Big day for us today as we held our Pre-Drywall Meeting! Not a ton of surprises as I've had a bunch of conversations with the Project Manager and I pretty much drive by the house every other day... I spent the afternoon thinking up such a long list of questions/issues to talk about that I was almost disappointed with how well the meeting went.
The top of our list was as follows:
- Need to make a decision on the front door
- Double check all lighting and outlet locations
- What can be done about the large empty area of siding above the garage door?
The front door has been a week long disagreement between Jen and I. Our original drawing set showed a door with two raised panels on the bottom and a single raised panel on the top. Somehow that got mis-ordered as window pane on the top. When we first saw it, we both thought it looked like some sort of exam room viewing window that didn't fit the house. After the siding was installed, it grew on me, however. Ultimately, I wasn't all that attached to the window and Jen was very adamant that the window was just too much in the front of the house. So, team no-window won that round!
The lighting and outlets were right where we expected. In fact, there were a couple of lights added that I didn't quite expect (which I'm not going to argue about!) The electrician was very accommodating when it came to our own thoughts on light locations and sizes. Coming from a home that was nearly 100 yrs old, this place feels like it has outlets and lights EVERYWHERE. Most important to me was just documenting a bunch of the locations for the future. You never know when you're going to want to open up a wall or two down the road! Just a sampling of the dozens of pictures...
Lastly, the issue of the enormous open area of siding. To be honest... this has been the only real disappointment of our entire home building process. None of the original renderings showed this. None of the architectural drawings we've seen have shown this. And right now, it's really noticeable. So much so that we've become a little self conscious about showing pictures of it! But there's a reasonable explanation: The home sits really high above grade. This is primarily due to the fact that the water table is pretty high in the area and therefore the basement isn't as sunk into the ground as we may have hoped. The overall height of the garage will work wonders for us from a storage perspective, but that sea of green was frustrating.
So what's the plan? The gable vent is going to move down about a foot. Then, it needs to be trimmed out on the sides and the bottom which will add some girth. Then, we've also picked out some trim for above the garage door that adds a little girth as well. The result will reduce the gap by more than a foot compared to how it looks right now. Much more manageable. Our PM suggested that it's a perfect location for a basketball hoop, but I had to point out the obvious height deficiency that our family suffers from. It would make a pretty excellent location for a projector screen for some neighborhood movie nights, though...
The million dollar question of "when will it be done" remains unanswered. When prodded, our PM wouldn't commit, but said May seems unlikely. I'm still guessing early June.
No comments:
Post a Comment