The countdown begins

So it's a week tomorrow that we are moving to the new house. This seems to have come about far too quickly. The past year has been consumed with decision making, running around and generally fretting about the house and the end is now, most definitely, in sight.

I don't want to fool you though. We are moving in a week, but the house is quite a ways from being complete. Currently the "deficiencies" include the lack of a counter on the vanity in the ensuite, the lack of taps in any of the bathrooms, the absence of a backsplash in the kitchen, the non-working lights in the kids' rooms, incomplete painting and there is no railing on the deck off the living room. It would certainly have been nice to be moving into a finished house, but I have learned that when you are building a custom home that is certainly a pipe dream. All I hope for now is to not have to make any of the guys breakfast next week!

Kitchen Wonder

As the end of this process nears, things are really starting to come together. I suppose this is what is supposed to happen, but it's still really quite amazing to see all the ideas we formed on paper and in our minds coming to fruition. While I don't think I would ever recommend this process to anyone, much of the pain is forgotten as we're starting to see the final product.

The kitchen is my favorite example of this. I'm really happy with how it turned out!

The ground around us

I know, I know. No postings lately and there has been significant progress. We're moving in 2 weeks!

We have chosen a landscaper, but what we can afford at this point is some topsoil and grass seed. We're going to prepare the base for the walkway this fall, and install the walkway in the spring. The thought there is that the ground and house need to settle over the winter before we spend money on any hardscaping. Justifiable cost diversion at work.

The bulldozer has been on site now for 3 days and there's been a bunch of dirt being pushed around. The side benefit of this has been the disappearance (at least for now) of the weeds. Very exciting!

As time goes by

My realization of recent days is that blogging isn't my thing. In fact, this whole process is reminiscent of my teenage attempts to keep a diary - I never thought I had anything significant enough to write down which would result in defacing the beautiful book I'd purchased as my diary.


In any case, Andrew pointed out that it's been a while since I've posted an update. It has been an eventful last while on the house-building front.


We had a meeting with Dave, who broke the news that we already knew...that we are WAY behind on the construction schedule. I became a hard-ass and the outcome was a revised schedule with best case Sept 1st and worst case Sept 14th completion dates. In order to meet this deadline the guys are now working in overdrive.


We have slate in the laundry-room and foyer, hardwood in the lower level, priming the walls throughout and wood trim on the lower level. The siding is almost all done, the columns are all covered in stone and we have stone on the fireplace. It was really exciting to go there this weekend.




The Fireplace



Closet in the lower level



Door headers



The final exterior colours - Green, Grey & natural cedar




The Front

Live and Learn

This has been a difficult week.

We learned that the sink we chose for our kitchen has been discontinued and there is no other similar sink available. Given the fact that the sink hadn't been ordered when we chose it, we made the assumption that nothing else had been ordered either. So we went ahead and started looking at other tub options, only to discover that the tub had not only been ordered, but was actually sitting in the house!! With a 25% restocking fee on the tub, we're going to live with it. Incredibly frustrating. And the end results is a kitchen sink that we don't really want AND a tub that we don't really want.

Live and learn I suppose...live and learn (sigh).

A month later....

It's been a month since my last post and I wish I could point out all the changes that have happened, but the truth is that most of them are subtle and ultimately, boring.

We have wire, lots and lots of wire. We have central vacuum pipes running everywhere. We have had them take down one wall and move another. We have discussed, debated and eventually accepted our fate with regards to ceiling height at the bottom of the stairs. See? I told you nothing really interesting has happened.

In any case, here are the most recent photos. Windows in, stone veneer started, and first bit of wood siding up.

The battle with Bell

This isn't really my battle, it's definitely been Andrew's. He has spent countless numbers of hours on the phone in the last month or so, getting bumped from person to person, department to department at Bell Canada; all for the privilege of getting a phone line.

I know lots of people can relate to the misery that is interacting with utility companies, but you have to admit, this is a new low for Ma Bell.

It started with the need to dig a trench. Hydro, cable and the gas companies all agreed that if we were willing to dig our own trench that they would approve and provide us with these much needed services. Even Bell agreed that we could go ahead with this plan (after a paltry 2 or so phone calls to 6 or so different departments). The plan involved Bell sending us the requisite wire, so that we could put it in the trench (that we were digging at our expense, I should add).

One week passed, no wire....

Two weeks passed, no wire....

At this point, the trench digging had been postponed as much as could be tolerated and we ended up having to buy our own telephone wire (and please note that Joe Public does not have access to the same quality wire that Bell has access to, and so we are taking a bit of a chance).

At this point Andrew called Bell to see what had happened. Their explanation was that because we don't have a phone number, their "system" had rejected the order and so nothing had happened, no wire had been sent. The woman at Bell actually had the gall to ask Andrew if we couldn't just go and ask the neighbour for their phone number to use. It might seem obvious to you that without a wire in the ground we don't have a phone number because there is NO PHONE, but this logic apparently escapes Bell Canada.

VOIP, anyone?

Looks like a house

They started to frame the garage roof and almost finished the sheathing this week. It's really starting to look like a house!!



THE FRONT





THE BACK (apparently I was standing a bit crooked!)




The plumbing rough-in and the framing for the walls on the main level are also done, so we're really getting a good idea of how the house is going to work for us. Boo-boo number 2 was also discovered however. They forgot to frame the pocket door between the mudroom and the foyer. Apparently this is going to be fixed.





LOOKING FROM THE LIVING ROOM INTO THE DINING ROOM/KITCHEN





THE OFFICE





THE LIVING ROOM

Despite the rain....

What horrible weather we've had over the last few days. Despite that there seems to be a decent amount of progress on the house. Only the front half of the roof has had the sheathing put on, but it gives us a better idea of what the end result will be. The still have to put up the trusses for the gables and the garage.








We met with the first of 3 landscaping companies that we're "interviewing'" this weekend. We walked through the plan with the owner and it was then that I realized the enormity of the landscape plan. At this point, I just hope for grass!

Starting to take shape!

Lots of changes have taken place since our last weekly trip to the house.




The kids in their bedrooms.




We have walls!!




Looks great from the back. I love the stone used to keep the grade for the walk-out (click to see it larger).

A Heck of alot of Concrete

We were away for the last week and while we were gone the concrete was poured and forms removed. And.....we faced the first "oopsie" moment. Turns out that the guys that did the forms made the garage over 2 feet higher than it was supposed to be. So now it needs to be fixed (which, according to Andrew, isn't such a big deal).

We went out there today and took a look around. The kids had fun standing where their rooms will be and we got a better idea of the actually size of the space. We also now understand why the 200ish dump truck loads of fill are needed!


FRONT



BACK

We have begun!!

After months of planning, budget crunching and general angst the work has started! This week we've finally put a hole in the ground and the forms for the foundation are being built.

This is what we saw last Saturday:





And this is what Andrew saw today:





LET THE FUN BEGIN!

Paint, flooring, and heat... oh my!

Do you ever feel like you're taking 3 steps back for every one step forward? I'm sure you have, I'm sure we all have; but that doesn't make the feeling any more comfortable. Lately I'm starting to feel like I'm on a roller coaster that was fun initially, but now is making me nauseous and the end isn't even close. In fact we're still traveling up that first hill, the knots in our stomachs growing.

I don't want you to misunderstand me, we're excited to be building this house. We're looking forward to living in a house that we think will be perfect for us. The process is just seriously starting to suck.

Getting paint quotes, cutting our HVAC budget, choosing between beautiful and practical flooring - these are things that are our focus these days. We're at a point now where we have to much time - we just need to get on with it!

New Colours

At Andrew's request I am posting the 4 colour schemes we have come up with so far. Let us know what you think

Can I live in a blue house?

We've seen a couple of blue houses that we really like. I think blue makes an otherwise plain house more interesting. From my perspective, if we go with beige or grey the house won't be much more than a boring bungalow.

So Andrew spent hours last night mocking up one of the house drawings with colour. As you can see, he left the front door white because we have no idea what to do with it. We also aren't sure what to do around the front door. Andrew thinks we should put stone around the door, but after looking at his 2 pictures, I'm not sure that's the way to go.

The other issue is the roof colour. Since the blue we chose is a grey-blue, a grey roof looks funny, but the black is so dark. Not sure what to do here either.

Once again the windows have the potential of biting us in the #%@. In a previous post I pointed out the cost savings of going with vinyl windows. We can get the red colour in vinyl, but are basically committed to red forever as painting vinyl windows is a bit foolhardy from what I've read. So do with just go with white? So many choices.....

What do you think? Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated!! Either email me or post comments at the end of this post.

Bathroom, bathroom, bathroom

We spent 2.5 hours at the bathroom fixture place today. Who knew that there were so many choices! And such a wide price range. It's probably a good thing that our bathrooms are compact - it forced us to limit our search.

In the end we figured that we'd cut out the bathtub from the master ensuite in favor of a BIG shower. Probably not the best decision when it comes to resale value, but that is clearly not the point here. We're putting a nice deep soaker-type tub in the kids bathroom, so that makes up for it (we're going without all the fancy schmancy whirlpool jets, etc) .



Faucets was another eye-opening experience. This is where we could have easily bankrupted ourselves. Some of those faucets are works of art, and when you start looking at the finishes, you could lose your mind! Gone are the days of chrome, chrome and more chrome. Now we have stainless steel, brushed nickel, oiled bronze, venetian bronze, and chrome. We priced out the shower in our bathroom and for the same system we were looking at more than a $500 difference based just on the finish! In the end we cheaped out. It's hard to justify such a crazy expenditure when we're looking for a way to cut costs. For the kids tub and sinks we're going with this:



And for the ensuite shower and sink, this type of thing:



The coolest part is that we're getting a rain shower head that will come down from the ceiling as well as a typical shower head. Very cool!

I should clarify something here. These are the choices we made based on what we think we can afford and what we think we want. We haven't got the final pricing yet. Kathy (the woman at the store) told us that if the quote makes us nauseous we can always "reassess". Let's hope that we don't have pull the Gravol out at this early stage!

Building Permit Approved!

We got the news that we now have a building permit. That's a fairly significant step. At the very least it means that Canada Post should recognize the address (so that the mail from Ruth's school doesn't get returned to sender any longer!)

We're still on the hunt for cuts to the budget. The windows are the current target. It's hard to do, because I'd really like to INCREASE the budget and get even nicer windows, but that's definitely not in the cards. It would be nice to be able to have wood though (although window cost aside, our painting costs increase exponentially with wood windows!) We're looking at vinyl single hung windows. I really can't figure out where the value is in a double hung window, so it seems like a logical place to save. If you any different, please let us know!

Got $50K?

We're looking for $50,000.

Essentially that's what the estimate came in over by. We had a very defined idea (supported largely by the bank) of what this house should cost. Or more accurately, what we can afford. Unfortunately when Dave came by the other day with the final building estimate we are over by about $50K. And when the GST becomes HST next summer that number will get bigger.

Finding money is hard work. We can pick thinks out here and there (like going with 30 year instead of 40 year shingles on the roof), but haven't been able to get rid of enough. It's tough because we don't want to regret "cheaping out" 5 or 10 years down the road, but the bottom line is that we're talking about spending money we don't really have.

We're going to talk with the HVAC guy. This is one area of the estimate that we really just don't understand, and hopefully with better understanding we can make some cuts.

Our other option is to try and become a registered charity and collect donations.....we'll be sure to let you know if we are successful ;-)

Dilemma #1 - The Door

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2 feet. That's all that stands between what we have and what (I think) I want. I constantly find myself going back to the house plans and looking at the entry way. It's a small space, which makes sense given the "quality over quantity of space" approach we're taking. But I just can't seem to resolve myself to having a really simple entryway. More specifically, a really simple entry door.

This is what I would love to have.




























This is what I think we're going to have.


























OK, OK. I know the context of the images isn't fair, but the bottom line is that when I look for images of a door that will fit in our space all they show is a door. No sidelights, no transoms, nothing else. And that's because nothing else will fit. 2 feet doesn't sound like much, but it means a change in the roof, the trusses, the foundation, the flooring, etc.etc.etc. Bottom line is that it's a very expensive small amount of space. All for the sake of a door that won't actually improve the utility of the house.

Quality, not quantity...quality, not quantity...quality, not quantity...quality, not quantity...quality, not quantity...quality, not quantity

Eventually it's going to stick.

Let there be gravel!

Andrew took a run out to the lot the morning and low and behold we have a driveway! I didn't get a chance to see it, but am excited about this development. We now have a path through the woods, not just woods! Andrew took some photos and I'm a little worried about the number of trees that came down, but ultimately the septic tank can't go in the middle of a forest.

I suppose the philosophical impact is more significant than the actual gravel on the ground. Its a sign of our commitment to what we are doing and more importantly WHERE we are doing it!

Now that the snow is coming and the weather is colder, I expect that this will be the last change we'll see until the spring. We have the winter to finalize details like cabinets, flooring, bathroom fixtures and things like that. Then once the road bans are off in the spring the heavy equipment should move in to dig a hole!