Making Progress, making decisions

The stone is going on the house!

Luke, the mason, cutting the stone

The weeds are growing...like weeds!

     Yes--I am finally back blogging. Summer is way too busy.  The house building is definitely moving at a faster pace now. The parade of homes date is set for 10/20 through 10/23. How exciting! I will officially have the house on my birthday, 10/23! Its amazing how step by step it is nearing completion. I agonized over my decisions on the house colors for the exterior. I  had 4 things to decide upon: : stone, siding, dryvit (stucco) and trim color. In my case, I happened to choose what was labeled as "tan" for the window color but really is an almond/light yellow color. That it turn determined the choice of the soffit color which in turn determined the trim color since they are usually one and the same. I now understand why most people stick with white for the window/soffit/trim color: IT MATCHES EVERYTHING.
     This is not the path I chose however! I decided I wanted something different besides white. Little did I realize at the time that it would narrow down my choices for siding, stone, and dryvit colors, since my trim color doesn't match to much. With the help of Jamie, the builder, and Jason, the guy at Fond du Lac stone and brick, I was able to come up with a good match with the stone. To come up with a dryvit color, I personally when to the place that sells it, then compared nearly 37 colors with a sample of my soffit.  I took those that seemed to be the closest match to the stone company, Fond du Lac stone and brick. As you can see in the pictures, the colors look great together--whew!
    A funny thing happened when I was first investigating trim colors. . The plan calls for something called Azek trim which is durable and made out of PVC.  I was imagining all sorts of different colors for this and how it would affect the other choices that I had to make. I decided to check out the website on the Azek trim. So, I clicked on the website http://www.azek.com/ and clicked on " trim". Then I clicked on "colors". What appeared to be a white screen showed up. I was puzzled. "Where are the colors?" I thought. "There must be some mistake!" So I clicked on another section that they had for materials used in making decks.  On the page appeared 12 different colors. I clicked back to the trim section. White. No colors! I had to laugh. I decided that this was the universe's answer to my poor decision making--I only get one choice when it comes to trim.  Actually, as it turns out, the trim gets painted to the color of your choice, and in my case it will match the soffit color (the almond color).
   The other thing I got very excited about was the insulation. My old house, the cottage, had no insulation until we put some in about 6 years ago. This meant we got lots of drafts and our house was always cold. We had no indoor air pollution either--new air circulated frequently through the walls. My new house is insulated to the max. I was actually surprised at the amount of insulation. First they do   3" of spray foam around all the windows and sills. Then they spray 1 inch of a soy based, non toxic  foam into the walls. On top of that is a cellulose batting. The inside walls get the batting too. My house is a marshmellow! The install some type of air exchanger to help exchange the air.


Colleen and Caroline at the entryway of my insulated house