Today framing was finished up for the basement and our first floor subfloor decking went on allowing us for the first time to wander around where on our first floor.  This gets everything ready for the panels to show up on Monday.

So far, everything looks great, the framers worked fast, got things right, and in the one case where they made a potentially big mistake, they fixed it first thing in the morning.  There was talk that we might have an entry landing with roughed in stairs…  But it looks like that will have to wait until next week.  For now it looks like our house will have to sit tight for the next few days waiting for the panels to arrive.  In the mean time, our framer went ahead and boarded up all the openings to secure our basement so that nobody camps out in it and so they can stash tools and building materials in a safe place.  To that end, we have also been talking about getting real doors into our basement soon.  Originally we were looking at something very utilitarian, then we got a bid from Loewen to get doors to match the rest of our windows, now it looks like we’ve circled back to the utilitarian doors.  Anyways, its a decision to be made soon because the panels go up next week, then the rest of our windows and doors arrive in the beginning of October, and siding will go on shortly thereafter.

And with the house starting to really take shape, its pretty clear that we have a rather large back yard despite the small (50′ x 50′) lot.  Early on in the process, every time we told people what the size of our lot was, the standard response was always along the lines of - “Thats great, you can actually still fit a pretty big house on that”.  Our neighbors who we bought this lot from only have a small paved walkway with a little area for a table on a patio that is maybe 80sf, but we chose to build vertically and tuck our house towards the street corner in order to maximize usable yard space.