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.

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

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 .

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.

• flyover (18MB) : This is a 24 second shot of us flying over the lake–first from our fly-in from the northwest and then almost directly over the house. Both shots have a freeze frame that adds a yellow arrow pointing at the house.
• exterior walkaround (24MB) : This is a 2 minute shot of the street scene up and down the street and then a walk around the house.

UPDATE: I had no idea just how bad Microsoft Windows was It appears they do not have a MPEG-2 codec installed by default in Windows Media Player. If your video player complains about the format, you can use a free open-source codec I uploaded to my webserver; just download, run the .exe to start the install, leave all the defaults and then try again. Here it is: DScaler MPEG-2 codec (688KB)

On Friday, March 10th, I got a nice personalized trip to Charlottesville via my good friends Dave Lawlor and Ron Laurenzo. Dave wanted some dual engine time for his continued pilot training and Ron had the day off (he’s a charter pilot by day) so he went along as co-pilot and we took off for Charlottesville. Although the ride down was a bit rough (some fairly gusty winds) we had a great time spending the day in Charlottesville and visiting the house and seeing the latest progress. The trip back was very enjoyable as the wind was calm and the sky was beautiful. Since it was so nice, we flew over the lake and got some flyover pictures of the house from the air.

Rather than putting all the pictures from that trip in the blog directly, you can see the whole album at our “smugmug” albums page. If you have high speed internet, you should switch to the “slideshow” view and select fullscreen w/captions to see the best version of the pictures.

Just for fun I put together a short video clip that takes all the pictures that are basically a straight-on view of the lot from day 1 until now. You can access that by clicking on this MPEG video link. It is about 5MB in size, which should be nothing if you have a high speed connection. If clicking on the link doesn’t do anything for you, you may want to right click and save it to your local computer and then play through Windows Media Player or whatever video application you have.

Anyway, it sure looks like 6 weeks will be plenty of time to finish it up–Chris said he sees workers over there even on Saturdays, so I guess they are pushing to get it all completed.

Exterior front–most of the siding is up, brick cover of the foundation is done. Front porch stairs aren’t done yet.

Exterior of the back of the house–again, most of the siding is up, but the deck stairs aren’t done yet.

Another look across the back from the garage end of the house.

Since there are so many pictures in this entry I didn’t have it all display on the main page–to see the rest of the pictures follow the link below.
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In the meantime, here’s some fun pictures of appliances we picked thanks to the internet–and, yeah, of course a picture of the kitchen sink as promised in the title

Here’s the Jenn-Air downdraft cooktop. Because of the design of the kitchen in this model, this isn’t under a vent hood (look back at the post which has pictures of the other model we almost bought–you can see the cooktop placement in one of those pictures) so it has a downdraft vent.

The one thing Margaret wanted to make sure she had was enough “cooking/baking space”–so we decided on a double oven instead of the oven/built-in microwave combo at the other home the builder did.

If you haven’t noticed, the appliance theme is black, so here is a black fridge with internal water dispenser to continue the theme..

And of course a dishwasher..

And finally, the kitchen sink:

All the exterior framing/sheeting is done now and the shingles are up on the roof, ready for putting on.

From this front view you can see the front porch is finished.

A view from the garage looking into the house–the two rooms closest to the wall are kitchen/family on left and dining room on the right.

Along the back of the house is the family room with fireplace at the far end of the house.

We went ahead and had the basement framed to our design of how to finish it–an extra bedroom with closet and full bath, a utility room, and a large family room along the back of the house.

On the 2nd floor, you can see the hall with bedrooms on either side and the bonus room over the garage at the far end.

Here is a shot of the master bedroom with vaulted ceiling and the master bath.

This is the bonus room where the girl’s bedroom will be. At the end of the room will be a window seat with a closet on either side. Thanks to Aunt Joyce for that great modification idea–the builder really liked it!

Pictures are from Tuesday, Jan. 3rd.

Front view from slightly left of the lot.

Front view from right side of the lot.

View along the back side of the house.