House Construction

I was online looking up the address of a friend nearby and noticed that Google had published their neighborhood's street view. While I am accustomed to having street view avaialble whenever I'm looking up addresses in urban areas, such as New York City, this is the first time I noticed it in a suburban setting.

Our builder, Gary Casazza, is in the process of putting the finishing touches on our foundation today. 

Today our builder outlined where the men have to dig for the new foundation. Of course, this encompasses the exisiting foundation hole. The workers will dig two feet beyond where the new foundation will be in order for the new basement walls to be installed.  They have to still excavate the old floor and fill below that floor as we are digging deeper in order to have a 9' ceiling in the basement.

Yes, it was facinating to watch the demolition the first day (Thursday); first the roof is taken off, then the guys started to saw the walls down and would push sections off the second story to the ground where the pieces were placed in a dumpster. Anything that could be recycled, was removed and put onto a trailer for transportation.  Shots of the house were done with my Canon digital camera.

At long last, here is the front elevation for the new house...

Well, it's been a while since my last post and we are finally moving on. As of yesterday, out builder showed up and started demolition on the house. If you click in the photo, you can view a slide show of shots I took with my camera-phone.

We have a tentative schedule of having the foundation set on the 17^th of August and then have the house itself set on the 21^st.

We're really movin' and there's no stopping now.

A week and a half ago we did our visit to Haven Homes and we were very happy with what we saw. I shot a batch of photos here. Everything is well constructed and they actually allowed us to go down on the production floor to get a closer look at their workmanship.

It's been a very busy week around here and we are starting to see the fruits of all our labor.

We have had a third meeting with our builder, Gary Casazza, and will be taking a trip out to the Haven Homes factory next Monday to start making the final decisions. In the mean time we need to look at some of the work he has completed and just be assured that he really produces work that we are happy with. I feel confident that that is the case, but we'd look like damn fools if we spent all this money building a house with an incompetent builder.

As many of you know we experienced a house fire in May of 2006. We we are almost at the one year anniversary to that even and are still living in an apartment. The main reason for not being back home is due to delays in the settlement with our insurance carrier, but we are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.