Moving Forward!
Some recent activities:
Good news - the framing of the house has continued, pretty much on schedule, despite some heavy rain the past 2 weeks. The house is framed and the basic roof line is in place. It really looks like an actual house, at this point. The house is also "closed off" - meaning, the exterior walls are up, with only holes for windows and doors.
One thing I did not know is that the Tyvek wrap will not go on until just before the external siding goes on. It is not intended to protect the house before the siding is on. We recently had to start making a few decisions - this is a part
of the process that everyone has told us gets crazy - you end up needing to make important selections every few days. So far, not too bad. But we had to decide on our plumbing fixtures for the kitchen and all 3 bathrooms - this needs to get done early, since they way they cut out the interior walls depends on the basic structure of the fixtures (like the tubs, and sinks and faucetts). They don't actually need to install anything, but they need to know the layout.
HINT: If you decide on faucetts late and your builder needs the product to install, the faucett manufacturers usually have "install kits", which have the simple base components that a contractor can install, without needing to wait for the actual fixtures.
Other decisions we made the last day or so were for the roof tiles and the siding. The roof tiles was pretty simple - we went with a black color, standard tile. (Of course, you want to pick the roof color to go well with your siding color). As for the siding, we had a hard time choosing between a lighter and a darker grey, and in the end selected the darker (and, of course, slightly more expensive) gray. Also, we elected to go with a simple style siding, where each shingle is slanted and overlaps with the one above. There is also a style which looks perfectly flat from the side, and where the top of each single is bent down. We looked at a few houses to compare - I like the flat look, and my wife liked the slanted look more. (Guess which were are going with?) Just kidding - both are pretty similar, to me.
Some recent activities:
Good news - the framing of the house has continued, pretty much on schedule, despite some heavy rain the past 2 weeks. The house is framed and the basic roof line is in place. It really looks like an actual house, at this point. The house is also "closed off" - meaning, the exterior walls are up, with only holes for windows and doors.
One thing I did not know is that the Tyvek wrap will not go on until just before the external siding goes on. It is not intended to protect the house before the siding is on. We recently had to start making a few decisions - this is a part
of the process that everyone has told us gets crazy - you end up needing to make important selections every few days. So far, not too bad. But we had to decide on our plumbing fixtures for the kitchen and all 3 bathrooms - this needs to get done early, since they way they cut out the interior walls depends on the basic structure of the fixtures (like the tubs, and sinks and faucetts). They don't actually need to install anything, but they need to know the layout.
HINT: If you decide on faucetts late and your builder needs the product to install, the faucett manufacturers usually have "install kits", which have the simple base components that a contractor can install, without needing to wait for the actual fixtures.
Other decisions we made the last day or so were for the roof tiles and the siding. The roof tiles was pretty simple - we went with a black color, standard tile. (Of course, you want to pick the roof color to go well with your siding color). As for the siding, we had a hard time choosing between a lighter and a darker grey, and in the end selected the darker (and, of course, slightly more expensive) gray. Also, we elected to go with a simple style siding, where each shingle is slanted and overlaps with the one above. There is also a style which looks perfectly flat from the side, and where the top of each single is bent down. We looked at a few houses to compare - I like the flat look, and my wife liked the slanted look more. (Guess which were are going with?) Just kidding - both are pretty similar, to me.
