First Floor Framing

End of the first week of framing and we've already got the basement and first floor exterior walls framed.  Despite the poor early New England spring weather the guys are moving right along.

Front corner of the house

Back corner of the house

The living room has a bright, airy feel.

Buzz Buzz

The work site is a constant flurry of activity these days:

The start of something good...

Just about nearing the 1 month mark and framing has begun.  Now it starts looking like a house. Just 4 or 5 weeks until it's all dryed in.

South side: Daylight walk-out basement

Front (west) side. Our future front porch and entry.

North end: Garage.

Decisions decisions decisions...

Had a quick meeting with our builder today to make the first of probably a million decisions. Made some choices for siding, doors, roofing, and a few windows to finalize.  Framing starts Monday and by this time next month, we'll have an actual structure to walk through.  Granted, it'll still be see-through, but it's more and more real every day.

Building a Solid Foundation

Our new home continues to rise from the earth. This week the foundation was poured for the basement.  In fact these pictures were taken just moments after the crew finished pulling off the forms.  

The entire southeast corner of the basement will be at grade.  Good southern exposure should bring warm daylight through a few double-width windows and patio doors.  Featuring a 9-foot ceiling height, this space should someday become a top-notch family rec room.

The forms all set up, ready for the big pour

All waterproofed, waiting for backfill

 Rear view of garage end of the house.

Gaining our footing

Things are starting to get real.  The weather has been seemingly working against us. This past week we had a couple dustings of snow, a couple days of single-digit temps, capped off with a day of drizzle. Despite this, the lot got cleaned up, the driveway got cut in, a hole got dug, and the footers got poured.

We're coming up into another busy week.  We're told that the foundation will get poured early in the week, then framing should start late next week.  I guess that's the benefit of building a home at the tail end of a New England winter.  The home building pros are itchin to get back to building and so far all seem ready to get to action.

Call a doctor...I've got piles.

Putting down our roots...

What you see there is our future mode of transportation. The subdivision where our home is being built is off of what our new town refers to as a "scenic way."   One of many so called scenic ways.  Silly me, so unrefined.  I'd always thought they were just dirt roads.  Although admittedly, the only time I've ever seen dirt roads is on episodes of The Dukes of Hazard.   So now giving directions to our new home (because it ain't on no GPS maps) will include the phrase "turn off the paved road."  If you plan on visiting during the spring thaw or rainy season, you'd better have a lift kit and locking diffs.   You have been forewarned. 


After  many months of sub-freezing temps, we finally saw our first 50+ degree day today.  This introduced us to something we'll have to develop a tolerance or appreciation for: mud.

Excavator on site now starting to pull all the stumps. Town rule says that no stumps can be left in place or buried.  Having pulled down 50-100 pine trees on our forest lot, someone's got their work cut out for them,   Before we can put down our roots, these roots will need to go.

Stand back...he's gonna hurl

And so it begins...

The view from the rear of our fresh-cut lot.

Every story has to start somewhere. This one starts in a frozen field of fresh felled pines. (oooh, alliteration) Perhaps it starts with the story before the story...

After a months long search for a new family home, playing the Goldilocks Game whilst living nomadically in hotels, apartments, and rental houses, we inevitably ended up heading down the path to a custom build.

We found our little slice of heaven in a bucolic New England town. A literal sea-change, having spent our lives in cities of various size. A 180 from where we had started looking for homes among the suburban sprawl.  But we believe that trading traffic jams for the serenity of small town life will have invaluable benefits to our lives.

If you listen closely, you can hear
Al Gore weeping.

Our little 2 acre plot is what we consider the "best of both worlds."  It's in a new sub-division of homes, slated for about a dozen good sized single-family homes.  But our lot is located so that it's surrounded on all sides by 50-100 acres of preserved forest.  So we'll have neighbors, but we just won't be able to see the neighbors.  That's a tremendous change for us from city life, where your neighbor is either on the other side of the wall, or at best their kitchen window is only 20 feet from your kitchen window. 

We passed papers (and a duffel bag of dinero) just 2 days ago, and already our builder has the lot cleared. This was just another stretch of forest last week. Our builder rocks. We need to be done and in before the next school year, so he's prepared to keep things rolling along for us.   Huge piles of slaughtered pines is a great start. (The majority of which had trunks twisted with old-growth poison ivy vines.  Good riddance to all)

Insert house A into lot B...
You should see the size of the IKEA box this one came in.