Cement and Lots of Decisions

On Monday morning a cement truck backed up to our future front door and began dumping cement down through a hole in our foyer. 

Down below the crew was working hard to spread the cement for our new basement floor.

By the next morning the framers were already busy putting up our basement walls.

Lots and lots of decision points are breathing down our necks. They can’t install four of the windows until they know the color of the flashing and we couldn’t decide on that until we had a relatively good idea what colors the house would be which depended on knowing what the stone would be. With a lot of help from our builder Rick Hendel we settled on the stone mix below that he’d pulled together from several sources. The only change we’re making is that the grout will be flush with the stone. With this we (a great team of TJ (Architect), Marita (Interior Designer), Rick H (Builder), Rick T (Proj Mgr) and Lynn (Proj Mgr)) were able to get close enough on the other colors to know that the flashing would be a dark bronze color. Whew. Only a few hundred more decisions to go.

Stairs to the lower level!

Still undecided on the base of the cupola. Beginning to lean towards Jeff, TJ and Patrick’s recommendation of octagonal.

This is not a door. 🙂

The HVAC folks, Select Mechanical, pumped up all of the in floor heating lines to 100 psi. This insures that they remain rigid and don’t get crushed by cement folks walking on them and will let them know if there is a leak. Very glad to see that both manifolds are still hanging at 100.

Very sadly we lost a branch from one of our oak trees in the wind last week.

 

One sure sign of fall is that my wife begins to bake. This causes some degree of tension in our house though. I have never understood this fascination with making perfectly good cookie dough hard and crunchy by baking it in a hot oven. ‘You’ll not have enough cookies to take to your framing friends if you keep eating all of the dough’ she says. Cookies for my framing friends or dough for me? Tough choice.

We have a floor in the garage and steps to make it easier to get inside.

 

These awning windows were supposed to be push out like the casement windows in the next photo below. Push out fit much better with our traditional architecture and were a big reason why we chose Loewen windows.

 

 

Oh, that ‘not a door’ above? That’s Bob watching out for us and making sure that our new doors aren’t damaged by lots of people using them to go in and out.

Next up? HVAC, plumbing and electrical.