Monday was a "scheduled non-work day" with regard to building the house. The construction crews also had last Friday off. Two days off for the New Year's Day holiday that occurred on a Saturday. Sheesh. Don't these people know we have a house we want to move into?

Construction proceeds apace on our house-in-progress. Today was officially work day number 14, and they are wrapping up getting the shingles on the roof, the plumbing in the walls, and they've started putting in ducting for the heat. The front, side, and rear doors have been installed (kinda).

I was curious as to why one of the second story windows has been sitting in the garage instead of being installed in its wall. It turns out that this window space is used as the major port of entry for the sheet rock which will be delivered the week after next. I'm sure that beats trying to carry it all upstairs.

The construction schedule includes an opportunity for us to meet with the site super (supervisor? superintendent?) to inspect the progress before the dry wall goes up. This also gives us a chance to take photos of the wall studs and the wiring and the ducting and everything in the walls that will be hidden by the sheet rock. This will be very useful when we want to make little renovations down the line. We'll meet with the super next week.

In the meantime, a couple of my faithful readers have asked for pictures from some other angle; something to give more of a sense of what the house looks like in context. In the coming days, I'll give you some other angles of the front of the house.

For now, however, let me show you the back of the house.

As I had mentioned in an earlier posting, our house is a little bit bigger than the houses on either side. This photo shows just how much farther our house extends into our back yard than our neighbors' do.

This is purely an accident of timing. Paulette and I had picked out this particular floor plan as being the best suited for us from among the many plans that the builder makes available. Because we got into the game so late in this community, there was only one lot left that could accommodate the house we picked. There were several larger floor plans (and several smaller floor plans) available, and there were still a couple of lots left to accommodate those larger plans. However, they didn't want to sell us the larger lot to put our puny house on. (Naturally, they wanted to sell larger houses for those larger lots, because that way, they'd make more money.)

So instead, they sold us the smallest lot left that our house could fit upon. Most of the houses on lots of this size have a smaller footprint (I don't know what the construction term is, so I'm using the computer geek term), and therefore a larger yard. As a result, our house looks much bigger than it is because it's next to smaller houses rather than being next to larger houses. Had we our preference, we'd have gone for the larger lot if only to get a decent size yard.

As with everything, there have been trade-offs each step of the way in our choices. Since we are not independently wealthy, cost *is* a constraining factor. This builder gives the best value of square footage for the buck, and if that means we get a smaller yard, then that's the way it goes. And so, here we are.

But all that said, you can imagine how psychologically weird it is to just look at the arrangement of houses on the one hand and say, Oh, My! That's one big house! And, on the other hand, to then look at the back yards and say, Oh, My! That's one tiny yard!

Earlier, I had joked that we were going to paint our house white with red polka dots. Well, that's a little family joke (my paternal grandfather once maintained a family cottage in Ontario in the sleepy town of Crystal Beach that was, indeed, white with red polka dots), but the truth is not too far off.

We had to pick the color scheme from a list of pre-approved schemes assembled by the builder. We opted for red with an off-gray trim, because we wanted something that wasn't effing green. Of the thirty color schemes available, twenty-five of them or so were some shade of green. It's like some cruel Northwest joke. "The Evergreen State" my butt. So, we opted for the least green color available. It was red.

If you think our house is a little bit taller, a little bit wider, a little bit farther forward and a lot farther back compared to the other houses on our street, just wait until you see it in Red. Holy cow, is our house going to stand out.

We didn't plan it that way -- it never dawned on us that our floor plan was larger than the houses next to ours. They hadn't even poured the foundations for our neighbor's houses at that time. But while we didn't plan it, is it any surprise to anyone who knows me that our new house is, like it's owners, going to stand out just a wee bit?

(Yes, I know. I need to go on a diet. But that's not what I meant....)