Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The Framing Begins

The framing started this morning, so we rushed over tonight to see how it looked. None of the frames are pre-fabricated, so they did a lot of work today! Impressive!







Wordless Wednesday - August 26, 2009


Monday, August 24, 2009

Pre-Construction Meeting - The Foundation is Ready

This morning, we had a "pre-construction" meeting with the builder's head guy in charge of our sub division in Verrado, John. Now that we've had this meeting, the frame starts going up TOMORROW.


This home building experience is much different from the one we had in Santa Fe. Back home, we were discouraged from visiting the lot, and it was only by our visiting the lot on the weekends did we discover that they missed an entire forth bedroom, put in the wrong counter tops, dug some kind of a hole in the concrete that wasn't properly filled in, etc. We later found out the roof wasn't "vented" properly, which created the leak problem we had.


However, Monterey Homes encourages us to visit the home site frequently, and to be "another set of eyes." John gave us his business card and told us to call him for any reason. He assured us he will be personally overseeing every aspect of our build. And that while he's human and can't see everything, he's very good at what he does.




He confirmed for us that these days, the people who are building homes (with so few being built out here in this economy) and highly skilled ... the best of the best. He said these guys are the ones who have years of experience and are perfectionists in their trades ... and in busier construction times, they were the supervisors and foremen. Compare that to the way things were a few years ago ... so many homes being built out here, that a sub-contractor would hire just about anybody to get the work done. They just needed people.




We are very comfortable that we're getting a nice, solidly built home that isn't rushed because there are 30 other homes down the street that need to be built ASAP. As a matter of fact ... we're the newest house to be built on the street - all the other homes are way ahead of ours with the outside already stuccoed, roof tiles on, etc.

Because we have "the best of the best" building our house, John estimated the completion of our home to be late October / early November. YIKES! We were hoping for more like later in December, as our lease in this house is through January 31.




But, it's actually kind of nice to have nice that cushion of time. We can do some things like put epoxy paint on the garage floor, paint some walls inside, put up shelves in the garage for storage, decide what REALLY needs to go to the new house vs. what should be given away or trashed, etc. And then just gradually move in as time permits (as opposed to the lightening fast move we had to do last year).



Here are some pics of the foundation. I admit, these pics probably won't be too exciting for you, our readers. I have this blog out there for you guys, as well as for us. We look at our own blog a lot ... it's really an online scrapbook of our lives. :) As such, you'll get to see LOTS of house pics in the coming weeks. We'll be sure to get plenty of pics of Christian posted, too ... I know that is why many of you REALLY visit our blog. :)