HouseBlog

I threatened one day I might resurrect the HouseBlog when we finished the basement..well, it is well underway and moving fast, so I decided I better post something soon or else I’m just going to be posting the final “it’s done” pictures.

For a refresher.. a blog entry from last year showed the basement as we had had it framed out for what we wanted–extra bedroom, closed, full bath, utility/storage room, and large family/rec room.

The basement–circa January 2006.

Since then, we finalized on a builder to finish the basement and he started a week or so ago. The first phase has moved very quickly as framing only had a few items to clean up and with rough electrical taking only a day, it was time for insulation and drywall almost immediately. Here are a few pictures from the current progress–click on any image to see a larger version:

Insulation complete; drywall on the ceiling…straight ahead will be our “movie watching” wall!

More drywall; in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs that connects the various basement rooms the ceiling drops down due to HVAC ductwork.

The other end of the main family room/rec room area, with walkout doors on the left.

Hard to get a good picture of the extra bedroom, but it is basically completely drywalled now–closet at far end; entrance to full bath that separates it from the rec. room just out of frame on the right.

After some pressure from family members, I finally went around the house tonight and did a pretty comprehensive photo tour of the house. I mixed in a few pictures that were in the entry from a few weeks ago. The only things missing are the guest room (needed to be cleaned up–lots of miscellaneous stuff in there at the moment..) and the garage..which I finally have fairly organized.

Anyway, it’s quite a few pictures, so rather than put them here, they are on our smugmug website..a direct link to the album is below.

House Tour Gallery

Well, we finally moved into our new house. The month of April was a whirlwind–selling our home, packing up, moving, and now trying to start settling in here. The house is beautiful; a couple pictures are below for your enjoyment! Without the help of so many friends and both of our parents (Margaret’s parents took the kids for just shy of a week, my mom came up from Friday through Wednesday to help us do the move and get settled) I don’t know how we would have done it. With the kids gone and mom’s help we were able to unpack about 90% of all the boxes and each room basically has the furniture in place and just a little organizing left to do. Of course, over the next months there will be a lot of other work–hanging pictures, getting driver’s licenses, registering vehicles, learning where everything is–but it’s amazing how much we are already set up to return to some sort of normal life

This latest milestone brings the main purpose of the blog to a close, but I guess I’ll keep it around for who-knows-what…maybe to capture the process of finishing the basement some day After we have all the rooms organized and ready, I’ll do another photo tour and post them all here so you can see the whole house in finished form.

Here are some pics I took earlier this week..

View from the street..grass is starting to come up

Margaret is already figuring out how to get a porch swing on that front porch..

View from the back yard

The slate for the entry that Margaret picked out is perfect (at least we like it!)

The family room area is all set up..although I took the picture right before we brought in the area rug that goes in the middle.

The eating area between the kitchen and family room .

Well, we got an offer on our house today–the one we were hoping to get from the folks who came Tuesday and said “we want to buy it” It’s a good one and it lines up perfectly with our needs for moving–although it makes us move into high gear since now we have a target and it is coming up very soon!

We should close on our house here on April 19th and then close on the new house on Thursday, the 20th. We would then try and move that weekend (21/22/23) and relinquish ownership of our house to the buyers on the 24th. So, it should be a whirlwind of activity between now and then and I’m afraid I probably won’t have any pictures to show either..

We promise to take some when we start moving in when everything should be complete. At this point, the painting is done, the final finish coat is ready to go down on the wood floors, the carpet is being installed this week, and finish plumbing was all done a couple days ago. So, the house is getting very close to complete at this point.