Current location:	home on the range
Current mood:	calm
Entry tags:	family, home improvement

Coming Soon - Framing
Got a call midweek from my contractor saying the lumber for the framing would start to show up Monday or so and that the roof trusses were on order. Once the material arrives the framing-in will start and evidently that goes very fast. He said, "soon it will look like a house!" Cool. :)

This meant I had to make a decision on what color shingles were going to go on the roof. I took Friday off as a little minivacation, so Mom and I went down to the contractor's office and looked at samples of shingles and siding. We were torn between a color called "weathered white" and another color called "pewter". The weathered white looked like its name, while the pewter looked like a nice medium gray. I was leaning toward the pewter color because it would make a very lovely contrast with the pale siding we wanted. The very nice lady in charge of the office said there were two homes the contractor had just re-roofed, one with each color, so we could go and see how it looked in daylight. I got the addresses, printed out maps from Google maps, and then Mom and I went on a little drive around the area to find the homes. It turned out it was time well spent, the weathered white colored shingles actually look like a soft silver gray in daylight, which is a color I really like and so did Mom. The pewter shingles looked almost black -- very handsome -- but in this climate in the full sun they would really retain the heat. So we decided on the weathered white shingles and a siding color called "Pearl", which is a very pale warm gray close to what I have on the house already.

The concrete is now hard as... well, concrete. I've been walking over it as I drag the hose and sprinkler from one end of the yard to the other in an attempt to keep the lawn alive. Summer is here with a vengeance -- it has been 105-107 degrees F the past few days, ugh. Looks like the weather may moderate toward the end of the week, but is IS July, and that means hot. This probably means the various builders may be showing up very early in the morning to beat the heat. Guess I should get to bed before 1 am, huh?

Here are two photos from last week.



The concrete slab all nice and set up. This is before a bunch of birds decided to poop on it after eating wild cherries. :P



The back of the house as it looks right now. The exposed wall doesn't look terribly nice, but it is holding up well despite the vagaries of the weather. As of this moment it is wind storming outside and there were big thunderheads on the horizon before the sun went down. Maybe if we are lucky we'll get a little free water out of the deal, but this time of year we are just as likely to get a dust storm rather than a rain shower.

The concrete folks very nicely strung the hose from the old washer faucet and nailed it up along the side of the house to keep it out of the setting concrete. Someone also turned on the exterior faucet on the front of my house which was a really big help since I'm now using that to run all my sprinklers. At some point, the plumber is going to replace all that old piping and life may get a little bit easier in terms of the water supply.