House Updates

The house is coming along slowly but that is to be expected. The stage we are at now is supposed to be slow. The plumbing is done, the gas line has been run and connected and all the plumbing for that is in place. The furnaces and water heaters are in too. The electrician started last week and will finish in a few days, then we have another inspection before the sheetrock begins. We are on schedule to move in around mid-April.

Here is the front of the house. The siding is done but the stone hasn't arrived yet. The bottom half of the walls will be stone. The stone is a cultured stone that has lots of earth tones in it. The stones are different sizes and create a beautiful pattern. I am hoping it will look as fantastic in reality as it does in my head!

This is the view down the left side of the house. The house is a lot deeper than it seems looking at it straight on. You can tell where the stone goes in this shot.

This is one of the spaceships in our attic. Oh wait, it's actually a furnace. It is suspended from the rafters and doesn't touch the floor. This is supposed to make it virtually silent. We'll see about that. Levi took one look and went oooohhhhhh, then backed away from it. Oh well, so much for attic storage space...... There is a second one on the other side of the house too.

This is the view of the back. The portion on the right without windows is the back of the garage. Where the covered porch is on the back will then have a large patio area off of it. We are thinking of adding a covered area off the back of the garage and creating a kid play zone there. Put things like the sandbox and playhouse. That way if it is too hot or is raining they would have a nice shady or dry place to play.

Chris's company is doing a couple of large jobs up near here right now and part of the job requires them to haul away a lot of dirt. He is having his guys bring 20 or 30 dumptruck loads to our land. He will use most of it to build the pad for the barn, and some to fill in the pseudo pond that resulted from where they dug out the clay for the pad for the house. Then later he has another job where he is going to get a bunch of good topsoil and bring it to our land, too. We should be all set to grow grass and trees and whatever else. He is also going to have his guys come and dig the real pond way out back where we want it. We are going to set it up as kind of a wilderness area. We will put a deer feeder out there and stock the pond with fish. I want to grow cattails and lily pads in the pond (I have no idea if those even grow in Texas???) We will plant lots of trees back there for a refuge for the deer and other wildlife. It will take years to get to where we want it, but it will be fun to watch it develop.