HouseBlog

Here are a couple more videos–these are a bit larger than the short video in the previous post, so you will need high speed internet for sure..

• 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.

Well, we got another nice set of pictures from Chris from this weekend that shows a lot of progress on the house. We had talked to our builder over the past few weeks and gotten a good impression of where things were, but it’s always fun to get the pictures and see for ourselves. You’ll notice the basement is still just framed out–that’s all we paid for. We will finish it over time–if you want a nice place to stay when you visit, you can send $$ towards the “Basement Completion Project” and we’ll make sure to send a tax deductible receipt for your gift

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we don’t have any new pictures to show you, but a lot has happened anyway. We spent a day in Charlottesville picking cabinets, sinks, carpet, tile, and a few other minor things. Not to mention, we also picked appliances right after we returned, so it’s been a busy few weeks. The roof is now complete, the back deck put on, all the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical is done, and given things went as scheduled, the drywall should have started going up today.

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: