Much progress has been made on the building front. Great news with the cold weather and then dump of snow threatening to slow things down significantly. In the end our builders, who seem to be relatively immune to the constraints of weather, soldiered on. There were only a few days lost to extreme cold, and the power shed come warming hut is coming in handy for keeping tools and batteries from freezing along with people!
After the first floor framing we had to make a few adjustments. It’s a good thing that Jeff is on top of everything and saw some height issues with some of the windows before they started work on the second floor. Some of the windows were set a bit too high, particularly the view windows in the front of the house. After a quick meeting with our builder though we were back on the path and the corrections were made the next day.
Jeff is lending his labour to snow clearing and generally trying to avoid having our builders do site clean up. He’s giving up much of his personal time to run the snow blower and tractor over the high traffic corridors, filling in the gaps of time while he waits for kids to be done at basketball practices in Fernie and making the most of the trips in and out of town. Seems like we are wearing a path between here and there, sometimes twice a day to make it all happen. The girls have been voluntold a few times to lend a hand, and I even had a pitch in day on Sunday to relieve one of the piles of materials of its snowy tomb. All good if it saves time and money, and it gets the house built faster.
Decision making asks are coming faster now and we’re meeting with cabinet makers and have a laundry list of tasks to work through. We’ve gone through the plumbing and have a list now that is out for quote. The reality check of what you can afford versus what you really want is a hard one. Dream house or not, the cost of materials really tests the needs versus wants! We’ve designed/redesigned our fireplace and master bath this week to accommodate some challenges we have with fixtures and layout and the first round of cabinet quotes came in higher than expected so we’ve thrown the net a bit wider to see what other suppliers have to offer. Our interior designer is being tested for patience as we work through it all and we’re having to do a lot of homework to get ahead of what’s needed. So far so good, just another layer. Good news is we have the windows and appliances ordered, so there’s two big ones off the list. Next up is cabinets and rough-ins for plumbing before they pour the floors. We think we’ll have a roof next week…more pictures to come!
Yes! They are pretty good at working through the weather and the guys on site are hardy!