeks the only thing that has happened back there is the backfilling of our walls. Seeing the trusses and lumber is exciting as I've heard that step of the construction goes pretty quickly. Although up to this point, nothing has really happened very quickly so we'll see about that.

We Have Walls and Snow...

Last week the concrete basement walls were poured and then the snow returned. I don't think we have to worry about our concrete setting too quickly in this kind of weather. It's pretty exciting to see the defined space even if it is still open to the snow. Next steps are to set the window wells, dig out for the floor, get the plumbing roughed in, and backfill against the walls.

Concrete Forms Getting Placed

I'm continually surprised as to how long construction takes. You see a shopping mall go up in what seems like a week, but I guess it would feel differently if you lived there. We are a month into the construction of this addition and we now have foundation footings. The silver lining here is that the longer it takes the more time we have to save some extra money to actually insulate the box we're going to be left with! Over the last two days we have had a crew out placing the basement wall forms, and today the first ones have been set. It looks like all the materials are here to set the rest of them so we may be ready to pour in the next couple of days.