Sheetrock in Bonus Room and Garage

They are almost done with sheetrocking the bonus room and garage, and should be doing the ceilings soon. Here is the bonus room coffered ceiling - lots of white!





This is the bonus room bath.



Here's the garage. Hopefully they'll be pouring the floor soon.

You can see the outline of the bonus room stairs in the back of the garage. We're hoping to use the area under the stairs for storage of our bikes, the lawnmower and the snowblower.

They SHOULD be starting the siding this week. We'll see!

Ceilings & Grading

They finished sheetrocking the main house and did the ceilings as well. The ceilings are knock-down - not as nice as regular sheetrock but much better than the junky popcorn ceilings we have now. At least you can paint these ceilings!


Georgia's coffered ceiling looks great!

They also did some grading around the house. As you can see here, the house sits fairly high up from the street so we will need a retaining wall similar to that in front of the other houses on the block.

The area behind the garage will be graded to create a trough so the water from the backyard (which extends to the left in the picture) is diverted to the drain shown here with the orange "fence" around it. Hopefully the unsightly fence will be removed once construction is completed!

Next up are sheetrocking the garage and the bonus room, pouring the concrete garage floor, interior painting, and installing the siding. Estimated closing date as of now is just after the July 4th holiday. It can't come soon enough!

Sheetrock!

They started the sheetrock this week, and as you can see, they are moving really quickly! In fact, they worked on Saturday and it sounds like they were going to work on Sunday as well. Here is the view from a few feet inside the front door. This is the coffered ceiling in Georgia's master bedroom. The ceiling height on the second floor is eight feet but the inside of the coffered area is over nine feet high, which adds a lot to the volume of the room in addition to being an interesting architectural feature. This is the second floor hall looking toward the front of the house, with the door to the second floor porch in the center. This is the dining room; note the tray ceiling (which matches the ceiling in the living room across the hall) and the box bay window. The white box with the exhaust tube is a heater; they tape the drywall and then mud it to cover the seams and need the mud to dry well before they apply the next layer. They apply three layers of mud in all, then they sand it smooth. That's the MESSY part - luckily it won't matter in a new house.

We learned an interesting thing this week - our builder doesn't put on the siding until after the drywall is hung since there's a chance the house can settle due to the weight of the drywall. There's a low probability of that happening, but why take the chance. So after the drywall is all hung we should see the siding go on!

Insulation Up & Down

They're pretty close to done with insulating the house. This is a picture of the bonus room with the closet in the back right and the bath in the back left. Since we're going to be using the bonus room above the garage as a second master suite, we're having the garage insulated as you can see here. We're also getting insulated garage doors with thermal, double-pane windows. And we're finishing the garage walls and ceiling. We're not finishing the basement, so this insulation is what the walls will look like until/if we decide to finish it some day. The shiny silver does make it brighter down there even with no lights. It also makes it look even bigger, if that's possible! We have the egress window to the right (you can see the light hitting the floor) and three hopper windows along the opposite wall. It was cloudy today, so when it's sunny there will be even more light.

Not insulation, but the porch flooring is in on both the upper and lower (shown here) porches. Next step will be either sheetrock or siding or both together. Once the sheetrock is complete they'll be able to give us a tentative closing date. We're estimating late June, but we'll know more soon.

Waiting for inspections

We think they're pretty much done with most of the pre-drywall stuff, and that they're waiting for inspections by the city. The electrician finished on Wednesday - making the changes we asked for on our walk-through last week. This is one of the four-way switches, located right inside the front door. These is the box for the intercom station in our master bedroom, along with another four-way switch.

Not sure if this has been included previously, but here is the fireplace showing the hearth framed out. There will be a wood mantle as well which will match the color of the kitchen cabinets.

Finally, we discovered this week that we have a "view" - we can see downtown Minneapolis from the windows in the princess suite upstairs! The three buildings are the tallest in Minneapolis - from left the Capella Tower, the Wells Fargo Center, and the IDS Center. We can also just make out the tops of the three buildings from the living room windows on the main level. And as the dirt mountains disappear we'll be able to see even more of DT. Cool!