We're having a house!

A week ago, the first shipment arrived at the site. Concurrently, the slabs were being poured into the foundation. I missed the whole thing, as I headed out of town on business. At this point in the project, if you blink you really can miss a lot.

I've had some people ask me what a "kit" house is, with some people envisioning a double-wide delivered to the site and connected to utilities. Having now seen the piece-parts, it's much more like I envision a model airplane kit (not that I have any experience with them). There are stacks of materials delivered, our names on each piece, and numbers on many (all?) of the pieces to indicate where they go.

So, I showed up at the site on Saturday, and by then the sills were on the foundation, the floor trusses in for the first floor, and a lot of the framing set for that floor. We had a good time wandering around and figuring out the feel of the rooms on the first floor. Lesson learned: always carry a set of the plans. We forgot how the mudroom and the dining room interact; as a consequence we were all worried that the mudroom wasn't wide enough for a washer and dryer, as well as the cabinets we plan to put in. We had a good time taking pictures of each other in the sauna-to-be, cooking at the stove-to-be, and simply enjoying being there. Dare I admit that I was carried across the threshold?

It's so cool to see how fast this is going up. Today (Tuesday) more components were delivered to the site, including windows! The beams are up on top of the first floor, and it seems that the floor trusses are also going up for that level. I can't wait to walk through it this weekend - it will be great to see a next level of work completed. I don't dare think about the time that people will take off between Christmas and New Years, but hopefully we won't lose everybody for the entire period. I guess there's a lot of good news in no snow - people aren't off skiing, snowmobiling, etc., and there's good weather here to keep progress afoot.

Here's a shot with a bunch of the windows - it's not easy to to see the details through the wrap that's around them, but the wood is going to be beautiful, and while we're keeping in mind the best use and placement of windows (so there aren't many on the north side of the house), there will be some big, bright spaces that these windows will create.