As you can see from the photo to the left, they finally installed a backhoe loader in front of our house-in-progress. This will allow us to joyride around the neighborhood and smash stuff. Oh, and it will allow Alexander the opportunity to get a better understanding of the laws of physics... while we joyride around the neighborhood and smash stuff.

All seriousness aside, I had expected that there wouldn't be many opportunities to show changes to the house on the outside as we near the end of the construciton cycle, but I was wrong. There's still plenty happening every day, and plenty more yet to do.

The most obvious changes in the past couple of days on the outside are the grading of our yard(s) and the installation of some of the landscaping in front (none of which is visible in the first photo because of the backhoe sitting in front of our yard). They've also begun installing the completely functionless columns on the front porch (there's another one yet-to-be-installed on the right-hand side of the front eve), and they've poured the concrete for the steps outside the "man door" that leads out of the garage on the right-hand side.

In this second photo, you might just barely be able to make out where the "man door" is on the side of the garage. Notice that the yard is nice and smooth. Notice that there's some small lumps of green bushy things in front of our porch. Those may some day be recognizeable vegatation of some kind. Some trees have also been planted, but aren't obvious in either of these photos.

Inside, they've installed carpeting, the stove, the microwave, the dishwasher, and continue to work on bathroom fixtures and the like. Yesterday was the big push to get the carpeting in, and they were still working on it well into the evening when I had stopped by. Today, on the other hand, nobody was around, and it looked like pretty much all of the flooring was taken care of.

At least, from what I was able to see through the windows.

While all of this work continues on the construction inside and out of the house, there are two other major tracks happening parallel with the entire process. One, of course, is the financing. Talk about joyrides and smashing stuff. I'll comment more on that delightful process once the ink is dry on all of the documents we have yet to sign.

The other is, for lack of a better term, "outfitting" the new house. Instead of buying a refrigerator, washer, or dryer through the builder, we opted to find our own that was more to our tastes. So we've had to make our own purchases and arrangements for delivery on that score. Then there's moving over the phone service, switching over the gas and electric, etc.

As you can imagine, it's all keeping us very, very busy.

And there's only a little over a week left to go. Eeek!