House progress

We had a little bit of forward motion on the house today. Bright and early at 7am our framer came to chalk out the lines on the footings, and supposedly lumber was going to come today, too. We were all ready to see walls up by the end of the day! At 7:45 they were done chalking and off they went.

Look! Chalk lines! (I made the photo big since chalk lines aren't that impressive.) But there are also TWO BIG LADDERS! That must be a sign of progress, right?

Even more mysterious was this:

I'm still not sure what this door is doing here in our gravel pile. We do not have white six-panel doors in the addition. Or our existing house, either, for that matter. The addition has clear-finished maple three-panel doors. My best guess is that this was a marker for the person who delivered the plywood later in the afternoon, but even that is a less than satisfactory answer.

Other excitement of the day involved Matt going over the window order (remember the quote we got last week?) Well, Matt wanted to double check sizes, window grills, colors, operating mechanism (we have double-hung, awning and casement windows all in the addition). And quantities. Oops. One window type we have *12* of in the addition, and there were only *2* listed in the quote. [sinking feeling. Hm. Yes. 10 windows at just under $600 each, yep - there goes that $6000 cost difference we'd been so very excited about for obvious reasons!] So he called the rep, only to get the beautiful news that the quantity listed in the print out was wrong, but the windows really were included in that quote! AND, two windows had grills that weren't supposed to, so now our total for windows is just under $17,000 instead of just over.

Wow.

And the last bit of excitement is that when we got back from supper at Matt's mom's tonight around 7pm, our framer and his one-man crew and some 2x lumber were working their way around the site! By the time they left around 7:30, they had all the top and bottom plates lined up around the perimeter, and holes for the anchor bolts drilled. Woo hoo!

They plan to be back tomorrow at the end of the day to get a few more hours of work in. It's tough watching it go SO slowly when all we can think is that 1) K is going to be home sooner than we realize (hopefully!) and 2) it would be really nice to have the addition mostly livable, at least the upper level, by the time he comes home so that if Matt's mom wants to come here at that point, she has the option. (Any time before K comes complicates things with US Immigration because it constitutes a significant household change and she would need to be fingerprinted and go through all the background checks that we did. If she moves in after K comes home, it's not an issue.)

Phew.