House - November Update

Here's another little house update for you. I know it has been awhile, but it has felt like things were sort of stalled out and there wasn't a lot of interesting things to share. Now it looks like a house from the outside and progress is being made on the inside, so while I can't say that I see the light at the end of the tunnel yet, I can see that we are making the final turn. Here's another look at the plan that we chose and how our house is "supposed" to look.

Here is how the house actually turned out. The biggest differences are that we extended the garage, carried the porch all the way across the front, and did without the dormers.  The garage is also wider, so the double doors just made more sense.  The dormers were purely decorative, so we opted to save the expense of those and use that money in other places.

This is the back side of the house. The master bedroom and bathroom are on the right, you can see the patio doors and picture window under the deck roof, and the west bedroom window is on the left.

We had an unfortunate thing happen over the Thanksgiving weekend. The wind gusts here were so bad that it blew a LOT of the shingle off the roof. They had only been on about 2 weeks, but the temperatures hadn't been high enough for them to seal, so when the wind came up on top of that hill, the shingles just blew right off. They have been fixed, but I haven't been out to get a new picture. I believe all of the siding is also on this side of the house now. I will be there tomorrow sometime, so hopefully I will have a new picture to post.

This final picture is our back deck.  This isn't the best picture and it isn't completely finished yet, but I just had to share.  This is CONCRETE!! 

When we were having the discussion about saving money, I knew that one HUGE chunk was going to be our massive back deck. I had seen pictures of stamped, stained concrete on Pinterest and thought that it looked really awesome. So I asked Kelsey about doing this and he told us that in fact it would save quite a bit of money to go this route vs. the composite decking we were looking at. I am not going to say that it was super easy, because we had to choose almost everything from pictures in magazines or the internet; like the style and pattern of the stamp and the color of the concrete dye. In the end it turned out Amazing and I can't wait to be able to enjoy it in the spring. Kelsey admitted, after it was done, that he was really nervous about doing it and didn't get much sleep the night before. He had never done it before and I told him that it is okay to try new things!! I don't think he or Jeremy had much faith in me when I made this suggestions, but so far the outcome has FAR outweighed the risk involved with trying it. In the picture above it still needs a couple coats of sealant to protect it and make it all shiny, but that couldn't be applied until after the curing period.

Work has moved to the inside of the house now, so I have been told.  I am anxious to go out tomorrow and see all the work involved.  Tomorrow will mark 2 weeks since I have been there and 3 weeks since I was there to pick out the placement for the light switches and electric outlets.  That doesn't sound like it would be that hard of a job, but believe me, IT IS!!

I am starting to get the itch to pack boxes and prepare to move!!  We only have a few decisions left to make and then it is just a matter of getting everything installed and hooked up.  I have told myself from the beginning that I would wait until after Christmas to start packing and getting things ready and SO FAR I have done a pretty good job of that.  But, I know that once the holidays are over and it is time to start packing away the Christmas decorations I am going to be so anxious!