Getting testy now!

Remember when I said Barney and I weren't even getting testy with each other? Well, scratch THAT!

We've started drywalling!!! Yay!!!

When you're building a house, verything is exciting! Even drywall! We hired Perry Storm to do our drywall. He's Ben Brush's father-in-law. Ben's mom is my good friend, Maureen Brush.

Every weekend Barney is out at the site working on something. Here, he's putting the OSB board around the fireplace area for the stone to adhere to.
























Dining room (looking out the windows to the driveway). You can't see out of the windows because of the plastic film on them.

Sawing more OSB board.

I love the master bath! (This is looking toward out master bedroom.)

Driveway is poured and garage doors are installed!!!

I love our new curvy circle driveway! We have to wait 2 weeks to drive on it. We bought our garage doors from Terry Rave. He and his wife, Brenda, used to go to church at Bethany. Our kids were about the same age.

Timbertech deck is almost done.

No more power spraying and restaining! I actually like power spraying; it's the restaining that I detest. I can never get the stain evenly distributed. But, no matter now!!! We put in composite decking, which needs so much less maintenance. (P.S. You can see Lindsey & Rich's dog, Adam, through the sliding glass door.)

Stone is installed around the front door.

Can you believe they told us there was a glass shortage?!? That's why the sidelights around the front door aren't in. The front door in these pictures is actually called a "bang door"--one that can get beaten up a little bit while all of the workers are moving things in and out. The real door will come later.

Finally deciding where to put the fireplace. It's between the living room and kitchen.

Adding the stone to the pedestals

Getting the front entry design figured out... was a challenge!

After much discussion and a few changes we finally decided on 6" posts (two on each side) on top of two stone pedestals (which turned out a little big bigger than we thought they would).

Repurposing some of the windows!

We took the 3 double hung windows that were in the hearth room and put them in the garage. We LOVE them in the garage! We separated two of the other windows and put one of them in the master closet. It lets in a lot of natural light so we think we're really going to like it even though it takes some of our closet space away.

The Big, BIG windows are finally in! :-) Yay!!!! And the bathtub is mounted!!!

Starting the stone application

The stone is called "chablis" from Lumberman's. We like Wes at Lumberman's. He's awesome!

Hosea & Miguel are our stone application guys! They are good!

Siding continues

Here's the new windows in place!

Starting the Siding

We're using Hardie Plank siding. We're happy to finally get the siding started!

Cutting the openings for the new windows and doors!

The old windows are now gone and the openings for the new windows and sliding door have been cut. It was AMAZING how much it opened it up and let so much more light in! I am in love with the new window choices!




Here's the "new" pool table area with BIG window openings and the 6' sliding glass door openings.











Here's the new hearth room window opening--nice and big casement windows and the new 8' sliding glass door opening.















Wild flowers to decorate the dining room (in a mud boot!)

Here's the old windows & sliding door that we removed

Here's the old windows and sliding glass door that had to go. Does anyone know anyone who would like to buy some just removed brand new 400 series Anderson windows???

We took advantage again of the beautiful weather (a full moon again!) and hung out in the 'great room' . The big window wasn't in yet, so we could still enjoy the view (without the film on the windows--which can't be removed until the interior painting is done, which is still a long way off!)

Finally, more pictures!

We had big slow down due to deciding to change some of the windows that had already been put in. But, the slow down is over! It's been 3 months since I've posted so I'm going to post several pictures of the progress in the past 3 months. It took 6 weeks for the new windows to co in which really slowed us down, but I love my new windows so much that I don't care one bit!

The two pictures below show the back of the house with the old windows in. I decided that I couldn't live with the double hung windows in the back because they cut up the view of the lake too much. We kept the double hungs in our master bedroom (on the far left), but removed the 3 double hungs in the hearth room. I also didn't like the 6' sliding glass door. It seemed WAY too small, so we took it out and ordered an 8' slider. We also removed two double hungs from the lower level.