Final Chapter

This will be the last installment of pictures from building the new house. It's now been 13 months since we broke ground but we are finally getting settled in and most of the boxes have been unpacked. So here is a large batch of recent photos, mostly of the interior...but I did start with an exterior shot of our new turkey neighbors. We don't think our turkeys followed us from our old neighborhood since those flocks were mostly mothers and their babies. Here in Hawks Landing we seem to mostly have these roving bands of males. Here we have "turkey in the straw." Our neighbors reported seeing a bear in their yard a couple of weeks ago, but we haven't seen any since we've been here. You can click on the pictures for a larger view.

Our almost finished kitchen (still waiting for additional parts for the track lighting)

Family Room, with newly hung TV

This is the cabinet that hides all the electronics for the stereo and TV...

and here's all the stuff it hides.

A picture featuring our new rustic coffee table.

Dining Room

Norris' office

Another shot of Norris' office

Master Bedroom and our new cherry chest of drawers

and new dresser made of bubinga wood on the top and sides and curly maple on the front with walnut trim

In this shot you can see some of our new rustic bed

More of the master bedroom

Shower in the master bath

Sink area of the master bath

Guest room

Part of the laundry room

Guest bath shower

Guest bath tub

More of the guest bath

Foyer with our as-yet unfinished wormy chestnut wood floor inlay

Cheryl's quilting studio

Another view of the studio

Part of Cheryl's office

The other side of Cheryl's office and the Murphy bed

Stairs from the foyer up to the main living level

We actually can now park both cars in the garage since most of the boxes have been unpacked.

And this side of the garage will be part of Norris' wood shop once we get some of this stuff better organized and stored or given away.

This is the part of the deck that will become screened in porch in a week or so. The deck furniture is new.

This part of the deck wraps around the front of the house and has our old deck furniture.

The Weeping Love Grass that was seeded on the slope of our road is finally starting to sprout, thanks to some recent rains.

To wrap it up, here's one last shot of the outside. The Weeping Love Grass we had planted to stabilize our front slope has taken off nicely and held up to the recent rains of Tropical Storm Fay with hardly any erosion.

Thats it. From a mound of solid rock with trees on top to finished home in a little over a year. It's been a long and intense experience, one that we don't hope to repeat anytime soon. But we can truly say its "our home" since we had it designed and built the way we wanted, which isn't something we'd have if we bought an existing home. For our friends who are now in the process of building their own homes, lots of luck!

All Moved In

Almost a year to the date since groundbreaking, moving day finally arrived. On Aug 1, two moving vans loaded our belongings at the rental house and moved us to the new house. We filled one large van and a smaller van. The smaller truck didn't have enough oomph to make it up our steep driveway, so its contents had to be unloaded onto the larger truck for the trip up the hill. The last boxes were unloaded off the truck after midnight and we spent our first night in our new house. We have been unpacking boxes ever since, but the interior has finally starting to look like a house rather than a warehouse.





Our builder was working on getting our house finished right up to noon on the day we moved in. Some exterior work has continued even since we have moved in. Here a tree trimmer climbs one of taller trees to cut down some the huge vines that encircled many of our trees. You'll probably have to click on the picture to enlarge it enough to see him.

The landscaping is mostly done at this point. This view of the area behind the house also shows the stone steps the landscapers put in to get from our driveway up the upper levels behind the house. The lamp pole was just set in concrete before the picture was taken so it is being temporarily propped up with 2x4s.

The screen has not yet been installed on the covered part of the deck, although we have gotten some new deck furniture and a new gas grill.

Here you can see the landscaping around the front sidewalk, to include our transplanted Welcome bear.

A view from the street now that the hill has been landscaped and mulched.

When we get the inside all together, we'll try to post a few pictures of the interior before closing out this blog.

Moving Day Tomorrow

The cats are fully aware life is in uproar, as are we. Norris again spent most of the day at the house, but had to leave when the floor finishers showed up.

DirecTV was scheduled to hook up our television today - this was set up back when we thought we were moving earlier this week. This photo shows the installer putting in the dish, while the landscaping trees show up next to him above the retaining wall, and in the foreground.
This next picture was not adequately lit so it's a little blurry but it shows two of our painters working on finishing out the elevator. We had asked that the birch plywood get sealed, not stained, but they didn't get the message. The stain matches everything else in the house, and we decided it looks great stained also. The elevator car was delivered "unfinished" to be completed on site with our baseboard molding. Now it looks like the smallest room in the house. And the only one that moves.


Work will still be taking place tomorrow morning while we are being packed onto the trucks: drywall repairs, clothes dryer hookup, grout and shower door installation, screens in all the windows....but the punchout list is getting shorter!

Norris spent the day watching progress on a variety of fronts. We still experience "one step forward, two back" situations. Today for example, the shower installers showed up early with the new glass, but cracked a tile. The tile installer is to come back tomorrow to fix that. We are still scheduled to move in on Friday - we hope the shower installers can finish up in the morning while our 5-man moving crew is loading us up at the rented house onto two small trucks.

These pictures were taken yesterday - this first one shows Ronnie and SuperDave using heavy equipment to get the dumpster relocated to allow SuperDave and the mini-trackhoe access to the ditch area that needed to be cleaned up. The mini-trackhoe used all its might but was going no where with the heavy dumpster till Ronnie gave it a shove from behind.


Clean up of the lot continued today, with a lot of work being done by hand. Also yesterday, the mailbox and numbers were installed. Our first pieces of mail were delivered later in the afternoon.
The builder's sign, visible in the left background of the mailbox picture was removed this afternoon. We now have appliances, decorative rods and mirrors mostly all installed, telephone service inside the house, a cleaned up garage, a sealed deck, attic flooring, and a host of items on our list have been taken care of. Several things will need to be fixed after we move in - the dishwasher front that matches the cabinets for example was mis-ordered and it will take a few weeks to get the right one. But we'll be happy to be in our house at long last!

Move-In delayed, but we're getting there

After concluding the house would not be ready for move-in tomorrow, we rescheduled our movers for Friday. The good news is that the power company showed up this morning to repair and dig-in the rest of the power line. Here Ronnie, our builder's project manager, watches as the power company crew splices in a length of new cable to make the run longer so it could be buried deeper. The even better news was that after they finished the cable, they installed our electric meter and switched us over to permanent power. The plumbers are supposed to come later today to power up the well and check our plumbing system for leaks.

The glass shower people showed up to install the glass walls for the shower in the master bath. Unfortunately, it didn't get cut to the right size and they had to order a new glass panel. Not sure when that will come.

The stone masons were able to get the front sidewalk finished this morning.

Lastly, the landscapers started doing what they could today, which consisted mostly of installing the wood steps going up the path that connects to the old logging road that goes almost to the top of the ridge line. We are putting in a total of 36 steps to get us past the steepest part of the slope and to help control erosion

Weekend Update

Not much going on at the house today, except one of the floor people was there to put the flooring in our elevator and also to lay the wormy Chestnut flooring in the foyer. We wanted some Chestnut wood in our house as a reminder of the huge Chestnut trees that once grew on our ridge line (and still do, although only as baby trees). We bought some reclaimed barn siding made of Chestnut and had it cut into flooring, which the installer cut to size and glued down as a 6' x 10' inset in our front foyer tile. Here most of it is covered up by objects he used to keep the wood weighted down while the glue dries, but you can see the warm color and rich patterns of the grain, along with the worm holes.

The piece of wood under the bucket happens to be the slab of wormy Chestnut we are going to use for our mantle piece.

mid-day update

The house has received the Certificate of Occupancy - so we feel more relaxed. We were already on our way to the house to check on progress when Ronnie called with the news. These pictures were just taken.

SuperDave used the big track hoe to bring the sand up the hill for the stone masons, shown here laying out the flagstone on the new front sidewalk. They had run out of stone, so Ronnie had gone to get more so they could finish that last bit in the foreground - and bring them a pizza because they still have to haul their water up the hill (We're trying to keep vehicles off the concrete until it has a few more days to cure.)

Below is a picture of our Rock Star SuperDave, working on the slope-erosion issue at the edge of the parking area of the drive. You can see he's balancing on the blade to scoop and move dirt and rocks from where it was piled next to the well (seen wrapped in insulation between the driveway and the trackhoe), uphill where he will create a berm. He had to take down two poplar trees, seen stacked on the left. One of them was already a goner. The thing on the driveway is the fiberglass imitation rock that our builder used to cover the well-head. Its "faux" paint job looks completely foolish with all the real rocks on the property - we hope between SuperDave and the landscapers, it can be a bit better camouflaged.

While we were still at the Big Level house packing, a couple of turkey families stopped by for a snack. I counted 20 while Norris was taking pictures. The photograph does not convey how close you are to them, or how large they are. For the first couple of years, it seemed like every time we went to our new development, called "Hawk's Landing" all we saw were turkeys, so we will probably see them in the new house too.