January 14th

House visits were more and more frequent now as every time we'd show up there was some new significant system or item in the house.

This time it was some water lines and venting.




















Earlier I watched the glass block guy install the glass block in the glass block window opening where the glass block goes. Some people don't like it but we both dig the look of glass block. It's probably our ghetto roots.

January 13th

As we watched our house get built we noticed many of the houses that were almost complete or completed had brick with "No Park" painted on it, sitting on the driveway. I'm assuming to keep shoppers and tradespeople from parking on the driveway and screwing it up when it wasn't cured and getting it dirty when it wasn't sold.

When we drove up we found our very own No Park Brick. It seemed a (no pun intended) milestone for progress and we thought we should document it.

Progress progress. We found windows, roofing materials, and the lines for the AC units.

If you look carefully you can see the middle window is missing. The window team brought the wrong window for this opening. The opening was framed larger than normal because of the office space we selected. It took a few days for the right window to show up.

We also had most of the AC ducts, the air handlers in the attic, and the big air returns installed. The air handler in the basement is installed much later in the process because people steal them. Stupid people.



















They had to move a couple of pipes after the walls went up and they had to move them in the concrete.

Early January

There was a lot happening just after Christmas. The house became more and more like a matchstick structure. Depending on where you were standing and looking, the rooms would blend together and become unrecognizable. It was hard to imagine what the percieved size of the living spaces would be. What would it be like to live in this place?



"Is this room small?"

"Is this room big?"

Is this a bathroom?

What the heck is this?



You really start to realize how strange the perception of space is.





It took a long time for the framing to get completed. Every couple of days it would look more and more like a house.










We got a delivery of roofing materials.






The next day it was sitting on the corners of the house. A few thousand pounds of wood balanced just right.








Although I missed the actual crane opration, it was pretty cool to see this up on the house. These guys were like some crazy super human cat people. Climbing around with no ropes or safetly lines or anything like that. Granted, it was only 10 feet at the edges but from the top there was another six or seven feet or so. There were lots of nail-ridden 2x4s jutting out at acute angles that they could use to break their fall, so they should be just fine.


Once these panels were installed on the roof, the structure became even more house like.

I know this seems like stating the obvious, but there was a genuine sense of amazement to this process. Each component, as it was added, made the reality come closer and closer. This was the largest jigsaw puzzle I'd ever been involved in. The "picture" was becoming clearer.


Another interesting thing you'll see is all of the cross braces used to plumb the walls to make sure they were perfectly upright as the roofing panels were attached.




















One last note, there was a tumbleweed that had happened to find a purchase in our laundry room. It don't get more western than that.

Holiday Season

Although sparse, cramped, and sans tree, we were in Arizona. Good times.

Our cookware was in storage and the Happy-Mart discount cookware was completely falling about at this point.

We decided that we should go out for Christmas Dinner. We knew we wanted something special and in Casa Grande that can only mean one place.

Carl's Jr.

December 21st

The concrete had dried out and we were expecting to walk around a bit and try to imagine some walls. We drove up to see this and it was pretty cool.

Although reminiscent of Stonehenge at this point, it was taking on a house-like shape. We also realized that the driveway could support parking for a decent night of Texas Hold 'Em.

We were so excited about actually seeing something that we could live in we went back later that evening to look again. On the way in we took this picture of the main entrance to the development. Think of all the children that we could feed with the electricity wasted by these trees every night.

December 15th

One week later, there was concrete. Smooth and clean; ready for a house to sit on top of it.

The concrete was very smooth except for any areas outside the home. In the external areas it looks like they sprinkled something onto the surface of the concrete to make it draw away into little recessed pits.

I thought this was for safety reasons until I saw the garage is smooth. I now believe this was an HOA ordinance designed to keep people from laying around “bleeding up” the neighborhood driving property values down.

Speaking of property values, by this time they had raised the prices of the home we bought $2,000 above the price we signed. Cool…



They poured the concrete for the window wells and some little cylinders. These cylinders are related to the cables that are now run through the poured concrete slab.

From the Post Tensioning Institute
“Simply put, Post-Tensioning is a method of reinforcing concrete, masonry, and other structural elements. Post-Tensioning is a method of prestressing. Prestressed concrete or masonry has internal stresses (forces) induced into it during the construction phase for the purpose of counteracting the anticipated external loads that it will encounter during its lifecycle."









Concrete is great at withstanding pressure (crushing) forces but is pretty much crap at handling tension (pulling) forces. Steel has great tension strength. So they tighten the cables at the ends and as they try to contract they press against the concrete with crushing forces. Newton’s laws, remaining remarkably relevant on humanoid biped scales, mean the concrete pushes back against the steel resulting in tension forces on steel. It works out nicely as long as neither gets the advantage. In order to determine when the cables are ready to be tensioned, they take one of these concrete cylinders and put it in a press and crank the pressure up to 3,000 lbs. If it cracks, it’s not ready. If it doesn’t crack, they start tensioning the cables. If I remember correctly they tighten them up to a few thousand pounds.

If you look carefully you’ll see the two surround speaker boxes that we set next to the outlet box in the center of the great room.



This is going to be so cool.

December 8th

When we were in the Design Center we met with Guardian who provides alarm and low voltage services for Fulton. At the time I asked if we could get conduit run in the floor in the great room for surround speakers. Their agent made some calls and told us "If Fulton allows it, we can do it." Cool.

Then...

Fulton allowed it but for some reason Guardian wouldn't do it. I was surprised. We had spent a ton of money with them and I figured they'd honor their word. Nope.

So I snuck in on this weekend before concrete was poured and ran it myself in what was to be the first of some "illegal" customizations to the home. I figured if they gave me hassle about it I'd have a few things going for me.

• We were very careful not to violate code or do anything stupid that the city inspector would be unhappy about.
• We had already sold our house so we weren't in danger of having to wait for our home to sell in a depressed market. This made us attractive buyers.
• We were in a depressed market and actually in position to buy a home. This made us even more attractive.
• They couldn't stop building this now.
• I could just offer to put down another $5,000 or so for their trouble.
• Fulton seemed like a reasonable organization.

I should state for the record that Guardian made up for this miscommunication later and it worked out well for everyone.

Lots going on in this picture. You can see the shovel I bought at Home Depot for digging the trench for the PVC, the post tension cables sitting on their stands, the floor boxes, and, of course, the requisite lunch from Whataburger.

What you can’t tell is that Mark drove out to help me but had to leave just before this was taken. More importantly, you can’t tell that sitting in that Whataburger bag is not a breaded, deep-fried, chicken concoction of pure goodness otherwise known as a Number 4. What is actually in the bag is a grilled, healthy, tasteless evil sandwich of nausea. A Number 3. With a single bite taken out of it.

Listen to me, people, when I tell you. Never eat primes. Ever.

November 18th

When we visited on the 18th they had filled in all the space around the house with the dirt they had piled up while digging the basement. The process was interesting. They fill in three feet of dirt then use a machine to pack it down. They compact it for two hours. Then three more feet-two more hours and so on until it's full. This makes it very hard for water to get to the walls of the basement. You can see the tension cables sitting by my car in the background.

November 10th

All of a sudden we show up and the concrete is poured, the basement is framed and there is drywall sitting in the middle of the main room. It was our first sense of walls and actually house (instead of hole in the ground) and it was pretty cool. They built the wet bar frame and just left it out in the middle of the room because the drywall was in the way. It sat there for quite some time.

October 22nd - 27th

Things seemed to be moving along nicely at this point

We had walls, window wells, stairs and this crazy vapor barrier stuff that looked like a gummy tar substance.

I took a few close up pictures of this stuff and it actually came out kinda cool. I would have liked to see how they spayed it on. It was still viscous days later. We walked around looking to see if there were any gaps and we didn't see any.

We discovered building materials on the 26th. Trusses for the basement ceiling and the roof. At this time we had no idea what this was going to be used for.

The basement plumbing was run and and the floor was prepped for the concrete. I can't imagine how much of a pain it would be if we get a leak down here.

October 11th, 2007

The concrete forms were assembled and actual concrete was poured into them.

October 8th, 2007

Someone put some stuff in our hole in the ground.

concrete forms

Hurry up and......

We signed our paperwork June 24th. Design Center on the 17th of July.

Then what? Nothing much house-wise.
Monsoons came and brought dust storms.

View from the apartment

Steve, Theresa, and Zach came out to visit. We visited the Grand Canyon. Barb got a job and a haircut. Monsoons went away. My friend Mark and I attended the CEDIA expo in Denver.


Then on October 7th...

We got a hole in the ground.

Choices Choices

There were a lot of choices to make in a very short time. Which lot? Inside? Corner? Single Row? We decided on a corner lot that didn't have a huge premium, had minimal traffic, and had enough room for the eventual pool. In Casa Grande, corner houses can only be single story. So we knew the people behind us could not be a two story. The house next to them was already a single story and the only mystery was what kind of house would we get next to us.

The Lot

We are right on the corner of Seven Seas Drive and Summer Lane. We figured that aside from a few close houses, everyone else in the neighborhood would have to go out of their way to drive by our corner.

View Larger Map

Our first decision was exterior color. Not much of a decision as we could only pick from four sets of colors all based either brown, brownish, slightly different brown, and dirt. We chose brown.


Then came the design center and we were woefully unprepared for this. (Yes, it actually caused us woe)

What appliances would we get?
What size fridge?

Should we get a medallion?

Standard granite or one of these?

Marble? Travertine?

How about one of these?

Yes, i know it's sideways. I was laying down on the floor from exhaustion at this point.

Left Granite, Right Granite?

What color grout?

Tile in the kitchen?

What about the backsplash? What about the master bath?

Carpet the bathrooms!!!

Staggerd cabinets? Straight Cabinets? Moulding? Teeth? Notch? Classic?

Cherry? Maple? Stained? Natural?



Standard lighting?
Lighting package?

Note the mysterously glowing tag

Barb wanted something more traditional in the lighting. This was ornate enough for her and had enough refrence to Masonic ritual and New World Order to satisfy my need for controversy.

What doorknobs do we use?

What doors?
What front door?
Stained? Natural?
Glass front?
Mahogony? Fakehogony?



What kind of faucets do you we want? Same everywhere? Different in the kitchen?

Do you want your faucets to look like the Pilsbury Cyclops Boy and his sidekick "Hammer" are going to cream you with a meat hook?

We had some delays in getting the Design Center appointment scheduled and then when we did we found that we just didn't have enough time to sort it all out. We had visited the design center before our appointment to browse at least three times, then spent 7 or 8 hours the first time then another 9 or 10 hours the second visit to get things figured out.





In the end we were happy with our choices. Every 3 to 5 weeks, one of us will turn to the other and say, "Did we pick stuff that matched or is our house going to look like Willy Wonka's house?"

Comitted

After much deliberation and after revisiting half of the homes we had seen we came back to Fulton, picked a lot, and signed the paperwork.

We really liked how they had the random stick poking up out of the ground. No other lots had this special quality. We knew this was the one.

Although this isn't exactly our configuration we decided on the "London" model. We had some flexibility in models to choose from until we decided we wanted a room for Poker/games. The London was the only model that fit. It had a basement, of course.