House Update - 26September2011

I haven't posted anything on the house in about 3 weeks or so.  Mainly because the taping of the drywall was taking FOREVER!  Or at least it seemed like forever.  The guy did a great job and it looks awesome, but it was somewhat frustrating to visit the house and essentially see nothing happening.  It takes a long time for one person to put 3 layers of spackle on all the seams in a ~3000 sq ft house!

The good news is...things are really picking up.  There were lots of materials delivered at the end of last week including the fake stone for the fireplace, tile for the bathroom and foyer and the hardwood floors.

The hardwood floors are actually installed now in their un-finished state.  They will be sanded in place and stained a rich brown color.

The foyer tile also looks really good.  Here's a picture from the 2nd floor which makes it easier to see the pattern.  Then there's another picture that's closer down so you can see the actual tile.

Finally, they started tiling the bathroom floor.  I agree, it looks kind of boring in this picture, but in person it looks really nice.  There's more color variation that you see on the tile in person than what the camera picks up.

We're hoping they'll finish up the foyer today and possibly start the shower tile.  Its definitely moving along now.

We were able to take a walk through our builder's last house when it was about at this stage.  It took them about 6 weeks to finish up everything else, so that puts us on track for finishing up 2nd week of November.  Hopefully they stay on this track! :-)

Allergies....

...are kicking my hind end today.  They've been steadily getting worse over the past two days, but today, I feel like I've gotten hit in the head by a two-by-four.  Usually, my allergies (or as my 3-year-old niece puts it...aller-jesus) aren't too bad.  However, in the spring they are bad (due to flowering trees) and in the fall they get bad due to goldenrod, ragweed, etc.  It will be at least another two weeks of this stuff being bad, so I'm not looking forward to it.

On a good note though....ITS FALL!!!

I love this time of year, despite the allergies.  I love seeing the trees change colors and waking up to brisk, cool mornings.  The days are still fairly warm, but the morning and evenings are nice and cool.

There's just under 2 months left until we're supposed to close on our house.  I haven't posted pictures in a while, because, to be honest, there isn't anything exciting to show.  Every time we walk into the house we say "what did they do today?" and neither of us can answer it.  We know that the guy doing the drywall taping/sanding is working, but since its only one person, it goes VERY slowly.  We've been told that once this guy is done, we'll see progress go forward again a lot faster.

We do have the stone in for around the fireplace along with the tile for the master bathroom, foyer and kitchen.  They're all in palettes and in boxes, so there isn't anything to show there either.  The hardwood is sitting in piles in the living room to get acclimated to the house before it gets installed.  It has to sit for at least 2 weeks before they can do anything with it.

I'm hoping the guy with the drywall is done soon because then the paint goes on the walls.  We've picked some pretty bold colors, but they are also very classic colors.  Hopefully they will look really good. :-)

As soon as I have some decent pictures to show of the house, I'll post them.

Vacation! Wahoo!

No...I'm not going on vacation any time soon.  I have to wait until the first week of November for my next day off from work.

However, work did send out an email last night saying they're changing our benefits for 2012.  Now, most people went ahead and deleted the email since most times when they make benefits changes...its not for the good!  This time though, people were forwarding and re-reading the email and PDF file multiple times.

Policies are changing such that if you have 1-5 years of service, you get 3 weeks of vacation (versus 2).  Between 5 and 15 years of service you get 4 weeks (it used to be at 5 years you got 3 weeks of vacation and then at 10 years you get 4 weeks).  There were some other minor changes, but the big one was the vacation time.  All of these changes are effective January 1st.

Luckily for me, not only would I get the 3 weeks of vacation starting January 1st because I have 1-5 years of experience, I hit my 5-year anniversary next year. :-)  So I'll go from 2 weeks of vacation this year to 4 weeks next year.  I'm liking the fact that I'll be doubling my vacation time. 

Quilting classes 2012....here I come!

Stashbusting 2011 - Week 37

Its been a few weeks since I posted a "stash busting" post, but I have done some sewing here and there.

First up, I've designed a "sampler" quilt in EQ.  It uses a lot of traditional blocks and the first one is Storm at Sea. This is the first time I've tried to make one of these blocks along with a first at foundation piecing.  While the points aren't EXACTLY perfect...they're pretty darn close.  Or at least good enough for me on a first try at something.

Next up are some blocks for a scrappy quilt I'm making.  Whenever I cut fabric for a quilt and I have excess left over, I just cut it into 2.5" squares.  Then as I'm piecing for a quilt (or just want some mindless sewing) I can randomly grab 2.5" squares and sew them into 16-patch blocks.  Once I have enough of these, I'll make a queen-sized quilt to fit our bed.

Finally, I have some little odd-n-ends type things I've been sewing.  These "blocks" are made out of mostly flannel squares that I had given to me.  They are 3.5" squares sewing into little cubes and stuffed with machine-washable fiberfill.  They are very soft and squishy, and will make some good little gifts for babies.

So how did I do over the past few weeks?

Added This Week:       0 yards
Added Year to Date:    43.89 yards
Used This Week:         1.42 yards
Used Year to Date:      25.34 yards
Net Year to Date:        18.55 yards

My goal for the end of the year is to get to 50 yards used this year so I'm halfway there!

House Update - 06September2011

 Things have been moving forward on the house, even if I haven't been posting pictures here. ;-)

Most of the pictures are rather boring at this stage since they are framing and electrical details.  Last week, the builder finish putting sheet-rock up throughout the house.  I have a bunch of pictures, but Blogger doesn't always like it when I upload pictures and it seems to be giving me fits today.  I'll have to try them again later.

Here's what we have right now though....

This picture is standing at the doorway of the mudroom and looking in towards the kitchen.  (Ignore my husband on the right hand side of the picture. ;-)  ).

This next picture is looking into the dining room.

This one is standing in the dining room and looking into the "formal" living room, which will actually be where we will eventually put a billiards table.

 Sorry for the sideways picture here.  I tried to turn it, but when it uploaded, Blogger put the picture back sideways....weird!  So we actually have real stairs now.  No handrail yet, but at least the stairs are there.

I'm hoping to get some better pictures later this week.  We've also started picking out paint colors, so that will be fun to see the color go up on the walls.  We trying to be relatively neutral for some areas...like the foyer, kitchen, family room and bedrooms.  However, the rest of the rooms are going to be pretty bold colors.  I guess we really got tired of having white walls in our last place and are willing to have someone else paint the bold colors to begin with. :-)

Enjoy the pictures!

Storm Pictures

Here are some pictures from the storm.

This first one was taken around 10:30am on August 28th.  This was across the street from our rental house and that's the tree that took out all our power...for 36 hours.

This is the "exit" of the culvert under the driveway at the new house.  The water was exploding from the end of it because there was so much water trying to get through the "small" 18-inch pipe.

This is what it was doing on the entrance side of the culvert.  Definitely a lot of water and there was so much that it couldn't all fit through the 18-inch pipe.

 

This is what the driveway actually looked like...  Because there was so much water trying to get through the culvert and it wouldn't fit, we actually had a really fast moving stream going across the entire width of the driveway.  Its hard to tell, but the water at the deepest spots was about 12" deep.  We walked through the shallowest areas and it was still well over ankle-deep water.

Here's some of the damage to the trees.  You can see a large poplar down in the front and then another one down way in the back.  The middle tree (the one that's bent) is was a really nice maple.  Unfortunately, a vine was tangled up between the poplar and maple, so when the poplar fell, it took the maple with it.  We're still trying to figure out how to cut that bent maple.  There's a ton of energy stored in that bent section, so we need to be very careful about it "springing" when its cut.

These downed trees are near our well.  Thankfully they didn't hit the well.  Just more trees to have to cut up at some point.  We're not quite sure how to get them down as they are pinned into some other trees.  We may need our neighbor's help since he has a large tractor that could probably pull the back end of the tree out from under itself such that the top section will fall.

This is just another view of the roots being pulled out from the trees near the well.

This picture is the "stream" that runs on the northern side of the property.  It is usually just a trickle this time of year, but on Sunday it was raging.  The actual bottom of the stream is about 2-3 feet below the top of the water in the picture.

These next pictures were taken on Monday, August 29th.  This is the creek all the way in the back of our property.  It was still flowing about 3 or 4 feet higher than normal, but you can tell that the water has gone down a lot compared to what it was.

In the first picture, you can see the reeds and plants that were essentially blown over by the force of the water.  Everything is "smooched" down in the direction of water flow.

In this picture, you can see the debris that got piled up on the bank.  It would have been cool to see the creek at its highest, but we didn't feel comfortable walking back through the woods to get there on Sunday.  The winds were still blowing a bit and we really didn't want to have a tree come down on top of us.

Soon I'll have some updated pictures of the house.  The siding on the outside is completely done and all the rooms have drywall up.  We think that they are taping the inside early this week such that they can start on all the finishing work.