This week, the floor goes down.

And here's an infinite number of oak planks, stacked in the kitchen.

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There's another pile, slightly larger than this one, in the dining room.

(Update: see that window opened right in back of the wood pile? don't do that! you don't acclimate floor material to the outside!)

Many weeks ago, we chose interior doors. Last week, the door guy said the doors we chose don't come in the height we need. So, we picked new doors.

Still no granite.

Current house had four showings last week, with two for the same person. Turns out, that this person is a neighbor who says she wants to stay in the same neighborhood but wants a bigger house. OK. So, she did her two viewings and her realtor started making noises about a "contingent" offer - that's where the buyer makes an offer, but the offer only holds if she sells her current house within X days. If we accept the contingent offer, we can't accept another offer for those X days. So it's risky for us. No offer has been made, contingent or not, so it's hypothetical right now. Plus, this person did the same thing with our neighbor across the street - two showings, talk of a contingent offer, then, nothing.

We got positive feedback from the other two showings, though they probably won't lead to offers.

The "For Sale" sign went up at 9:30 last night. The house appeared in the MLS (the national on-line real estate listing service) this AM.

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Note the little red For Sale sign in the background. That's been there for almost a year.
The free-floating amorphous spirit entity in front of the green house is friendly.

And, we learned at 9:00 AM that we have a showing at 11:00 AM today.

Needless to say, we weren't expecting to have a showing so soon, so the house is not really tidy. So now poor Mrs. is frantically scrambling to get the place cleaned up while I'm at work.

We're kindof bad at this.

Update:
The person who came to see the house yesterday is coming to see it again tonight. That's good news! I'm refusing to believe we could have found a buyer in essentially 12 hours, however. Just seems impossible.

Update:
Granite! On July 20^th, we went to stone yards and picked a handful of stone slabs for consideration. Some we liked; some we didn't love but we knew would fit our allotted budget (based on the "level" system builders and stone yards use to group stones by cost); some probably wouldn't fit the budget, but we wanted to know if we could swing the price difference anyway. So, the two stone yards contacted the stone fabricator with info about our candidate slabs. The fabricator came up with estimates. The stone fabricator then contacted our builder with those estimates. But the builder hasn't contacted us about it - he's notoriously incommunicative. So we still don't know anything about those estimates. It's an absurd and completely inefficient system. It's been almost three weeks, and we only know that the other three parties have talked to each other - none have talked to us. We have to make the decision about which stone to use, but it's impossible for us to get the necessary information out of the other three parties, who treat that information like it's a fucking state secret. Absolutely baffling.

Yesterday, on the way home from a little camping trip in the mountains, we stopped by the house-in-progress to see if there were any new things to complain about. There weren't!

We passed inspection, I guess, because the drywall is up! And oddly, not being able to see through the walls makes the house seem even bigger. Taller, definitely. But also, nearly every room feels wider, longer, bigger. The only exceptions are closets, which feel smaller.

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Fancy staircase, eh? I dig the way they've applied the drywall spackle/adhesive/whatever. We're going with hardwood treads, instead of carpeted, on the stairs. I can't wait to see how the cats deal with that. In our current house, the stairs are the only part of the floor with any carpet, and so it's the only place the cats can really get good traction as they tear around the place.

The exterior is nearly done, except for painting and the porches.

We saw the builder on our way out of the neighborhood. He was complaining, again, that the money has nearly run out; but, he assured us that he's still going to finish the house. We didn't have any idea how to respond to that. Was he suggesting not finishing it would be a realistic option? (No, he wasn't making a joke.) Baffling.

Also: still no quote on the granite. This is a mysterious and frustrating process.

Our current house is going on-sale today. I've been moving stuff to a self-storage site, to make it look like the house has enough closet space - it does, we just have a lot of stuff.

Anyone out there want to live in Apex, NC? It's a nice town.

Last I heard, the stone work is done, the roof is probably done, siding too. On the interior, there's nothing happening - we're waiting for electrical and plumbing inspections. Once that's done, they can start putting up the drywall. Then it will start to look more like a house and less like a carefully-arranged bunch of sticks.

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A router will live near here.

The builder assures us that the standing water on the sub-floor is fine (roof wasn't water-tight and the windows are always open). Sigh.

Last I posted, a week ago, we were in the process of choosing the granite for the counters. Well, the fabricator has not given us any quotes yet, so we still don't know which stone (if any) fits in our preliminary budget. When Mrs. called the fabricator on Friday (8 days after we first met with her) the fabricator said she had been unable to contact the builder to get exact measurements for her estimates. My wife gave her the number for the cabinet people. And we still don't have a front door. I'm to the point where I think we should just go down to the local Lowes and pick one out of their stock. Screw the builder's preferred vendor, if he can't figure out how catalogs and price quotes work.

Wasting time, sitting still.

This weekend we went to see The Stones, a.k.a. the giant slabs of granite that we have to choose from for our kitchen counter tops. These reside at various stone yards throughout the area, and we had to go pick out our slabs. The counter person has samples to pick from, but because granite is a natural stone, each slab is unique; even if two slabs came from the same mine, they will vary in color, streaks, veins, etc.. So, you really need to go pick out the individual slabs you want to use. Which we tried to do.
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The plumber is plumbing. The electrician is wiring. The heat & A/C person is running ducts. The back porch got a floor. They've started the exterior siding (I suppose that means paint color selection is imminent). The mud wasps are apparently having a national convention inside (luckily, they're not aggressive). The glass block window was finally installed in our bathroom!

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They also installed little transom windows in two of the upstairs rooms. Even though they're small (due to the roof line), the light they let in, and the view of the tree tops, changes the character of those rooms considerably. Those little windows cost us $1600. Worth it, though.

I've been looking forward to picking out the stone that they'll use on the exterior accents, and this weekend was the time to do it. I had visions of wandering around a big lot, touching piles of rocks, doing some geology, wondering what kind of lunatic would use this on a house, or who could even afford this hideous stuff! Ha! Morons. It was gonna be awesome. Instead, there were three 2x2 sample boards (a dozen bits of stone fixed to a particle board back) waiting for us in the garage: a light brown mix, a gray mix, a dark brown mix. The builder had said "go drive around the neighborhood, so you can see them installed." But he didn't tell us which house had which, and many houses had none of the three, and ... just three? Options! I want options! Bleh. I'm sure we could have all the options we wanted, for a price. We picked the dark brown mix. Anticlimactic.

This week, we're going to start talking with a realtor friend about selling our current house. There are already six houses for sale between us and the closest main road, and it seems like a new one comes on the market every week. Our neighbor across the street has had their house for sale for close to a year now, but that's unusual. Most seem to sell within a few months. Regardless, we're already committed - we can do two mortgages for a while, but not forever - and the proceeds from selling this house are going to fund a hopefully big chunk of this new house. So, we'll be joining them soon.

Poor Mrs. has spent the last two weeks trying to get the blasted appliance people to tell exactly how big our new refrigerator will be. I've lost track of how many times she's asked them to either tell us the dimensions, or to tell the cabinet people the dimensions. But our contact is terrible about returning calls. She gives conflicting numbers. The info in their ordering system may (or maybe not) be right, so her manager can't tell us what's what. It's just a nightmare. And it's holding up the cabinet people. And until the cabinet people are done, the floor people can't get in, and the electrical people are waiting, and the countertop people are going to wait, etc..

That's right: the problem is that the person, who was specifically assigned to us by our builder, who works at a place that sells appliances, who is responsible for ordering the appliances we selected two weeks ago, still won't tell us the dimensions of the appliances we ordered. Head. Smack.

But, the electrician and the plumbers are starting, doing what they can - everybody comes together in the kitchen and bathrooms, but aside from that, there are things for them to do.

This our main staircase. Ooooh... curved. How opulent! Yeah yeah...

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The builder didn't want to do a curved staircase, even though that's what the plans called for. He just assumed he'd do a standard straight staircase. That's his thing: assume we want what he wants, then go ahead and do it and make us convince him to do it our way. It's not that he's trying to annoy us, he just makes assumptions we feel that he really shouldn't.

And, we're still fighting over the window in the master bathroom. They put in a pair of standard (clear) windows, right above the bath tub. Now, we're in the woods, but if you look out that window, you can clearly see the place where the next house will go, once they build it. So we're like "GLASS BLOCK!!!" He's like "HUH?" His framer has apparently never done such a crazy thing as put glass block windows in a bathroom. And he seems unaware that they come prefabricated, and they just drop in the hole in the wall - just like that standard window did. All he has to do is pull the standard window out (which he has to do anyway, because the bottom is too low and the bathtub doesn't fit underneath it), and put a fucking glass block unit in its place! But no, they resist and hem and haw. Grr.

Anyway, the staircase cost him a bunch of money because he assumed he'd just go ahead and do a straight one. But this curved set had to be built off-site then shipped over. And it's curved, so that's much more labor. But, it was in the plans, and he agreed to build the plan. And there it is, sitting in the garage. I hope they measured correctly !

Cat5... met with the electrician, went over all our ethernet needs, last weekend. At the end of the conversation, he said he'd get an estimate together and send it to me. I was puzzled. The builder's agent (a realtor who is coordinating all of the various sub-contractors and vendors with us) assured us that the builder does cat-5 throughout all of his houses and so we didn't need to put it in the contract. But, the electrician says, no he doesn't do cat-5 in his houses because he assumes everyone will use wi-fi. And now we have to pay extra for it because it's not in the contract. It shouldn't cost a fortune, but it's another expense we weren't expecting.

So far, we're over budget on: windows, fireplace, electrician, plumbing fixtures, cabinets. We'll probably have to pay more for the back porch, since we decided to get the whole thing screened-in instead of just half (I despise bugs). We haven't even looked at kitchen counter tops, tile, paint or light fixtures.

Appliances, plumbing and cabinetry have all been selected and ordered. Whew. So this week, Mrs. met with the electrician to map out the locations of all the light fixtures, outlets, switches, etc.. Then she got the framer to replace a window that was too big, and got him to add some transom windows to a couple of rooms that needed a little more natural light. We're still trying to talk the builder into putting a glass block wall in the bathroom above the bathtub, instead of the standard window he already installed - because why would we want a big window above the bathtub? He's resisting. He's also dropping hints that we've already burned up all his profit on this house with our change requests. We're like "Dude, this is stuff we all agreed to before you started!" So, we're paying extra for those new transom windows.

Tomorrow, I'm going to meet with the electrician and we're going to talk about Cat-5, coax and speaker wiring. Man stuff! It's 104 degrees out right now. Supposed to be even warmer tomorrow. I hope we can get our talking done quickly!

Progress is progressing.

And, we received our first bill for the construction loan. Luckily, it's for less than two hundred dollars. Next month's should be much bigger.

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Kitchen floor. The cabinet people have marked-off spaces on the floor where the appliances and cabinets will go. The electrician put circles on the floor where ceiling lights will go.

You're given $25,000 and a list of items you must buy. The list of choices seems huge at the start, but there are constraints you don't know about and which you will only learn once you get into the process. And while the number of brands is large, the prices between brands and models are unimaginably varie - which you will also discover as you progress. And, you have four hours to get everything. Go!

Yesterday: a full day of housewares shopping. I took a day off from work, even. We spent the morning at the cabinet store, picking cabinets, doors, colors, pulls, layouts, etc.. The cabinet guy had a copy of the builder's plans and had done a CAD mockup with of all the different cabinets we'd need in the house: kitchen, pantry, bathrooms, laundry room, etc. His mockups were pretty much exactly right, and we only had a few minor changes to make. So we spent most of our time picking out the cosmetic stuff. We didn't have many options to choose from when it came to cabinets and door styles, thanks to our budget. We already knew we wanted a really dark stain, so there wasn't much to choose from there, either. That left door style and pulls. The door style choice was made easier by relative cost of the two styles we liked. That left pulls, and that wasn't too hard. So, that was both stressful and anti-climactic. We want very much to make the right choices, but don't really have much to choose from.

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Our new kitchen! Lavish!

Then we drove an hour across town to go the the Carrboro branch of the appliance store (even though the cabinet store was yards from the Raleigh branch of the appliance store...). There, we picked out kitchen appliances and plumbing fixtures. Kitchen appliances were, as with cabinets, severely constrained by budget. There were basically three brands we could consider, and one we discounted based on a reputation for unreliability. So, we got a quick tour of what they had on display and the salesperson said she'd put together a quote of the other two lines. We'd prefer to mix and match between the two, since one brand has some features we like but a lower reputation for reliability, and the other has a better reputation, but is missing some features. But, the manufacturers offer big rebates if you buy their whole line. So not a lot of choice here: one line or the other. But with the rebates, both come out under the builder's allowance.

Plumbing was much more fun: faucets, shower heads, toilets, bathtubs, etc.., lots of little inexpensive decisions. The only really expensive item is the master bathtub (we could have easily blown our whole allowance on a fancy tub). But, we found one that wasn't going to break the bank, and left us lots of room for everything else. We did run just over the allowance here, but since we're well under with appliances, things balance out.

Still lots of things left to pick, though: lighting, paint, counter tops, trim, floors, etc..

One thing that's really sinking in is how truly expensive home furnishings are. This is not going to be an inexpensive house, by any standard. But it would have been no trouble at all to quadruple what we spent kitchen appliances, without going to different stores. Tripling the plumbing budget would be trivial. Though I have no idea how high we could have gone on cabinets, because there weren't prices tags on anything except the pulls, the sales guy was frank about telling us that we weren't shopping anywhere near the high end of what they had available. It's shocking.

When that was done, we stopped by the construction site on our way home. There, we discovered a bunch of things we'd like to change about the framing (want to turn some of the unused space under the upstairs roof slope into storage, want to add windows in a couple of rooms, need a new front door, etc. - all stuff we had talked with the builder about, previously, but which didn't get done by his framing sub-contractor). Hope it's not too late. Work on the house is stalled right now because all the next steps the builder can take depend on all the stuff we picked out today - need to know where the cabinets go and the kind plumbing fixtures we want before the plumbing can start, and we need to know the appliances before cabinets can start. I'm sure electrical is waiting on our lighting and appliances choices, too.

It's a chore. Luckily, Mrs is taking care of the day to day haggling with all the people involved. There's no way I could do it and still do my day job.

Stopped to look at the house yesterday PM and...

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The framing is pretty much complete. All the interior walls are in place. The exterior walls are sheathed. The sub-floors are all in-place. The sub-roof is done. Most of the windows have been installed. So, two weeks to build the skeleton. I'm amazed.

It's the first time we could actually walk inside, as there was no inside, this past weekend. And so it's the first time we really got a real feel for the size and layout of the rooms. We built it flipped from the way the plans were drawn (in order to put the garage/driveway on the right side), so it's been tough to match the drawing to earlier stages of the house. Now, though, the house exists as a physical object, so we don't need to worry about the drawings. Verdict: some rooms are bigger, some are smaller, than I imagined. And the house is much much taller than I thought it would be. Not sure why that is.

Today, we go select kitchen appliances. Next week, once we know the size of all the appliances, we go to select cabinetry. We have to select the plumbing fixtures this week or next, too.

Today we have an appointment, arranged by our builder with a kitchen appliance dealer he prefers. We can buy the stuff anywhere, but we might get a discount or something if we go through this dealer (don't know, we just got the number of the place yesterday!) This will be our first time dealing with a builder's allowance. An allowance is where the builder says "you have $X to spend on these things. go pick them out." In this case, "these things" are the oven, stove, refrigerator, etc.. If you go over the $X amount, you pay the difference directly to the vendor. Digging through Consumer Reports, we learned that kitchen appliances can get very expensive; we could blow our entire kitchen allowance just on the stove, or on the refrigerator, for example. Most models are not that expensive, and it's certainly possible to do it all for much less than we're allowed. But still, it's going to be tricky to stay within the allowance, in the face of all that shiny new stuff. Right now, I'm determined to do it, but we'll know by 5:30 this evening if I was able to hold firm...