July17, 2009: More Stairs and Tile

On Friday, we went out to the house briefly before going out to Rustburg to meet the granite company. Tiles were laid in the kitchen and the stairs were completed. On Monday the stair railings will start going in.

Tiles in the Kitchen. They're 2'x2' Ivory tiles from the Marazzi Stone Collection layed out in the brickwork pattern.

Closer view of the kitchen tiles.

Preethi ascending the completed stairs.

Ballustrades and posts for the stair railings.

Trim in around the front door. I hadn't seen it before, but Preethi said it had been in for a while. The curved trim on the top is a bit more challenging than normal.

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May 30, 2009: Adult Legos

It rained through Wednesday, but on Thursday and Friday, the bricklayers were able to work. By Saturday when I got out to the site (travel), almost half of the house had been bricked. Further work had gone on inside making some minor framing additions and the front door was installed.

View of the front of the house. You can see where the front door has been installed. It's 8' Mahogany with 3/4 view, an arched top and needs to be stained.

A closer view of the front door. You can see some of the bricks on the bottom right. We'll have small capstones over the windows in the front, but they haven't been delivered yet, so the brickmasons got started mostly on the back of the house.

A close-up of the front door. We like it a lot, so there's perhaps too many pictures.

Front door from just beyond the foyer.

Front door from the the middle of the great room.

Bricks on the lower front of hte house and some of the scaffolding on the west side.

Closer view of the bricks on the front. The concrete blocks will be below grade.

The west side of the house bricked up to the top of the main level.

The brick fork lift (I'm sure it has a different name, but that's what it is) lifting up a pallet of bricks to the workers on the backside of the house.

View of the bricking process from the rear of the house. The main level is complete and they're working on finishing off the bricks on the master bed / bath beyond the bumpout. If you count closely, you can see 7 workers in the photo, which explains how they managed to get so much done so quickly.

Bricking around an exterior outlet box.

Another outlet box (under the window) and a light box. The plastic is on the windows to reduce the chances of scratching the windows.

A close up of the bricks. The type of brick we used is called Dan River Hand Craft (it's actually engineered with very straight lines) and the mortar pattern is called grapevine.

Sand for making mortar and the mortar mixer.

View of the bricks on the garage side of the hosue. In the earlier shot of the back, the bricks were about 5 feet down from the roof. 20 minutes later, they're nearly up to the roof.

Tiles we were considering for the kitchen and foyer (Marrazzi Stone Collection). The whiteish tile was a given, but the choice was between the greenish-grey tile on the right and the straight-grey on the left. We're going with the greenish-grey.

We're considering these tiles (Marazzi Jade Sage - slightly green). Here we were checking out if we could set up the tiles on a diagonal and have them line up right with the shower and the "throne room" (they did).

A roughed-in step in the garage was added during the week. Originally, we thought we were going to need two steps, but we were able to make the inspector happy with just one (less space taken up in the garage).

A wall for shelves in the main-level bath.

The framed-in fireplace.

I was curious to see what heating / cooling work had been done in the attic, so I climbed up. This also let me see things like the top of a shelf in an upper bedroom.

Another shelf in one of the upper bedrooms.

The shelf in the master bedroom.

The attic fan with the dual pole single throw switch (turns on with attic thermostat and when whole house fan is on).

The air handling equipment I originally came up into the attic to see.

This was the inspection sticker on the front door. It's really just posted here for my personal amusement as that's the name of one of my nephews.

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April 24, 2009: Onwards and Upwards

We visited the site twice on the 24th. Once around lunchtime with Wilber and once in the evening with James and Kate and Joe and Jen. Again, the midday pictures came out a lot better than the pictures taken at sunset. A lot of the structural framing was completed on the main level and the floor started to go down on the second level.

View of the house from the tree on the north east corner of the lot around lunch time.

Looking into the garage in the evening. You can see both the support for the span over the entrance and the I-beam steel support closer to the centerof the garage. It's not a huge garage, but it's not small either so a little extra support goes a long ways.

Looking at the main-floor bedroom around lunch time. The joists for the second level are going in.

Looking from the great room back into the "dining" room (it'll probably never be a formal dining room and will instead be more of a flowing extension of the great room). You can also see distinctly see the engineered wood used to span and support the largish spaces on the main level.

Preethi in the foyer by the entrance where some of the top level support work has started.

Wilbert in the great room.

Looking at the entry-way at night.

Here you can see where some of the flooring for the second level is beginning with the bump-out for the master bedroom.

A view of the garage from the south side. If you look closely, you can see the I-beam that is helping to support the garage expanse and also see that the garage is a taller-than normal room. This was mostly the result of the need to drop the garage a foot and a half or so to match the roll-off of the lot and the need to have a common level for the second floor. This in turn means means that we're going to have a slightly taller than normal garage door (8' as opposed to 7').

A closer view of the steel beam support in the garage at night (hence the blur).

Joe, standing in the great room looking out the south side. There's actually pictures of everyone who came that night, but only's Joe's photo turned out okay-looking.

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