Framing has begun

So apparently framing the house (building the timber frame) takes about 10 days.  As you can see it has begun, so in about a week there will be a basic house built.  Thats gonna be a huge milestone.

Starting to take shape.  They have framed most of the lower right hand side of the house.  The front right room is the study/office.

Here is the view from the left, taken from the two car garage.  You can see the wall, laying on the floor ready to be hoisted up into place.

This is taken from the back center of the house.  At the front is the study then behind that is the Master Suite.

This is a window at the back of the Master Bedroom.  Again, nice that there is no other house back there.

This is along the back of the house.  The first bit that juts out is the where the fireplace in the Family room will be.  The second larger part jutting out is the breakfast nook.  From where I took the picture to the near edge of the breakfast nook will be the screened porch.

Down under.  This is the crawl space under the house.  Apparently people use it for storage of  durable items but I don't plan on spending any time down here.

And here's the whole thing (again from the neighbors attic).  On the framed part there is the study (on the right) and master bedroom (on the left).  Between them is the master bathroom (middle left) and a walk in closet (middle right).

The (left hand) neighbor

This house is not sold yet but they are building on spec.  (Which is nice because it means they won't be building it after we have moved in).  Its coming along well....

Garages and Lot

Time for some updates.  For those of you who are familiar with the story of the easement, suffice to say we are moving ahead.  For those who are not, don't even worry about it.  I may do a post on the easement issue, or I may not....

Anyhoo, things have progressed.  The was a small sprinkling of snow at the start of the week which apparently slowed down delivery of lumber but, things have picked up again.  I expect things to go fast from here...

There are two garages.  Here you can see the two car garage in the foreground and the single car garage in the rear.

From the attic of the neighboring house you get a great view of the whole plan.  Again the garages are poured concrete.  The front porch is gravel and the rest of the house is currently crawl space.

On this one you can see the back of the lot a little more.  On the right the lot extends all the way down almost to the road.  In the left its more shallow but backs onto a pond (you can just see the edge of it behind the trees).  (The lot is not confined by the orange fence thing, almost all of the trees on the back are ours.)

And here you can see the back left corner of the house and the pond in the background.  We love this lot because unlike most there is no-one behind the house.  Across the road you can see an outhouse from a neighboring farm.

Level Lot

Visited the lot briefly this afternoon. We had the "pre-construction Meeting" with the builder on Tuesday, more on that when I have time. Anyway he had told us that today they would be doing some work on the lot in preparation for framing. So we went up and I think it looks great. They did a nice job leveling out the ground around the house and in the crawl space. See for yourself:

This is the view from the road of the front of the house.  You can see that the house is a good way back from the cul-de-sac.  The little digger is working in what will be the 2 car garage.  The lot is like a pizza slice, it gets wider as you go back.

Thats going to be the front step on the left.  Just one step up which is good.  You can see that they have leveled the ground in the crawl space.

View from the side of the lot looking at the side of the house.  The gap will be a access door for the crawl space.

View from the back edge of the cleared space.  The lot actually includes most of these trees.  At the back is a storm water storage pond that they have just started to landscape.

Bricks

OK, so now you can see the outline of the house in brick. The brick pillars that you can see through our are supports. The house sits on top of the outline + pillars leaving a crawl space underneath. I'm told this approach has some advantages over a slab but not exactly sure what those are. I guess if anything ever goes wrong its easier to get at the plumbing etc. but I don't ever intend to go crawling around down there....

Busy week

Not much to report. We met with the designer earlier in the week (as previously reported) but have not had time to visit the site. Debbie is in New York for the week end getting her big city fix and abusing a poor defenseless credit card.

I go out and visit the site sometime today and see if anything has happened.

We have a Pre-Construction meeting with the builder on Tuesday so that will be pretty interesting.

For now, I'll leave you with a cute picture of the kids. :-)

Starting to make decisions

We met with the designer today and selected the windows, stone and exterior colors. It was surprisingly fast and easy.... more later. Running out to swimming with the kids right now.

Foundations

OK, so here are some assorted pictures of the lot and the foundations which got poured this week.

The Rosemont

OK, so they have already built one model that will be similar to ours. The finished product will look similar to this.

Its their Rosemont model. 3,832 sq feet. 4 bed/3.5 baths. 3 car garage. Recreation and Play rooms upstairs. Master Suite on Ground floor (bit weird for us but think it will work well as the kids get older). Screened porch with gas/wood buying fire place.

Welcome to our new home

Well this is the start of the new pad. I know we never actually got around to finishing the road trip blog but all in all I'd say it was a success. So encouraged by that experience we thought we'd start a blog following the construction of our new pad.

So, to get you up to speed, we bought a new place on Friday 3rd Feb 2012 (see HJ posing beside the sold sign). We've settled so well in NC we decided that it was time to get serious about buying a place in the new year. Well, things moved fast.

We had visited Bells Casa a few times but it wasn't in the same school district and we do not want to move the kids again. Then (as seems to happen around here due to the growth) they changed how the schools are districted and Bella Casa came into play.

Bella Casa is about 3 miles from downtown Apex and has a country feel. That said its actually a pretty big development with a lot of homes. We bought at the Bella Casa Estates which is the part of Bella Casa being developed by Royal Oaks Building Group. ROBG are a local and fast growing building company. we did a lot of research and they really seem to be very good. They are fairly new to building Custom Homes but they have hired some very experienced guys to run that part of the business. We met them and have a lot of confidence in their product.

Anyway, here is the link to the Bella Casa website. We bought lot 11.

http://www.estatesbellacasa.com/community-info/

Its the biggest lot available and much larger than what seems to be typically available with a new home. Any new homes we have seem all seem to be at about 0.3 of an acre. So I'm excited about the space.

Oh, I should also say (in case you have not gathered this yet) the place is not built yet. So we get to choose all our own fixtures and fittings. That should make for a few spirited discussions... :-)