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.

Ooof!

Ooof!  That's about all I can say about the past week or so.  All last week, I was on a business trip to Bangor, Maine.  While I don't mind going up there (or the 6 hour car ride), it just makes for a long week.  We left Schenectady on Tuesday around 11:30am and didn't arrive in Bangor until 6:30pm.  It was a good week of meetings, but a long week.

On Wednesday, I saw the weather reports and was concerned about my parents who were in Florida at the time.  Hurricane Irene was, at that point, thinking of smacking Florida.  Thankfully, my parents got home and didn't have to worry about the hurricane at all on their trip to Florida.

However, by late Thursday, Irene was aiming for North Caroline and the east coast.  We drove back to Schenectady from Maine on Friday and it ended up taking a lot longer as there were a ton of people from the Boston area driving west to get away from the storm.

Saturday was spent putting all the outside stuff away in the garage (garbage cans, flower pots, chairs, etc) and we did some grocery shopping.  I was able to find a few containers to store water in, and thank goodness that I did.

Late Saturday, the first bits of rain started to hit us.  It didn't seem too bad though.  Sunday morning...we had full downpours happening.  The winds weren't too bad, but a lot of rain.  Our power went out around 10am on Sunday morning.  Shortly thereafter, a large tree came down across the road next to us and completely took out the power lines.  So much for this being a "weak" storm.  The winds were really picking up and all we could do is watch branches and trees come down and the roads fill up with water.

As the winds started to die down later in the day, we took a drive over to the new house to see how it had fared.  Thankfully no damage to the house or well....however, we did lose about a dozen very large trees to the wind.  The trees we lost were mainly due to large poplar trees, with very shallow roots, falling and taking out a bunch of other trees with them.  But as I said...at least no permanent damage.

While we were at the lot, we did get cell phone messages that Rich's sister was out of power and they had 3-4" of water in their basement.  We were able to borrow a generator for a few hours and pumped out her basement.  They were lucky with only 3-4" of water...their neighbors had 3 feet of water in their basement. 

Late Sunday evening, we got back home and had some yogurt and cereal for dinner.  We were trying to eat some of the perishable goods in the fridge since we still didn't have power.  Ultimately, our power wasn't restored until about 9pm on Monday evening...36 hours without electricity.  We were definitely glad when it came back on.

The flooding in the area was unbelievable though.  At one point on Monday, all the bridges over the Mohawk river were closed.  There was no way to get from one side to the other.  The police, however, did open up one bridge because it was insane that people couldn't get across the river.  Thankfully, the major bridges on I-87 were reopened (they had closed due to a runaway barge with a 30 foot crane on it) so at least there were 2 bridges on that side of Albany and then one bridge on this side.  What a crazy day!

Things are slowly getting back to normal for us, but for many others, they are still without power and some without homes due to the flooding.  Its going to take some time for the community to rebound after this.

House Update - 19Aug

I have more pictures, but blogger is not being happy about uploading them currently.  There has been quite a bit of progress on the house over the week or so.  Most of it is not really "blog worthy".  All the electrical and plumbing rough-in is done, but it really doesn't look like much and its rather boring.

However, they did get more siding up on the house.  I do have a picture of the entire front of the house, but since Blogger apparently didn't like it...all you get is the front of the main portion of the house.  The "trim" over the windows will eventually be painted the same light tan as the rest of the trim around the windows.  It just comes as white, so it looks "eh" right now.

They did finish all the siding on the back of the house.  :-)  They still have to finish the garage and the "eave" above the garage and the chimney, but you can really get the idea of what the back will look like.  Houses are all kind of "blah" from the back, but it doesn't seem quite so "blah" with the red.  Its really hard to believe that this is the first red house that our building is doing.  It such a bold color that very few people are willing to do it.  I guess we wanted to stand out. ;-)

 

We also have a fireplace now!  Rich didn't want to move the cement board, which I can't blame him since that stuff is HEAVY, so you only get a partial picture of the fireplace.  Its fully wood-burning (since we have 16 acres of trees...we might as well use them) and it will eventually have stone around it.  There will also be a hearth at the bottom where you can actually sit and be near the fireplace.

  

 This next one is hard to figure out what it is...but its a picture looking UP at the ceiling in the 2-story foyer.  They finished all the sheet-rocking of the ceiling on the 2nd floor and have most of the master bedroom sheet-rocked.  The first floor also has 1 room (dining room) with the ceiling installed.  Most of the rooms have insulation, so I'm guessing that they will make good progress today in buttoning up the walls.

Its been exciting to see the house take shape.  Now that they're starting to close in walls, I'm sure we'll be even more excited.

Our closing date isn't until the middle of November, but there's still a lot of work to do.  They have to finish the walls, tape it all, spray-foam the master bedroom, final electrical, painting, floors, trim work, cabinets, hardware, and a bunch of other little things that just take time.

Hopefully we'll be moved in by Thanksgiving!

Stashbusting 2011 - Week 33

Again, I haven't posted very often over the past few weeks.  Check out my other recent posts to see what has been up....

However, I did get binding done on a quilt about 2 weeks ago and it hasn't been counted as a stash report yet.  I also made another block for my scrappy quilt (16-patch blocks made up of 2" squares - finished size - and all the squares are from the various quilts I've made).  I did also buy some FQ's...but they were on sale so its a good buy. ;-)

So here's the numbers for the past few weeks:
Added This Week:       6.25 yards
Added Year to Date:    43.89 yards
Used This Week:         0.47 yards
Used Year to Date:      23.92 yards
Net Year to Date:        19.97 yards

How did everyone else do?

Finished!

Last night, after a final last push, I was able to finish the needlepoint that I've been working on for close to 3 years.  Here's "Starry Night":

Its something like 20 wide x 15 high or something like that.  I don't remember the number of stitches high and wide, but it came out to 70,500 stitches on the thing.

I also have some updated pictures on progress at the house.  Our front doors have finally been delivered.  They still need to be stained, but here's kind of what they will look like.

Here's a picture of the front corner of the garage completely finished.  The color of the siding and trim is spectacular!  We absolutely love it.  I can't wait to see the rest of the house finished.

All the electrical will be done this weekend (supposedly) and the insulation starts on Monday.  Then drywall starts on the 22nd.  It will be exciting to see things closed in finally and have the rooms take more shape.

Health & Fitness

I recently went to the doctor and the results were less than what I had wanted.  Ultimately, I've been very stressed out and haven't exercised in God knows how long.  I'm very badly out of shape and my heart rate isn't exactly what it should be.  My goal over the next few months is to ACTUALLY start exercising more and to lose some weight.

I think once I start losing some weight from exercising, my heart rate should get better (along with my overall fitness level).

I've always found it difficult to motivate myself to exercise, so I'm hoping that by posting here, I may have more motivation to keep going.  Its really odd since I used to be very physically fit.  Even as recently as about 4 years ago I was pretty fit.  I was going to the gym for at least an hour a day Monday through Thursday and then on Fridays we were going rock climbing at a local center.  I was down to 126 lbs at the time and looked and felt great.  I broken a bone in my foot in June 2007 and since then I've had a hard time getting myself back into exercising.  Work has also been difficult, which really makes it such that I don't want to exercise at night.

I know a lot of these things are just excuses, but its hard to change how you think.  I'm hoping that I can continue to motivate myself and keep the exercise going.

The goal for this week is to walk 30 minutes each day.  I'll post on Sunday evening on how I did. ;-)

House Update - 15 July

This is a relatively "picture-free" post.  The builders finished up the roof and installed all the windows except the master bath.  Here's what things look like now:

The only windows not installed are the master bath windows and that's just because they need to get the tub in through the window.  Its possible to get the tub in through the doorways, but its just easier to lift it through the window with a crane...after all, its a cast iron tub!

We're supposed to have the electrical walk-through soon.  I think this will be one of the hardest things to do.  How do you decide where you want electrical outlets?  You have to kind of know where you want things in the room to make sure you put outlets where you need/want them.  Probably the only room that will be "easy" is the sewing room....just put lots of outlets on every wall. :-)

I probably won't have a lot of pictures of the house unless they put the siding on soon.  As we get into doing the interior (dry-wall, etc) then I'll be able to show more of the insides.  The pictures I have of the interior are a little hard to understand since you can "see through" the walls right now.

House Update - 12 July

Before I jump into progress on the house yesterday, I wanted to share some pictures of the flowers at our rental.  When we first moved into the rental, I was a little bummed out that I wasn't going to have a lot of flowers this summer.  At our house in Scotia, we had lots of flowers and it was nice seeing them bloom all summer.

Earlier this spring though, I noticed that the woman who used to own the house we're renting had a few roses.  I've tried to clear out the grass around the roses, but its a losing battle!  However, over the past two weeks, I noticed some daylilies blooming next to the house.  They were hidden by some sumac that was taking over the area, so when my parents were visiting last week, my mom and I tore out all the junk plants around the daylilies (including a very invasive sumac and american grape vine).  In doing so, we've uncovered a ton of daylilies that are now clamoring for the sun.  Every day I see a new color pop-up.  Here's the colors so far:

This was the lily I first noticed since it was on the outside corner.  This one spurred the tearing out of the rest of the junk in that corner.  Its absolutely gorgeous!

So onto the house...

The framers/roofers finished the shingles on the main portion of the roof yesterday.  The roof cap isn't in yet, but I'm hoping it will go on today to help keep water out of the house.

They also framed out the chimney on the back of the house.  Even though the fireplace isn't in yet, the chimney is started and they have the materials for the flue.

The windows were also all delivered yesterday.  I didn't upload any pictures of them since they're pretty boring sitting in their boxes. ;-)  However, we have all the windows at the house including the sliding glass door for the back.  I'm hoping the builder will get the windows installed today....next will come siding! :-)

House Update - 11 July

I haven't posted in a while since I was on vacation last week. A much needed vacation I might add. :-)

Rich and I didn't really go anywhere for vacation, but it was enough not going into work every day.  We spent some time with Rich's parents at Peck's Lake, some time with my parents at the rental house, shopping for house stuff, shopping for work clothes (we both needed them desperately) and spending time at the lot.

We saw quite a bit of progress last week.  At the end of my last post, we had the first floor framed.  Now we have the entire second floor framed, too.  The roof decking is also installed and they even started putting shingles onto the roof.  Here are some pictures from last week:

Family Room -- right side are windows, straight in the back is a fireplace (where its framed)

 

Roof trusses on the 2nd floor

Our builder even uses hurricane clips.  While we don't get hurricanes very often in upstate NY, its nice to see that he's doing things really well to make sure we won't have any problems with high winds.

Picture from the back of the house with most of the trusses up.  If you look over the right hand end of the house, it looks like there's a flat spot on the peak of the roof.  They just hadn't put up the peak trusses yet.

All the roof trusses are up and the decking started.  On the left hand side of the picture, you can see that the peak trusses are now up over the master bedroom.

View at the front of the house now that the roof decking is up.

Back of the house with the shingles started.

Today is another warm, sunny day out so we expect the framers to finish up with the roof today.  I think our windows will probably go in soon, too.  yay!  I can't wait to see the siding go up on the house!

House Update - 30June

I haven't posted anything about the house in the past two weeks, but there's definitely been progress.  The last pictures I posted were here.  We had the footings poured and the forms up for the walls.  At this stage, they have completed:

• Pouring walls and removing forms
• Waterproofing and back-filling around the walls
• Rough grading of the property
• Basement-to-first floor joists installed
• First floor completely framed!

I don't have all the possible pictures online to show, but here's a good synopsis of the progress on the house.

This is from Tuesday, June 26th.

This is from Wednesday, June 27th.

This is from Thursday, June 28th.

There has been quite a bit of progress in a short amount of time.  Its quite exciting to see the walls being constructed and the house actually taking shape.