Housebuilding

The major change to our house today is that we now have garage doors.

And yes, I do take pictures of every little improvement to the house. Why do you ask?

There’s been a lot of progress today. (Yes, I have more pictures.)

• Someone from a utility said that a pole will be appearing nearby sometime.
• The house is now under lock and key
• The kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities are in.
• The doors and molding are in.
• There are light switches.

“And at some point a pole should appear, and we should tell them about it.” — Jessi

Many doors are installed, molding is around most doors, windows, and floors, and the base of the vanities are in the bathrooms.

See today’s pictures!

You know your house is taking too long to build when…

The doors and cabinets have arrived, although they’re not installed yet. Also, the heating registers are installed in most (maybe even all) of the rooms. I have some pictures. I especially like the box that quite clearly has its “This side up” arrows pointing down. (No, the camera was not upside-down, nor was the image rotated.)

The thing that’ll take forever is the telephone poles so that we can get power and data. We may end up having a completed house just sitting there for a few weeks without power (and thus, without an occupancy permit). The person who owns the land across the private road from us said that they would sign an easement to let Verizon and Mass. Electric put up poles on the road, but they apparently haven’t done so after about two weeks. So, we’re probably going to just put a pole on the corner of my parents’ yard near the paved road, and have wiring go underground from there all the way to the house (instead of just from a pole-on-the-private-road to the house). This method will cost a bit more, but then we don’t have to worry about anything since it’s all on our lands. (The person who owns the land across the private road is making a rather dumb decision by not getting that in quickly, since having the utilities put poles on the road would likely increase his property value significantly.)

Last night, I tried to run a Magic NAC Qualifier, but we only had 5 people. (The minimum for running a sanctioned tournament is 8). That was rather disappointing, especially since we managed to have 11 last time. So, we had an informal unsanctioned booster draft instead. Jessi came in first place and I came in last place.

They were supposed to finish plastering our house today, although I haven’t actually inspected it to ensure that they did. I think the critical path is just waiting on the phone company to put in poles for us. Hopefully, we’ll be in the house within a few weeks.

Last weekend, Jessi & I went to Camden, NY to visit Jessi’s relatives for the fourth of July.

There’s not much news on the house. We’re still waiting for the power poles.

Coming up on Tuesday, I’ll be judging Card Stop’s second qualifier tournament for the Magic North American Challenge. Hopefully, starting next week we’ll also have Friday Night Magic there.

We received our first property tax bill from the Town of Charlton.

Ah, the joys of being a landowner.

Last Saturday, we picked out our appliances and lighting fixtures. Jessi will have three ovens (An oven with another oven instead of a pan-drawer, and a combo microwave/convection oven over the stove). This pleases her immensely.

Today, the drywall is being installed, and the cabinets are being ordered.

Tomorrow, coverage starts on our homeowners insurance. Apparently, we should have had it a long time ago, but nobody told us and made sure we did.

It turns out that there are some places that the town clerk didn’t search before, and in 1955, Charlton Town Meeting discontinued Berry Corner Rd., from Ayers Rd. to the Sturbridge town line, from being a town road. Had we discovered this much earlier in the process, this all would have been much more difficult. However, finding it now, they can’t retroactively revoke our right to build, and it’ll be easier to get telephone poles put in because they’ll just need permission from us, and not from the town. So I guess things are going alright with it, it’s just… odd.