Housebuilding

Drywall is expected to be delivered late this week, so it looks like the internals of the house may be done in just a few weeks.

The main problem, as one might expect, is with Verizon. They need to put a telephone pole on our part of Berry Corner Rd. in order to give us power and data lines. However, they hadn’t realized that it’s a town road, so they hadn’t started the process of asking the town for permission to place the pole. (That involves a public hearing, with probably registered mail to the abutters and such. Luckily, the abutters probably won’t have a problem with it. :) They still haven’t been convinced that it’s not a town road yet, but we’re working on it. (We have documentation from the Charlton town clerk.) But it could be 6 weeks before we get our power and data lines in.

We now have insulation in our house!

Apparently, Verizon doesn’t yet believe that our road is a town road, so it may be a while before we get wires going to the house. *sigh*

There’s been a lot more progress on the house. The porch now has stairs and a railing, and it looks really nice. It passed several town inspections today. Soon, the well will get hooked up and we’ll have running water. Still no word on how long it might take Mass. Electric to get its act together.

See Today’s Pictures

I put together a quick video tour of the inside of the home. I tried out Windows Movie Maker so I have it in Windows Media format (2.3MB), but if you don’t like Microsoft formats I also have the 11 meg source AVI files of the downstairs and upstairs walkthroughs.

More pictures!

I took most of them a few minutes ago, but some near the beginning are of the construction of the porch.

Also, since I’m on a slow-upload connection, I changed my album generator to have the thumbnails link to 800×600 size images, which in turn link to the full image. Let me know if you prefer this, or if anyone besides me ever looks at the pictures.

I just received word that there is now a plywood roof on our house!

Also, we’ve just received the first piece of mail in our new mailbox. It is, of course, junk mail.

New contact info for me & Jessi:
194 Berry Corner Rd.
Charlton, MA 01507–5247

Phone number is remaining the same (I love VoIP): 774-490-7314

“They put a house on top of our basement!” — Jessi, when seeing the latest pictures. (Thank you, Ben!)

UPDATE 5/18: As Ben says, even more pictures today! We’ve got a second floor now!

Latest news from my dad today is that it looks like they’ve just about finished improvements to our segment of Berry Corner Rd. so that the cement truck can come through and poor the footing for the foundation. It’s nice to finally see things progressing after the months of waiting for things.

In sad news, I’m sick today :(

Jessi and I got to see the work done on digging our foundation so far. There’s a lot done in just the couple days they’ve been working. They’re working on the drainage for the road, they’ve flattened out the hills, and they’ve dug a cellar hole. Hopefully, they’ll start pouring the cement for the footing for the foundation this week.

I took pictures!

After a couple years of waiting for people and governments, our house will actually get started soon! The bank put some money from the loan in our checking account today, so I wrote the builder the check for 10% of the cost so that he can get started! It should arrive on Saturday if the Post Office is efficient (which I don’t really expect, but is possible), which should mean that groundbreaking could start as early as next week!

We have a building permit!

We sign the contract with the builder this Sunday, most likely.

Much happiness and joy!