Foundation forms have been set...

Finally, after almost a week of no progress (including about 3/4 inches of rain on Friday), they started working again on our house! The have set the forms in place for our foundation, and filled them with concrete. From what we can see from the houses around us (yes, our neighbors are further along than we are -- no fair!), the next step will be to remove the forms, add the plumbing and other piping that will be under the slab, add some gravel, and then pour the actual foundation. Be sure to stay tuned...additional updates as conditions warrant!

Emilie checking out the progress

Emilie is glad to see that the forms are in place (she also says hello!)

A closer shot of the forms

Pourin' concrete

Today they filled in our trenches with concrete...

Here's a shot of one of the trucks for the company that is apparently laying our concrete

Hallelujah! They finally started!

We got the good news today from Steve, the project manager for the Highlands, that:

The foundation process has started, pad has been pushed, footer has been trenched, and it is scheduled to be inspected by the Monroe County Building Department tomorrow morning, weather permitting.

Now, I don't have a clue what all that means, but once we went by our lot this evening, we saw that some progress has been made:

Emilie surveyed our lot at soon as we arrived

You can see the trenching outline of our house, and the line in the middle is (we assume) the line between the garage and the other side of the house

Here's a little better view of the trenching at the front of the house

And Emilie just had to get a shot of the trencher that did all of the hard work

A brief update

Twenty boxes and counting...mostly books. Boy, those things are heavy! Good thing our friend Elizabeth suggested we look in the dumpster at Barnes and Noble for book boxes. They had lots of clean (they were in a cardboard recycling bin, not really in the trash), sturdy, small book boxes. I'll try to keep each box under 50 pounds!

Unfortunately, there is a chance of rain the next few days. Aaargh!

Dryin' it out...

We've had several days without rain, but our lot still had a nice pond on the side, so apparently Beazer got fed up and tried to help dry out our land.

From what I can tell, they moved some dirt around, piled it up, and replaced our dachshund wading pool with a creek. We're keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn't rain for a few more days, so that they can hopefully get started on our foundation.

NO MORE RAIN!

Derek found an aerial photo of the place where our house will be. You can see that Meeting House Lane will connect to some unnamed road. It won't connect directly to Rockport Road, which is good because that is sort of the main artery in that area, so it is pretty busy. Kind of neat to see where the streets will be. If you look closely, you can even see the bulldozers sitting, waiting to start building our house!

Our little lot is all soggy. So, no progress has been made. But the forecast has no rain until next Friday, a week from today. Maybe it will dry out enough to start. I just can’t wait!!! I keep driving by, looking at the puddles. Our lot is just about the highest land around, but clay doesn’t drain very well. This might not bode well for our future gardening. I still have mud on my shoes from last time we walked around the lot. It might be a permanent condition. Even when the house is finished, I think the yard will have to wait until spring. I foresee a muddy winter.

To keep my mind off of what is NOT happening on the house, we have a busy weekend planned. Tonight, I am going with my friend, Elizabeth, to the release party for the final Harry Potter Book. Tomorrow, we are planning to get together with friends for dinner. Sunday, we are going to Indianapolis for the Middle Eastern Festival, a fundraiser at a church, with music, food, and dancing. And next week is the Monroe County Fair. We usually go to see the crafts, watch the cute baby contest, and eat fried foods.

We have also packed a little more. Boy, do we have a lot of junk! We are up to box number 14. So far, we have mostly packed knick-knacks, stuffed animals, pictures, extra sheets, and books. There are a lot of books. It is hard for me to put my books in boxes, knowing I won’t see them for months. What if I need to look up something for my students? What if miss my books! You can imagine how hard it is for me to actually get rid of any books. The Red Cross in Bloomington hosts a huge book sale in October. People come from miles around. I often buy cookbooks there, especially really old cookbooks. I found one that talked about making meals with less meat during the rationing of World War II. I haven’t made any of the recipes (one was a meatloaf made mostly from sweet potatoes!), but it was certainly interesting to look at it. This year, I hope to donate more books to the sale than I buy. That will be quite a challenge!

It has been hard to find small, sturdy boxes for the books. You don’t want to pack a great big box of books, unless you have your own personal forklift. And you don’t often see small boxes that are very sturdy. I think books breaking through the bottom of a flimsy box and landing on your feet would ruin any day. But a friend suggested we try the Recycling Center for boxes, which is a good idea. A lot of the apartments in our complex are currently empty, but people will arrive in August to go to school at IU. I bet we can get some of their used boxes then.

To take our minds off of packing and what is NOT happening with our house, we will have visitors in August. My parents are coming to see us for a few days, then we are going to St. Louis with Derek’s mom and Terry. I wonder if we will come back and see lots of progress on our house? I hope so!

Interior Decoration

Since we can’t actually talk about progress on the house, let’s discuss what we plan to do with the house once we have it. The back bedroom, the largest and farthest from the street, will be the master bedroom. That is the one that has a bathroom opening off of it. We hope it will be less cluttered than our current bedroom, since there will be room elsewhere for some of the stuff currently in our bedroom. For instance: the copier, the sewing machine, four book cases, four milk crates full of papers, six large floor/throw pillows, and out of season clothes. Hmmm, there might not be much left to put in the bedroom. We hope to buy a headboard for our bed after we move. We don’t have one now, partially because it would take up too many precious inches in the bedroom and partially because we were too poor to buy one when we first moved in to our apartment. The wall next to our bed is definitely worn where the bedding and pillows rub up against it, though, and we don’t want that to happen when it is OUR wall, not our landlord’s. We looked at a few headboards, but we are far too picky. Derek doesn’t want a footboard, just a headboard, since he likes to stick his feet off the end of the bed. Emilie wants a headboard that will be nice and comfy to lean against when reading in bed. A lot of headboards have a little carved ridge or bump right where your head would lean back. Doesn’t any body read in bed any more (or at least lean back and watch television?) We also want a full sized headboard. Apparently, the full sized bed is not cool any more. It is actually hard to find headboards that are not king or queen sized. Once again, we are old-fashioned and uncool!

We don’t have a color scheme for the bedroom. I guess it will be sort of pastel and floral, since our curtains and quilts are also pastel and floral. We do have a color planned for the bathrooms, based largely on the towels and shower curtain we already have. The master bathroom will be pink and the guest bathroom will be light blue. Too cute, huh? It is kind of surprising how many pink things we have in our house, now that I look around. Fortunately, Derek seems to be secure in his masculinity and not mind pink too much. As he said when I asked him if he minded sleeping under a pink flowered quilt: “I sleep with my eyes closed.” Such a tolerant fellow!

The front bedroom, of medium size, will be the office. It has a window looking out to the front of the house, so it might be a bit noisy for sleeping. Hopefully, it will be big enough to hold office and computer stuff AND craft stuff. It will certainly be bigger than our current “office,” which is the closet where the washer and dryer are supposed to go. Actually, this office is so small that it is mostly full of papers and we take the laptop into another room to do any actual work. We are very excited that we will have a washer and dryer of our own when we move. The way it is now, Derek has to lug all of our laundry across the parking lot to the apartment-wide laundry room. Then he has to put quarters into the machines, and run the dryers at least twice, because they don’t actually dry the clothes. Did I mention cleaning out other people’s lint and dirt before using the machines? Ick! So, like I said, we are both looking forward to having our very own washer and dryer.

We are also pretty excited about having a pantry. Emilie has some sort of squirrel gene that makes her stock up on food whenever there is A. a sale, B. a rain or snow storm, C. a new recipe, D. an article about a storm or earthquake anywhere in the world, or E. nothing better to do. So we have an extensive array of canned goods and other non-perishable food items. The stockpile has spread out from the cabinet by the stove onto the counter. It is so large that the Red Cross should probably be notified, so it can access the Johnson Emergency National Food Reserve in case of natural disasters. Soon, we will have a cute little pantry (about as wide and deep as a door) with wire shelves to store our food reserves. Then the Red Cross can rest easy. I thought about posting a picture of the cabinet of canned foods, but it is actually kind of embarrassing. Let’s just say that both of us refer to it as “The Scary Cabinet.” Anybody need any green beans?

Speaking of messy cabinets, the kitchen is one of those trendy “open kitchens.” Like you see in magazines, where everyone gathers around the kitchen at a party drinking martinis and watching the convection oven toast the Pizza Bites. Yeah, right. Whenever we have people over there is a mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen, because I just cooked for them. Why would I want people to come to a party and visit my dirty dishes? They had these “Great Rooms” in colonial America: sort of a combination living, dining, cooking, working area, where everyone gathered around the huge fireplace for light and warmth. But they only did that because they were too poor to build and heat more than one room! They also kept their cows and pigs indoors on especially cold winter nights, but you don’t see that in any home design magazines, do you? No, as a historian I can tell you that going back to the way they did it in the past is not necessarily a good idea. I am all in favor of modern inventions like privacy, electric lights, dishwashers, and blogs. I do not want to live in the good old days, when people only had one room. Anyway, I hope to close off the kitchen as much as possible. And I can always shove all the dirty dishes in the dishwasher when the doorbell rings. Or in the pantry…

One issue with a combined kitchen/breakfast nook/dining room/living room is the color scheme. All the stuff in all those little sub rooms is supposed to match. Yeah, right. The color scheme in the living room is “whatever kind of matches the couch.” The other rooms don’t have a color scheme. And I don’t even like the couch fabric all that much. I’m sure Martha Stewart would do something grand, like having the whole area is shades evoking the ocean, shading from a soothing green in the dining area to a deep turquoise in the breakfast nook, where she would keep her priceless collection of 500 pieces of majolica on 500 tiny custom made shelves. Did you know she has multiple houses? I bet she has one where she hangs around in her PJs and stashes all her junk, so the other four houses look pretty in pictures. She keeps her old stuffed animals and college dorm posters in that house, too. Next to her lava lamp and all the clothes she is hoping to fit back into someday. If I had four or five houses, I bet at least one of them could look pretty good…

This is the tenth birthday of blogs!

Yes, according to the Wall Street Journal (which had a lovely picture of a cake shaped like a computer…I think it was a real cake, too!) it has been ten years since the blog or weblog was invented. It is so new that my spell checker insists it isn’t even a word, although the American Heritage Dictionary disagrees. Blogs seem to be inherently trivial, since they are a log of what you do or think. Just a sort of online diary, but with lots of people peeking. The first blog was truly a web log, in the sense that it was a log of what the author had recently read on the web. Some blogs have themes, like politics, others are based on a single person or subject, like the blogs of our friends (see links on the left.) A wedding or a new baby is a popular reason for a blog, so no one feels left out, no matter how far away they live. We discovered that a blog solves the problem of accidentally telling some detail to one mother and not the other, or telling one BEFORE telling the other. Now you all have an equal opportunity to see what we are up to. Well, at least in regards to the house. Unlike some people, we don’t put EVERYTHING we do on our blog. (Tries to look innocent.)

We now have a slightly better idea when our house will be finished. They will start in a week or so. About two weeks after that, they hope to do the framing (the wood that holds up the walls.) The framing takes a day and a half or two days. That sounds awfully fast, doesn’t it? Maybe it is sort of like a barn raising. After the framing is finished, it should be about 90 days until we get the keys to our finished house. So, hopefully sometime in November. I don’t know if I can wait that long! We have two boxes packed, and counting…Maybe I should make a sort of tear-off calendar, like an advent calendar for grownups. Of course, it would help if I knew exactly how long it would be… Strange bit of trivia: Some holidays not only move around the calendar, like Easter, they can’t even be predicted. Some Jewish and Moslem holidays start when the moon or a specific star is first SEEN in the sky. Given the slight wobble of the earth, atmospheric distortion, and weather, the exact day cannot be predicted. So the official date isn’t known until someone actually spots the sliver of the moon in the sky over Jerusalem. Fortunately, this is not a part of the world that experiences a lot of cloudiness. I don’t think I could handle such an unpredictable holiday, just imagine having a house full of cookies and baklava sitting around for another day and trying to keep the kids from eating them!

Amish barn raising near Mount Hope in Holmes County, Ohio

Property Diagram

For those who are either really interested in our new home, or really bored, here is the diagram of our property lines, public utility easements, drainage easements, etc., that was approved by the City of Bloomington Planning Department.

The Long-Awaited Pre-Construction Meeting

(Yes, we are starting our house on Friday the Thirteenth.)

Today we had our “pre-construction meeting.” We met the guy who will supervise everyone who is actually going to build our house. Then we tramped all over our lot. There isn’t much to look at yet, just stakes: this stake is the edge of your property, this is the front corner of your house, your driveway will be over here. It was very muddy. So, now we are both very muddy, and so are our car mats! Once the lot dries out a bit, they will level it off again and start building our house. So, please pray for no rain for a week or so. (Or cross your fingers, or light a candle, or rub a magic lamp, or whatever your preferred method might be.)

The first step will be to dig a hole where the house will be. Yes, they have to level the land so they can . . . dig a hole in the middle. Clearly, I don’t understand the building process very well, because this makes no sense to me. Then the hole will be inspected. Yes, really. (“Yep, that’s a hole.”) Then they will put iron bars into the hole. Then they will pour concrete, which will be the foundation of our house. Then the plumber will lay pipes. Then more concrete.

Yes, our house will have slab construction, not a crawl space. One of my students, who works in construction, told me that a slab house is a piece of crap and you just shouldn’t even bother to build one. (He LOVED giving me construction advice, since it was fun for him to know more than the teacher did about SOMETHING.) I am now trying to not hyperventilate thinking about that bit of advice. What if something goes wrong with the pipes? Will they be buried inside the concrete? How will they fix them? Won’t they freeze that way in winter? If they leak, will our whole house crumble?

Okay, I will try to look on the bright side: slab construction is generally safer in an earthquake (yep, looooots of those in Indiana!) and cheaper and faster to build. You also have almost no chance of having a rabid skunk crawl under your house and die in the depths of the crawl space. That’s a definite plus. We also upgraded to thicker carpet padding so the floor won’t feel hard and cold, even though it is concrete. Something I have always wondered: what is the difference between concrete and cement? Does one have sand in it??? Gee, sounds like it is time to bother the nice reference librarians at our local library.

We did learn today that our house will have the garage on the right hand side of the house (if you are standing in the street facing the house.) So the kitchen will be on the right hand side, too, and the bedrooms will be on the left. This is the reverse of the model home, so I am having a hard time adjusting my mental image. It is, however, the same as the floor plan shown farther down on this page. We didn’t get to pick the orientation of the house, apparently the engineers pick it. I don’t know how they decide. Do they examine the entrails of sheep or something? Maybe the entrails of an old computer? Our house will face north, which means the garage will be on the north side (hopefully insulating the house from cold winds.) So, our back yard will face south, which should extend the growing and grilling seasons a bit. Our house will be about 15 feet from the neighbor’s house on each side. That seems awfully close, but it doesn’t look that bad when you look at the houses that are already finished. And the windows are very carefully placed so you won’t be looking out your window directly into the neighbor’s house. Maybe we will eventually be able to plant pampas grass or something to give a sense of separation. The neighborhood association rules say you can’t put a fence there, you can only fence off your back yard, not the side yards. And it has to be a cute fence, of an approved type. Yeah, whatever. As long as the fence can contain an energetic dachshund.

We also learned our new address: 1549 West Meeting House Lane. Doesn’t that sound nicer than Lot #356? I better order some return address labels! I still think “Meeting House” is an odd name for a street. Do they have a computer generate names for streets? I actually think the names of housing divisions are a form of that game, Mad Libs. You know: insert adjective here, name a kind of tree, add a British-sounding word: Sweet Pine Glen, Far Oaks Estates, Green Elm Shire. My all time favorite stupid name for a housing division is in Wichita, Kansas, near where my parents live. It is called “Turtle Run.” Turtles don’t run anywhere! And turtles are not exactly an aristocratic sort of animal, are they? Cute, but not really expensive or noble. And a “run” really sounds more like part of a dog kennel than a place to live. The apartment complex where we live now is called “Steeplechase.” Apparently that is a kind of horse race, so they were going for the snobby polo-pony association. Most people think it is named after the huge church right next door (which, by the way, doesn’t even have a steeple.) I don’t think the name quite carries the connotation they hoped for. Should have stuck with the Mad Libs: Calm Ash Mansions, Bright Palm Lakes, Quite Birch Brook, or something like that.

Thank you all for your contributions to our blog. So far, our favorite advice is from Derek’s dad: have lots of food and beer and wine for your helpers, but only give it to them AFTER they finish work. Is that to ensure that they actually do the work, or to ensure they are sober enough not to drop your grandmother’s antique lamp? Either way, sounds like good advice to me.

Did somebody say dachshund?

Wait, did Derek just say I could have a dachshund? Where's my check book?

A "Sign" of Progress

We finally have a sign identifying our lot as our own!

Oh, and apparently we are also getting an in-ground pool for free, just to the left side of our lot...


Actually, the water is probably just deep enough for a little dachshund to go wading! (But hopefully it will be filled in by the time they start working on our house!)

An inch of progress?

Since we hadn’t heard anything about our house for a few weeks, we impatiently pestered the nice lady at Beazer Homes for an update. (Sorry, Linda!) She told us that they would probably be ready to schedule our pre-construction meeting next week. I’m still not sure what that is, but we get to meet the guy who is in charge of building our house. And then, after that meeting, they can start on the house. I am having a hard time waiting. I stopped driving by to look at our lot, because nothing was happening and I found it a little discouraging. Derek still likes to go look at our dirt, though. He is very proud of it. It is nice, level dirt now. Quite red, too, sort of like the dirt in Oklahoma. Maybe I should have gone for carpet that was more orange or rust, then the mud wouldn’t show. Can I just make everyone take off their shoes at the door?

The Bloomington Parade of Homes, sponsored by all the home builders in town, was last weekend and the model home that has the same floor plan as our house won “Best Master Bedroom.” I’m not sure how much of that had to do with the layout and how much was due to the cute décor. The décor in the model is very cute, there is even a little tray for breakfast in bed sitting on the perfectly made bed. And, of course, everything is color coordinated and there is no clutter. I think there is ONE book in the bedroom, on the tiny bedside table. Totally unrealistic! I am sure our bedroom will look considerably, uh, “homier.” I once saw a pillow that had been beautifully embroidered with the words “Martha Stewart expectations…” and then had the following written in magic marker “Erma Bombeck reality.” Maybe I should make one of those for our bed! If you don’t know who Erma Bombeck is, she is a humorist who wrote mostly about the experience of being a stay-at-home mom. One of her books is called The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank. She once said she would rather hear “I’ll cook dinner” than “I love you.” Smart lady. (Derek, honey, are you reading this?)

Time for more audience participation: now it is your turn to share your favorite moving tips. Please post your favorite advice for people who are moving by clicking the word “Comments” or by e-mailing me. Sorry, no prize this time. But you will achieve the world-wide fame and glory of having your name and tip posted on this lovely blog! What more could you possibly want? Well, I suppose you can remain anonymous if you prefer. And your tip will help us in our daunting quest (trumpet fanfare)… to move to our new house. I picture our move as looking something like this: