Rain delay

Bob and I were at the fireplace store double-checking our choice of gas logs and fireplace models. The salesman there asked whether we had broken ground yet, and we told him they were pouring the foundation. "That explains the rain," he noted. Ha, ha. Of course! No work got done yesterday.

The attached pictures are from Monday, showing the tall storage area wall and, in the other photo, me helping with the yard outside the guest bedroom and Bob's office (which will be the 4th unfinished bedroom).

Like my boots? Besides allowing me to walk in the omnipresent mud, they have the cutest design -- skulls and crossbones with little pink bows on their heads. Death metal meets ballerina!

We visited the builder yesterday and we all laughed about our unfounded weekend distress over measurements. David threatened to take Bob's laser measuring tool away from him ...

Footers!

Well, they worked at the speed of light last Thursday/Friday. As we were leaving the jobsite on Friday after photographing the digging, six cars drove into the neighborhood in a caravan of workers, and when we went out Saturday morning, the footers were already in place! Looks like a house!

The worry has started, however. It is hard to tell from the footers, but it looks like a couple of the dimensions have been laid out too small ... which led to a fairly frantic call to the builder on Saturday. Trisha has predicted that our builder will be VERY tired of us by August, if not already by next week.

Breaking ground!

There's still snow on the ground, but the digging has begun! Evidently, the big machines have no trouble getting through a mere six inches of frozen ground to the unfrozen ground below.

A little bit of disappointment--turns out because of required setback and the size of our walkout that they have to position the house further back on the lot than they thought. So, we'll have a longer driveway and probably no view of the pond. But, on the bright side, the house will be somewhat hidden from the road over the hill, giving us more privacy.

We took a hour-and-a-half drive down to Amishland on Monday, getting pretty lost on snow-covered gravel roads, where every mailbox read "Graber," until we finally found the right "Tim Graber," who will be building our kitchen cabinets. The decisions are definitely starting to stare us in the face now.

By the way, you could fit four of our houses in that house in the background of the one picture--it's in a different neighborhood!

The Bare Ground

We bought the lot for our new house on December 14! It's 3 acres of prairie on the east side of town about two miles from the east edge of the university and, more important, closer to the golf course than our current condo.

The lot has a rise on the front portion of it, and the house will be positioned at the summit. Hopefully we'll have a view from the kitchen window of the pond that is two lots over. The back yard slopes down to a little forest on the property that adjoins at the back. We plan to plant trees on the back portion--if we can keep the deer from eating the seedlings!

The front part of the lot will be planted in prairie, so there will be minimal lawn and minimal lawn mowing.