Upper level is taking shape

Our house is now visible from the road!

view from the North driveway gate

view from Parking area

Front door (view from West)

Southwest corner

Southeast corner

East side

Northeast corner

North side (garage)

Something you may notice - the doors and windows, for the most part, are covered by a layer of wood. They will be cut out when all the walls are up and the crew is ready to install the windows.

Here's something new. The upper level!! This defines the actual height of the house and is the part that's now visible from the road - at least you can see the top of it as you drive by.

View of living room from Kitchen

 The lower level is completely covered now. There are also the beginnings of a couple of walls that needed to be constructed to support floor trusses near the stairwell.

Lower level view from East to West 

Lower level view from South showing stairwell and bathroom wall

Lower level view from West to East

There won't be many more opportunities to see the downstairs as the bedroom walls are built. Three bedrooms was a lot to fit into that space. But we have a transition plan that will allow us to open things up as our boys "leave the nest."

One more view of the "actual" view from the big window upstairs. Wow!

Floor trusses

There was a little more construction on the house Friday. The crew has installed a few of the floor trusses.

From Northwest corner

From North

From Northeast

Every visit it looks more and more like the model Brent made over the winter. Today we sat on the floor and looked up at the sky and marveled at how warm the cement felt after the 80º day. We sat in the corner of the area marked out for the bathroom and talked about what a good storm shelter that space will be. We walked around under the "floor" and loved the feel of the ceiling height.

The trusses do a great job spanning the space without needing many load-bearing walls downstairs. They also leave open the possibility of installing a central air system. We are confident our plan won't need that, but having the option is a real plus if we ever need to sell the house.

I've been participating in some workshops put on by the MU and K-State Extension offices called Growing Growers over the past couple of months. And today was a workshop on soil. It doesn't seem to matter how much I read about it - understanding soil and all the systems at work there is still beyond me. After the workshop today, I know even experienced farmers struggle. Afterward, with my mind and notebook full, I ran by the farm to see what had changed and check on the trees.

Brent has been involved in some projects at work that have taken up a couple of his weekends - including today. Somehow, thankfully, he still finds time to make it out to the farm to work and see the progress - and spend some time with me enjoying our dreams coming true before our eyes.

Lower level SIPs panels are in!

Today was the day - the day I could walk into our house because now it has some walls!

This was my first view when I arrived late this morning.
The crew had already done quite a bit of work.

They lifted and placed the panels with a SkyTrak - a fork lift on the end of an "arm."

The panels are tied to the forklift to move them to the house.

Then the crew positions the panel and attaches it to the foundation and other wall.

Close-up of a wall sitting on the foundation.

What follows is the usual counter-clockwise series of photos - starting at the parking area.

parking area

West side

Southwest corner

South side

Southeast corner

East side

Summer Kitchen (Northeast corner)

Garage

 And this is something totally new! The inside :-)

Inside view of Southwest corner

Inside view of Southeast corner

The view that we will see when we come home :-)

That's pretty darn awesome - couldn't have framed it better!

One of the first plum blossoms at Happy Apple's Farm

And it's just the beginning - there is much more to come!

Slabs are in!

The garage floor.

No, it's not wet, but it sure looks that way. There is a really shiny sealer on it and the dusty lines are cuts. Each side also has drains in the center. You can see in the photo that the Summer Kitchen slab is also in. (Please ignore the mud in the upper right corner of the lens - kind of blends with the tree.)

What follows is the regular counter-clockwise series of photos around the house.

Here is the West side, looking at the future front door.

Southwest corner. You can see the real floor of the lower level. It will be stained.
Sorry I still haven't cleaned the mud off the camera lens!

Close-up of the PEX tubes in the Northwest corner of mechanical room - allowing us to run 5 zones.

South side of the house.
(later Brent and I laid on the warm floor in the sunspace and just marveled at the blue sky)

Southeast corner of the house

East side of the house (pretty much looks the same).

And this is the view from the front door :-)

Today we met again with the Greg Wheeler who will build the rock retaining walls. Those will change the look of the West and East sides of the house significantly. Brent and I are really excited about the beauty and interest those will add. I think they should be in by June - just in time for some really hardy, heat-loving native perennials to get started!

Backfill and PEX for radiant heat

Oh my gosh! This is fun. Not only is the PEX laid out on the floor (who but us would be excited about plastic tubes snaked around on the floor?), but we can walk up to the house now.

We visited the farm last night because today the flat work is scheduled to be done. FYI: a little thunder shower is moving through the area this morning, so that is probably not really going to happen today. In any case, the work that needed to happen before the slabs are poured is done and it looks pretty awesome.

Here are some photos. They are in roughly the same order as always: starting from the parking area on the West side and moving around to the South, then East and North.

View from parking area.
Yep! The foundation is now covered with dirt - just like it should be.
And the maple tree is still there - the bulldozer managed to avoid it!

Close up of front door. Now you can really see the termite shield that caps the insulation and foundation walls.

This is another view of the West side south of the entry. Rock retaining walls will
roughly follow the stair steps in the foundation.

Close-up of the floor in the sun-space on the South face of the house. This area has extra rebar and lots of PEX.

View of Southeast corner.

Close-up of PEX layout - see the tubes for controlling the zones coming up in the far corner?
That's the mechanical room.

View from the East. The tallest retaining walls will be on this side.
Our builders, Rick and Dave Robson, are standing with me in the summer kitchen area.

Here's a close-up, looking East to West, that shows the drains in the garage floor.
What's so cool, though, is now we can see what our view will be from our front door…that's the pond on the property across the street to the West.  It's just the way we imagined it would look :-) 

This is the North side of the house. The 8' door for the summer kitchen  is where Rick (in the red) and I are standing. Dave is standing in the garage.

What follows are three pictures of the lower level floor. They show the arrangement of the PEX in the floor and also have orange lines that roughly represent where walls will be built to define the rooms.

Two bedrooms on the East end of the lower level.

Central common area, bathroom, and entry from the sun-space.

West bedroom and mechanical room.

 And we are about as excited as we can be, watching all that we've been dreaming and planning becoming a reality right before our eyes...

Two happy critters!
(we lovingly call ourselves the giraffe and the squirrel, although I'm a relatively large squirrel)

Standing at the entrance - where we will begin the next exciting chapter of our life. Wow :-)

Catching up - let's start with the weekend

Things are certainly picking up now at the farm!

Middle of last week I ran by the farm because I was in the neighborhood with our youngest son Jeremy. He hadn't been out to see the progress in a long time and we were curious how much of the insulation and rebar for the lower level floor was in. The day was pretty mild other than being VERY windy!

And we noticed something…

Some of our insulation has blown away.

That was really a lot of wind. Of course, it's always pretty breezy out there, but this was what our builder called "gale force" wind.

On Friday I took a little time off of work to go to the farm again. The maple tree on the West side of the house (the only tree of any size that will shade that hot side of the house) needed to be trimmed before the bulldozer came in to backfill around the foundation. Those big machines have a hard time avoiding low limbs, you know.

But I won't bore you with before and after photos. It still looks like a tree :-)

And that's not all we did with our weekend…we also saw a bunch of alpacas! The MOPACA show was at Hale Arena. So Brent and I headed down there in the morning to see how well the alpacas handled all that commotion. And we were quite impressed. They were calm and beautiful.

Here's a beautiful Suri from Hasselbring's Harmony Ranch in the show ring.

There were also people handspinning fiber and lots of product displays. It is really a very soft fiber and there are certainly a lot of talented knitters. Brent got his first pair of alpaca socks from a very nice couple with a Suri alpaca ranch in Tennessee. They also process fiber in a mill. Their ranch and mill are run entirely with solar generated electricity. We think we need to know them a little better.

We weren't finished with our busy weekend yet…

Our Kansas Conservation Tree seedlings were delivered to our house on Friday. So we took advantage of the beautiful day on Sunday to put our new little trees in the ground and meet with the contractor who will build the retaining walls around the new house.

Here I am with the first of the 25 cedars in the ground.

We planted over 100 seedlings: 25 cedars, 25 persimmons, 25 paw paw and 25 elderberry. The cedars are along the West (to replace the row of cedars we will lose when the road is improved) and the elderberries are along the South side of the garden space with a few also inside the cedars on the west and north sides of the property. The persimmons are mostly in the area North of the north-most driveway. And the pawpaws are down in the draw.

We spent 10 hours on the property on Sunday. And with a little help from our eldest son, Blaine, we got all the trees in the ground. It was wonderful...and exhausting. We loved every minute!