Brick on and Drywall up!

We went to our house on Monday and met with Tim. We all got up early (Cody, Dad, and I) to do our pre-drywall walk through of our house at 7:20 in the morning.  Tim basically walked us throughout the house showing us where our outlets were, and we pointed out a few mistakes that we wanted them to fix.  The main thing was that our heating vent in our basement got relocated.  Tim was already aware of this, and he told me that the heating and cooling guys were already scheduled to stop by later that day to fix it.  As we were leaving, he gave us a break down of how our house was going to proceed.  He said that in 10 days our drywall would be completely done in the house, then they would paint our walls, and then put our flooring and cabinets will ber going in!!  Ahh!!  I can't wait to see it all!!

 

 

When we stopped by the house on Wednesday it was a completely new house!  We got to see what our brick looked like for the first time.  We loved how it looked.  I can't wait to see what it looks like with the siding and shutters on.

 

 

When we walked into our house it was all hung!!  Very exciting!  This is our dining room. 

 

 

Here is the other view of our dining room and stairs.  We noticed that our stairs are pretty close to our front door. We hope that this doesn't make moving in hard.  If it is a problem, we might just have to bring everything in through our sun room door.

 

 

 

Here is our living room!  I was excited to see that our house still seemed big to me with the drywall up. Dad had told me that houses seem bigger or smaller at certain points in construction.  He said that while it was framed it would look really big, because you can see through the walls, but then once the drywall goes up it will look smaller.  However, I think that since our house has an open floor plan that it doesn't impact it too much.  It still seemed like a good size.  It was a lot easier to imagine where we will be putting everything when the walls were up.

 

 

Here is our fireplace.  I can't wait until they start putting the stone on!  I think it looks good the way it is now, but I bet the stone will be awesome.

 

 

Here is our pantry and basement stairs.

 

 

Here is our kitchen and morning room.  I love the morning room area... it adds so much to our house.  Also I was happy to see that the little wall where our dishwasher and sink will be, has firmed up now that there is drywall on it.  Before it was very wobbly and didn't seem very sturdy, but now that the drywall is around it, it's a lot better.

 

 

Our morning room ceiling.  You can see where our ceiling fan will go.

 

 

Cody inspecting all of the walls and outlets in the office.

 

 

Our garage entrance/mudroom.  This picture doesn't do it very much justice.

 

 

Here is our first floor half bath.

 

 

The hallway leading to our section of the upstairs.  We felt secluded because of the big distance from our room to the other rooms of the house.  The master suite takes up the entire left side of the house.

 

 

The main floor bath.

 

 

This is where the sink and counter top will go.

 

 

The laundry room looks a lot different now!  It was SUPER dark in there!

 

 

Here are one of our closets.  All of the closets varied just a little bit in size.  That makese sense because all three of our rooms are a little bit different size so it shouldn't be surprising that our closets vary in size as well.  It seemed like the closet in our second largest room was the widest, but the closet in our biggest room was the deepest.

 

 

Here is the second largest room.

 

 

Here is the largest.  Of course these pictures are cutting off more than half of the size of the room.  The pictures really don't do the room size justice.

 

 

Our smallest room had an interesting shape.

 

 

 

You can see how the wall in this room is not even.  We were a little perplexed by this, but I guess it will work out.  We were thinking that maybe someday we could put a desk or something like that in that area.

 

Here are the ceilings in our master bedroom. I'm glad that I didn't notice them being too low. Before when it was getting framed, I was concerned that our ceiling wasn't going to be very high in our room. But once it was framed, I didn't even notice it.

 

 

Here is one of our closets.  Our closets were super duper dark.  I couldn't even see them while I was standing inside of them.  I just know that I can stick my arms all the way out and twirl around inside both of them and not touch any walls.  :)  Now that's what I call a good walk in closet.

 

 

Here are the stairs leading down into the basement, which was also very dark encase you couldn't tell from the pictures.  Now that the walls are up, the basement seems a lot more private.  Before you could just look down and see what was down there on either side of the wall, but now with the walls up it is a lot more sectioned off.

 

 

As soon as you come down the steps, if you turn to the right you will run into the basement half bath.

 

 

 

If you turn to the left you will run into our sump pump/storage area.

 

 

 

Here is the hallway leading towards the finished area of the basement.  The basement half bath is on my left in this picture.

 

 

 

 

Our basement still seemed very large.  We were so pleased with our choices to finish the media room and to get the morning room.  Cody is talking about putting a bar against that right wall, and then place a pool table around where I was standing when I took this picture.

 

 

 

The morning room adds so much space to our basement.  This is probably where our living room area will be.  The tv will probably be in the left corner, and then our current furniture will go down there on the other side.

 

 

 

This is the view of the basement from inside of the morning room.

 

 

 

We were pleased to see that they moved our heating vent over.

 

 

We are unsure of exactly what we are going to use our media room for yet.  There are a lot of possibilities, and we are still exploring our options.

 

 

 

Here is Cody inspecting our drywall in the basement.  He is the inspector... I am the picture taker.  He loves to walk around looking at all the details in the house.  I love running around snapping pictures of everything that is new.

 

 

 

Right off of the media room is our furnace and water tank area.

 

 

 

Our furnace.

 

 

Besides the cracked floor that we noticed last week, our garage looked pretty good.  It was cold, but good.

 

 

Here is the garage door.

 

 

 

When you walk in from the garage, you will come into the mud room.  Here is where our security pad and light switch will be placed.  Then on the right there is a perfect area to place shoes, and our coat closet is on the left.

 

 

 

Overall we were happy with how our drywall looked.  Everything looked like it was hung full, and that it wasn't pieced together like dad was worried about. There were a few things that we weren't sure if they would get corrected in the tapping process or not.  Such as the example in this picture.  It looks like some of our walls didn't match up perfectly next to each other.  There were some gaps inbetween some of the drywall boards.

 

 

In our master bedroom we found a couple of issues.  The board right in between our two windows had some flaws in it.  I'm not sure if these issues are something that can be easily fixed in the taping process or not.  But I hope that we won't have messed up drywall right in that area, because that is where we were planning on putting our bed.

 

 

 

 

Here is a zoomed in view of a couple of the problem areas.  The piece of drywall right in the center of the wall had a rip in it.  This picture makes it look small, but Cody noticed it right away in the room.

 

 

 

And then towards the bottom on the other side, there was another rip towards the bottom.  Again you can't really tell in the picture, but it looked worse in person.

 

 

 

Here are some more of the gaps that we noticed in between where our walls met.  I hope that this is something that regularly happens while hanging drywall.  I'm hoping that once they start to tape our house that those problems will go away.

 

 

 

Most of the issues with the drywall that we found were small, but in the basement there was a large tear in the drywall.  This looks terrible, and I really hope that they will be able to fix it.  I noticed that there were about 4 extra boards of drywall in our kitchen.  I'm wondering if they will use that it fix this.

 

 

Here is another case of the drywall being ripped at the end.

 

 

 

We were looking to see if our siding was on our house yet, (it wasn't, but our neighbors across the street had theirs started) and we noticed that our meters were in.  Overall, we were really excited with our house, it really looks like a house now that the walls are up.  We have about 5 weeks to go until we get to move in!  It seems a little bit unreal that we will be living there soon.  I can't wait.  I think that the best part about our house this visit was that it was bearable to be in the house!  Now that the drywall is up, it's not absolutely freezing in there!  On Monday we could literally see our breath while we were standing in the house, but now we were standing in there for an hour or so and it wasn't bad at all.  And I'm a freeze baby... so you know it had to be good.  I'm glad that visiting the house in the future will be more enjoyable now that it's not so cold.

 

Insulation and brick work

Sorry for the lack of house updates since last Sunday.  When we visited the house on Wednesday my camera died right away :(  so I wasn't able to get any pictures.  We are so excited, our pre-drywall meeting is tomorrow, Monday 18th at 7:20 in the morning.  Cody and dad are not happy about this time, but I couldn't take the day off on Monday or Tuesday this week so we had to do it early so that I could get to work at a decent time.

 

 

When we were here on Wednesday they had finished the brick on our garage, but it was covered up, and this was how far they had finished on the front of our house.

 

 

Today you can see that the garage is uncovered and the rest of the house is covered up.  It looked like they were just about done with it, but we couldn't see it very well.

 

 

Here is Cody and in front of our garage.  I love the brick color that we chose.  I think it looks really good so far.  Right now we are the only house around that has a full brick house.  We found out today that the people directly across the street from us are building a Palermo as well, but they are building a different elevation.  It will be interesting to see if they choose to put stone or brick on their house.

 

 

 

 

Here is Cody in the basement before the insulation was put in.  This was one of the only pictures I got to take before the camera died.  Here you can see that dad placed a pvc pipe into our media room.  This is in case we ever want to run any additional cable or anything in that room, we won't have to cut out the drywall in order to put the cords in. We will be able to just slip it into the pipe. 

 

Now that the insulation is in that room you can't even tell that the pipe is in the wall.  We checked to make sure that it was still there, and it was...  You can just make out the orange plug where it will be.

 

 

 

Here is our furnace that is framed.  I still think that it is a weird place for our furnace to be located in the basement, but I guess once the drywall is up it won't be as bad.

 

 

Here is the insulation in the dining room.

 

 

Here is the insulation in the morning room. We were very impressed with how thorough Ryan Homes was when they did our insulation.  They sealed just about everything up really well.  There was only one small area that we saw that they forgot, but we will point that out tomorrow.  They sealed all of the gaps in our house good too...  Dad was really worried that they wouldn't do a good job, and he actually came over on Wednesday and started to plug a few things up, but you can tell that they went through the house and even plugged up things dad missed.  You could tell who did what because their insulation was different colors.  We were impressed that they sealed every crack and nook really well.

 

 

The morning room was the room that had the most gaps in it, and we were really happy with how well insulated it looked. They sealed every piece of wood together which was really good.

 

 

The only area dad wasn't completely satisfied with was the fireplace.  He thought that they could have insulated it better than what they did.  We are going to bring that up with them tomorrow.  I have actually read in Ryan Homes blogs that people get a drift from their fireplace... so I am a bit concerned about this.

 

 

Here is the area above the fireplace.  You can see how our pipes are all sealed.

 

 

Here you can see where the electric lines run in our office.

 

 

Here is a better picture of how everything was sealed.  They paid good attention to details.

 

 

More pictures of where the electric lines run.  My intention was to make a blog on Wednesday about where all of our wires were located, but alas... with my camera dying I wasn't able to.

 

 

Here is our larger room upstairs.

 

 

Here is our master bedroom.  You can see the plastic panels on the ceiling.  Dad said that these would help with the air flow throughout our house.

 

 

If you look up you can see the gray cardboard (maybe plastic?) squares.  These are going to help keep our insulation in our attic, and help ensure it doesn't come into our room.

 

 

Here are the wires in our closet and bathroom area.

 

 

Here is the view of our smallest room.

 

 

Here is the main floor bath.

 

 

Here is our laundry room. We were very happy to see how well sealed it was, because we were really concerned about it.  The pipe on the floor had a big gap around it.  We were happy to see that was filled in well.

 

 

Here our third bedroom.

 

 

Mom and dad.

 

 

Mom and I.

 

 

Dad and I.

 

 

Our neighbors have finally got a house!!  The house was actually pretty much all the way up on Wednesday, but now I see that they got the roof on.  Dad, Cody, and I actually walked around the house on Wednesday.  It is exactly like the model home, except that they have a large third garage.  We think that they must have a boat or RV that they want to store. Last week we got to see some of our neighbors.  The people across the street from us have been living in their house since December.  Their names are Rachel and Mike, and they have two kids.  They have a daughter that is 5 and a son that is 2.  Rachel saw my dad and I coming out of our neighbors house... busted...  Cody was nervous about going over their in the first place, and I was embarrassed when she caught me coming out of it... but yeah I guess I'm going to get the title of snoopy neighbor haha.  She told us that there were a lot of young families in the development and that everyone was friends.  I'm excited for summer, I'm sure we will be meeting everyone and hopefully going to some barbecues.  We also got to see the family that is moving into the house that started a week before ours (which is next to Rachel and Mike's house).  They have two kids a son that is 5 and a daughter that is 2.  We didn't introduce ourself to them yet, but we saw them from out of our window.

 

 

Here we are back into the basement. This is going to be our half bath.

 

 

Here is our unfinished storage section.

 

 

Here is our basement drain.

 

 

Here are our electrical boxes.

 

 

This is the sump pump.

 

 

Here is our morning room space in the basement.  It's actually a pretty good size room.

 

 

I was trying to investigate whether or not this crack had been fixed, but it was hard to tell.  As far as I could tell it seemed like it had been sealed, but it was behind insulation so it was hard to tell.  I can only hope that it was sealed like the rest of the house.

 

 

At least I didn't see any light trailing in from that area of the basement...  So I'm assuming it's alright.  In the picture you can see where our recessed lighting will be in the basement.

 

 

 

 

You can see where other things were sealed well in our basement.  But here is the one mistake in our house that I really don't understand.  It looks like our heating vent was placed in the wrong place.  As you can see it is currently splitting our media room and the rest of our basement.  This is the only heater on this side of the basement (besides the one in the media room), and I'm afraid that it is not going to work right in that spot.  We are going to meet with Ryan Homes tomorrow and do our pre-drywall walk through...  so we will see what they have to say about it then.  I'm hoping that they will relocate this, and it won't be a problem.

 

 

This is the heat vent in our half bathroom down there. 

 

 

Cody and I were extremely excited to get to show our house to our moms for the first time today!  It was cold in the house so you can tell we are all bundled up.  I think all of our toes were freezing!  I'm hoping that once the drywall is up it won't be so cold in our house!

 

 

Here I am with mom.  I love the way the morning room looks right now.  Cody and I have been looking at paint for that room.  We are thinking of painting the walls bright sky blue.

 

 

Here are the boys looking at the plans of the house. They weren't too happy about me interrupting them to take pictures... but they'll be happy down the road when they are in the pictures! 

 

 

Here is Cody and his mom in the house.  :)  I'm so glad that she was able to come down to see it before it's all done.  After we walked around our house we took her to the model to let her see what ours will eventually look like.

 

 

Here is our recessed lighting in our kitchen.

 

 

I stuck my head out our front door to peek at our brick work.  As you can see they are still working hard on it.  I'm hoping that on Wednesday when we come back the cover will be off and we will be able to see it all.

 

 

Here is our garage.  This was the only area that we were really disappointed with.  It looks like they are not going to insulate our garage all of the way.  As you can see any area that isn't next to the house isn't being insulated.  We are a little bit worried, because the garage is right next to our master bedroom.  I'm hoping that the cold air from the garage isn't going to come into our bedroom. We are going to be asking them about that tomorrow too.  My dad is talking about eventually just spraying insulation up there ourselves.

 

 

Also, I'm not sure if you can see it or not, but our concrete is already cracking in the garage.  And it wasn't in just one spot... it was in a few different spots throughout the garage.  I'm not sure if they didn't do it right, or if that is something that you can expect to happen when your garage gets poured in the winter.  We'll have to see what they say about fixing it.

 

 

Here is Cody and I in our doorway in the garage.  I'm sure this is how we will be coming in and out of our house on a day to day basis.

 

 

I'm so excited for the drywall to start going up in our house.  My uncle Timmy knows the guy that is in charge of getting a crew in to do the drywall for Ryan Homes, and he told him to make sure to get a really good crew to do our house.  My dad looked inside of the house that was started a week before ours and he said that the people that did the drywall on that house did a really good job, so we are hoping to get them to do our house.  My uncle Timmy has heard some horror stories of the drywall being hung really bad in some Ryan Homes houses, and we were really nervous about it. We were hoping that my uncle Timmy would be able to do it, but the timing just didn't work out right.  He had a house that he had to do in Tennessee at the exact time that my house was ready to be drywalled.  So hopefully the drywall is done well... if not, we'll have to say something.  But we are extremely excited to see it all.  I can't wait for the next couple of weeks as our flooring and cabinets start going in!