Home Construction (Day 43 - September 14)

Here we go -- things are going better today!  It's siding day, finally, apparently -- at least the start of it, anyway!  All the back of our Uchi was about halfway done when we stopped by to visit, and the right side was completely done:

The back of the house, half-sided...

 

The right side, fully uh... sided.

The siding dude was still there working, actually,

when I stopped by -- I guess it was a long day...

James, that was his name, he said he was a new contractor,

but he worked really fast, it seemed -- maybe when they get older

& more experienced, they realize they can take it easy?  : )

Also, it turned out they already sprayed the "popcorn ceiling" stuff

onto our ceiling, and...

....  and onto our floor (!?!!?!!) making a total mess,

with white powder everywhere, and really smelly.

You have to have a sharp eye for details to notice this, but:

they've also started putting up the trim around the garage doors.

Home Construction (Day 42 - September 11)

The only progress today was our furnace - we wrote this blog couple days ago and couple minutes ago we accidentally deleted it :'(

It was friday, no progress other than furnace

Home Construction (Day 41 - September 10)

Guys, no pictures today because nothing major happened.  They delivered the siding for our Uchi, and it's in a big bunch of piles outside right now, waiting to be attached to the walls.  Other than that -- nothing!  : (

Hey, I know:   go look at the baby photos a couple of posts down!   :^D   That's better...

Rocky Mountains, Colorado

A few pictures I took during my Colorado trip:

A breathtaking panorama -- wish I had a wide-angle lens

 

Yes - that's me : )

Even the squirrel was enjoying how beautiful our surroundings were.

The Rocky Mountains

 

A close-up of the Rocky Mountains

I could imagine how beautiful it would be to see a sunrise around this area.

 

A lake in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.  Very scenic!

Home Construction (Day 40 - September 9)

Today was "user-friendly convenience" day, because our Uchi got two important items of handy convenience installed:

#1:  Stairs to the front patio, and

 

#2:  Stairs into the garage!

 

(A closer look at the stairs from the garage...)

We searched for other things -- any signs of work, inside or out -- it's like a treasure hunt every day!  But we could only find one other thing:  the basement utilities.  We now have our water heater and softener, which are all wired up, the HVAC unit installed, and all the pipes connected, going to the rest of the house:

 

The master control room, in the basement.

Also:  the dark lair from which we will take over the world!!! (maybe?)

Best 30 bucks spent

I have a confession:  Sometimes when I'm bored and I don't feel like reading manga, buying houses, slaving my hubby, or dreaming about what kind of dogs I should adopt, I uh...  well, I dress up little children in big, cute, fuzzy costumes!!!  I love it!  A coulple of years ago I sent a "Tigger" costume to my sister overseas, to dress up my little nephew, and got back a series of hilarious photos.  Well this year, it was my hubby's baby nephew's turn!  And instead of Tigger, this time it was Winnie the Pooh himself.

We sent the costume to Atlanta and waited patiently for the results, but had no idea what was in store for us... remember how my hubby's Babushka is into photography?  Well check THIS out:

Winnie the Pooh finds himself at home with his trusty spoon and his #1 target:

The Jar of Honey.

He checks the spoon carefully for flaws.

Hey?  What are you lookin' at?  The way I eat is my own business!

I swear I found this jar of honey on the ground.  I didn't take it from any bees!

I promise!

Seriously?  You're still following me?  Grr, I'm kind of angry when I think about papparazzi.

 

Let's get to business though....   mmmm, looks GOOD.

[30 MIN LATER]

 

AH, I can't handle it anymore.  WOW, look at my belly.  Good times.

 

Time for a lovely nap.  Kind of spacing out here...  lovely beeeees fluttering around,

just had a big jar of honey...    gonna drift off soon...

happy happy...  honey... jar...  spoooOoooOoonnn....  yawn

Home Construction (Day 39 - September 8)

Yes, it's been a few days...  but, the only new thing that's happened is that all the cracks between the drywall plates have been sealed with this "fire-seal" goop, which isn't quite paint, but at least smoothes out all the walls:

View of the kitchen & dining room

(looking at it from the living room)

 

View of the living room

(looking at it from the kitchen)

 

The upstairs bedroom

(here we have an extra set of drywall,

which remained in that spot for the next 2 weeks actually!)

At this point, the work on the interior of the house largely stopped, and the work began to focus on the exterior again.  Fairly soon you'll be able to see the dreaded "pebble" exterior color and everything!

That's all for today -- not much, but I'm sure it's important!

Labor Day

This labor day we didn't go out of town since we had decided to invite Babushka (Grandma) to MN to visit us. Actually, we were originally planning to take her to Niagara Falls or New York, but everything fell apart because of the tickets from MN to Niagara Falls being really expensive. But we decided she would be really happy if we invited her to come here, too, since she'd never visited us in Minneapolis before.

The preparations started as soon as she accepted our invitation - almost every day after work we cleaned our apartment and did laundry.  We decided to clean one room at a time each night, and do a couple of loads of laundry. We didn't have the luxury of an extra weekend to clean, so it ended up being a really busy week

Friday after work, we picked up Babushka from the airport then we took her to our Uchi - it was a total surprise to her, since we didn't tell her where we were heading - we kept telling her that we were going to somewhere scenic to take pictures of the sunset.

She was so happy and liked our Uchi!  : )

 

Our Uchi still looked like this, at the time...

At the end of the night we took her out to eat at our favorite Indian restaurant, which she also liked -- mmm, Naan, rice, meat, sauce, what's not to like?!

The next day, I had a photography class in the morning, so the Russians (my hubby and his Babushka) dropped me off, and then went for a walk around the Minneapolis sculpture garden downtown.  After my class was over, we all went to check out the farmer's market, and then all around the twin cities to take photos:

Cathedral in downtown Minneapolis

The following day I came up with this idea to take the Russian and his Babushka to the botanical gardens in St. Paul -- there is also a zoo there, which I had forgotten about, but it all ended up being a great part of the visit!  The botanical gardens have tons of tropical plants, including ones from Asia, that I know really well but which the Russians have never seen before, and they have nice garden rooms like this one here:

 

and it turned out that Babushka and I have one thing in common -- we're both crazy about photography.  So she really enjoyed all the plants and flowers we could take pictures of, and so did I:

 

Some close-ups of a lily (heh)

 

 

 

What we *didn't* know was that the botanical gardens had an exhibit of GIGANTIC lily pads, the size of elephant ears.  They were unbelievably huge:

 

Have to photograph them from far away to get the full perspective...

 

The Russian's giant hands look tiny in comparison!

 

Each lily's root system leads to about ten giant leaves!  GIANT!

 

Of course, lilies are blooming as well!

Now, surprise #2 was that, at the time that we went, there was also a butterfly exhibit -- a huge tent full of trees and butterflies which would land everywhere and amaze everyone:

 

This one looks like it's an airplane about to take off?

On the last day that she was here (which was Labor Day) her flight was in the evening, so we got to drive around lake Calhoun & Harriet, and took photos in the secret rose garden there.  We showed her the Mall of America, and ate crappy Chinese food in the food court.  Then we were off to the airport.  It was a busy & entertaining weekend, lots of fun memories, and once Babushka was gone we both really felt it and missed her.  We hope to invite here again next year, but this time to our fully-ready Uchi.

Home Construction (Day 38 - September 4)

Today we won't post any pictures of our uchi : (  since we didn't take one : (

BUT we know what was the progress of the home - I stopped by during lunch with Jermaine - to show him our place for the first time. I forgot to bring my camera since I didn't anticipate going there

When we got there, they were filling our roof area with insulation. There was a van with people inside filling a pipe with bunch of small foams, and another person was holding the pipe in the garage ceiling.

There weren't changes from the picture since the only activity was only insulating ceiling where we couldn't see.

Btw we still visited our home though after work : )

Home Construction (Day 37 - September 3)

Hey everyone -- so, today you get to see what Uchi looks like with actual walls, instead of just the wood frame!  Ready?  Well, we promised last time, and here's the proof:

That's what's going on in the garage these days...   as you can see, it's not quite finished yet.  But, it's the only section of the house that wasn't finished on that day.  The rest was all drywalled-up and looking good, just a bit messy.

And the foyer?  See if you recognize it:

 

You remember the saying "with great power comes great responsibility?"  Evidently, there should be another saying:  "with great walls comes a great mess!"

Yes, that is our kitchen, if you can imagine it. It's like poor Uchi is ready for demolition or something.

That, friends, is what our living room looks like, and:

I'm kind of scared to even show you guys the upstairs...

If it's the end of the world, this is probably what our house will look like.  

 

 

 

 The basement hasn't changed much, but they brought the walls down the stairs so that it looks like a tunnel now.  Then there's this mysterious extra piece of drywall laying there, which I guess they are saving in case they run out, or we steal one or something... you'll have to wait for the next post to find out where that one will end up!

 

 

Finally, we wanted to show you guys the thickness of the walls.  Jeremy, our field manager claims it's 5 inches wide.  But a much much better & more precise measurement is that:  it's exactly 8 my-size-thumbnails wide.  We're going to ask him to start ordering parts using that measurement from now on.

Home Construction (Day 36 - September 2)

We hate to keep you guys guessing, so today we're ready to reveal the gender of our Uchi:

                                                      IT'S A BOY!!!

It has a faucet for a hose sticking out of the bottom, so...  you know.  Boy.  Definitely.

Now, today is drywall day -- they bring in big panels of stuff that looks pretty much like cardboard, and stick it up on the walls.  Finally, the house looks like it HAS walls, rather than being made of sticks of wood.

But the official tour will have to wait until next time!  We didn't actually go and look at the house on this day.

Home Construction (Day 35 - September 1)

Today was a big day for us - we had our second meeting with our Field Manager (Jeremy) and we will find out the completion day of Uchi.

That day is November 3rd! Happy b-day Uchi.

The funniest thing is that NOTHING happened except that Jeremy marked all the wall outlets which weren't "hot" all the time (i.e. all the outlets which had a switch controlling them) so that he could show us where they were.

That's all! Just some markings. Wow.

And then we got into a big disagreement with our sales guy (Murphy -- with an ironic name like that, we should have known...), about the color of our siding. He didn't tell us that three houses in our cul-de-sac were all the same color. But in the beginning, he forced us to switch from our preferred color (green) because there was already another green house 2 doors away from us. Inconsistent, right? Hmm.

Home Construction (Day 34 - August 31)

Now we know what they did on Friday (Aug 28) - they sealed the interior of our walls with plastic:


They even completed foam insulation of all the cracks between all the walls of the entire Uchi


The insulation for our foyer:


Insulation for our ceiling:


View from the 2nd bedroom:



And even the basement:



Kind of fun -- we can bounce off the walls like crazy people, for a while, anyway. We also noticed it was much much warmer in the house, now that the insulation was present.

The basement was all shiny and aluminum-foiled, did you see? And that's basically how it's going to look, from now on, since we don't plan on finishing it yet. Quite a surprise/shock since we didn't know that this was how an unfinished basement looks like. I thought they would at least add walls or the ceiling. Oh well!