Last post I wrote was on July 14 and I was away on a biz trip.  I said in that post that I thought it would be interesting to see how things looked when I got back.  I know this builder moves fast and I knew it would be a challenge to keep up and/or not miss anything.  When I left, this is where we were.

Bill was with me for part of the trip, then went on to his own biz trip, so we were both away.  Bill got home before me, and went over to the house the same day to see what progress had been made.  So I’m in a meeting, and he sends me a text with the photo below.  I fell off my chair and then almost cried.  We have a house!!!  Wow, unbelievable!  It is so amazing to see it take shape.  Seeing it on paper is a thrill, but when walls start to go up, it is unreal.  The framers started the week of the 13th I think, and today is the 28th, and they are pretty much done except for a few walls Bill and I want to move…  Wow, never thought I would be collaborating on where to move walls.

Last week we were both around here for the most part and got to go by a couple days and really see the progress.  So we had the outer walls up…

Windows to Karen Office.

Front door with side light panel.

Living room/dining room open space and this is the opening for sliders and windows to maximize view.

…and then the insides start to come together.

Karen’s Office

MM studio

Hallway from Karen’s office to entry, MM studio and staircase

Maybe too much focus on Karen’s office and studio?  Ok, let’s see how Bill’s doing…

Demolition of cement wall for Bill’s wine room.

Our builder saw an opportunity to save a bit of money by leaving this cement wall intact (which is the foundation of the old house) instead of knocking it down so the wine room could extend to the “underground” cement area as originally planned. It was tempting, but this is just not an item to compromise on at this point and the room would be quite small..  So down came the wall!  A guy named “Tex” does the work.  Messy, messy work, but this guy is good.  Then the pieces have to get jack hammered and hauled out.  The neighbors must love us.  I think I will be baking a lot of cookies when we move in to apologize for the disruption of this very loud construction.  But this wine room is going to be nice size.  It is just for storage although the builder would love to make it a showpiece.  Not our style, sorry…  But on the outside we are considering a little bar area with a mini fridge with a wine barrel incorporated into it as a focal point, so that will be cool.  We don’t have a lot of those kinds of elements, so good to have at least one.

So as each day progressed, it took more and more shape, so here are some photos from yesterday.  Ceiling is going in and final walls (that are up for discussion) are drawn out or temporarily set in place.  Gotta make some big decisions.  It’s starting to come alive and have a “feel”.  It has a really good feel and we are loving it.

entry way – front door with side light panel

Kitchen – spray paint on floor is where cabinets and island go.

Master bedroom looking at closet door – where you see the framing crew guy is Bill’s office

Karen’s fort above – by really will be crawl space we will have access to.  Framer standing in kitchen.

Living room ceiling

So here is the outside.  You can see on the left that the deck is starting to take shape and you can see the cool angles of the roof.  Called a “butterfly” roof with the two sections that go different directions.  The cool thing is that whichever way the roof slopes is the only place you need to have gutters, so you don’t have to put them all around.  Ours will be on the front for the most part as the overhang above the deck slopes forward.  We will have good coverage there allowing us to use the deck most of the year round.

What else can I say?  I guess I can say that this is consuming most of our mental energy.  There are so many things to think about, and we are trying to strike the right balance of what we need to be involved in and what we leave up to the builder and designer to decide.  We trust them so much that we have stayed out of most.  It is really a great collaboration and although we had our rough patches early on, the builder has proven to be great so far.  Every time we doubt something, we have our confidence rebuilt by seeing the progress and seeing how detail oriented and serious our team is.  We are having fun with this now, but exhausting all the same.  If we’re not having a meeting about something that takes up a good chunk of the day, we’re researching something or refining details.  Still a LONG way to go too!

So a few other nuggets completed:

• Appliances all picked out
• Framing mostly done and next is electricians and plumbing.  Bill’s “AV Navy” will be in next week too to do a walk through on where TV’s, speakers and other stuff will go.
• roofers coming this week
• finalized kitchen measurements and final touches on design done and cabinets ordered
• picking out front door in process.
• windows getting installed
• patio configuration???  Here is a photo of the back patio area (soon to be party zone).  Thinking about pavers and a two tiered deck.  Will be an overhang off that door that you see straight ahead which will be a covered area for the grill in the rare event of rain.  😉

• Discussion on earthquake (seismic) considerations.  Of course this is the talk of the town now after the New Yorker article.  It may not matter if my house stays standing considering everything that will happen as a result of the huge earthquake that is assured to hit here, but good to know our house is bolted firmly to the foundation.  You should see all the stuff they do for this, amazing!

Last, but certainly not least and for those of you who have actually stayed with this post the entire way through, congratulations, you get to hear this…  We do not and did not have our current house on the market, but we got an offer.  Shows the insanity of the real estate market here.  Most homes are not even hitting the market.  Basically a networking thing where we were talking to a real estate agent a while back and mentioned our house would soon be on the market, but we were waiting for our new house to finish.  We told her that it would be so great if we could sell now and have someone rent it back to us, and amazingly enough, she had a client that was interested.  We connected a few weeks later, and while Bill and I were away on our trips, we received an offer.  If all goes through, we will close the end of August which would help us out a lot by getting us out of one mortgage and an equity loan.  Can’t tell you how much time and energy it will save us if everything works out.  Totally amazing.  I won’t say much else at the risk of jinxing it.

Signing off now, I’m sure there will be many more developments in a very short amount of time!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy, and feedback is welcome.

Latest update, not terribly exciting, but definitely moving fast…

• Demolition complete
• Many dumpsters filled and dumped
• Big hole dug in for the addition
• Lotta dirt moved around
• Siding removed
• Lower level rough framing
• Lumber for remaining framing delivered to site
• Foundation for addition poured
• Windows ordered and near arrival
• Outline of Bill’s wine room in lower level laid out for his inspection (more on that in a minute)
• Kitchen design finalized
• More random bills handed to Bill and Karen

Main framing should start this week and in a couple weeks our roof structure will be delivered and placed on the house.  After that they will put up walls and then they will be to the point that the house will no longer be exposed to the elements.  Then the real fun stuff begins.

Our windows were ordered and are near arrival to the site, but when we heard this we were both stunned.  Neither of us remembers picking out window styles or anything, so that was a bit of a discussion with the builder.  Not sure how that happened, but I would have liked to see what I was getting before he ordered.  Just sayin’.  Not much we can do now but be patient, see how the windows look when they arrive and make changes if we have to.  I had a vision of sash windows or the crank windows, but what is ordered is the sliding windows which I don’t like much.  Will be interesting to see what happens…

Happily with all the demolition, there have not been any issues.  The demo has gone smoothly and they have not found anything strange or anything that had to be dealt with outside of what we were expecting.  The lower level which is being reconfigured is already roughly framed out and it looks fantastic!  The only issue we had is that the hall is very narrow down there and makes the space feel cramped.  This is because we are not renovating the lower full bath, the bathroom sticks out into the hall a bit.  The builder agrees that it is not a good situation and is going to move the toilet and sink around a bit and that will allow him to eliminate the bump out into the hall and make the hall wider.  So glad we have a solution for that!

The one piece of the lower level that has not been framed is the wine room.  In an effort to save costs (the budget is very tight), a suggestion was made to configure the wine room differently.  We did not think this change would affect the size of the room, but when we looked at the outline before framing, we realized that it changed it a lot.  It is actually significantly smaller than what we have now.  Bill considered compromising on this, but I convinced him otherwise.  This is important to Bill (and also to me), and I’m not going through all this to compromise on something like that.  I would rather save the money elsewhere.  We sent a note off to the builder requesting that he build it the way we originally had it on the house design, and he agreed that he would do all he could to make that happen.  We will see.

Next up is that we have to start thinking about and then make some decisions on the following:

• Front door style
• Exterior paint
• Interior paint
• Railing color
• Trim color
• Stone style
• Fixtures
• Appliances

Photos of the lower level bathroom and how it sticks out into the hall:

See how narrow that hall is???  That “bump out” on the left is coming out…

Big hole dug for the foundation, and then foundation pouring started:

As you can see, that big building in the back is the garage.  It has a huge workroom on the top, and the builder is keeping it standing as long as possible as it is full of building materials and LOTS of other junk.  I think it is also infested with rats, so as part of our permit approval, we had to agree to not tear it down until the rats were “eliminated”, otherwise the rats will just run to our neighbors houses when they tear down the garage.  WOW.  Who knew?

Naked house (siding removed):

Here is the finalized kitchen design:

The sink used to be where the refrigerator is (right), but we decided to move it to the left so we could put a window in for more light.  I LOVE the way it turned out.

You can see some of our selections of finishes on my previous post, but cabinets will be white, countertops will be whiteish gray swirl backsplash will break up the white with a bit of light green and gray accent tile, and island will be bluish grayish whiteish swirl on weathered blue/gray island cabinets.

See here:

And look, it is the start of the MagnaMemos new studio!!!

We’re both away on business trips, so it will be interesting to see what things look like when we get back.  Things happen so fast that if you leave for this long, so much has happened.  We don’t want to miss anything, but we have to work!  I know I will be snapping photos like crazy this weekend when we go over and see what’s happening.  I’m sure the plywood floor will be in and some framing started.  Very exciting.  This is the point when things really start to take shape and we can get a good feel for how the space will flow.  That has already happened in the lower level and anxious to see how that starts to happen in the rest of the house.  I will keep you all posted.

Lastly, there has been some discussion about the sale of our current home which is something we need to start thinking about, but I will write more on that next time.  I don’t want to get ahead of myself.