Update: house chugs along

It's been a while since I posted...    the concrete was poured in the 2nd story without issue, thankfully.  There were a few windows that were off and needed to be edited with the concrete saw (the ICF guys' fault, not mine - they forgot to match up corner windows when they edited one for support purposes downstairs.  I can see how they would make the mistake and forget by the time they did the upstairs). 

Everything went smoothly, and basically the house sat for a while letting the concrete cure.  There is one very large expanse of upper wall in the great room that STILL has braces on

it, 3 weeks later.  They are keeping the braces up for a while to ensure that the concrete is completely cured and a solid support system.  Fine with me!  It's amazing how many braces you end up in the house right before a pour, and the great room still has a ton of them supporting this wall shown:

Up next is picking out the brick and stone, and trying to finalize framing changes/tweaks on the interior.  Lots to do! 

Progress: Roof and an oversight

The roof is coming along and the house is taking shape. We live in one of those areas where a ton of the houses tend to be "McMansion-y" and as my architect and I like to joke, are "all roof".  Why is that?   Yes, my house is larger that I would personally prefer, but the roof was one of those places where I could hopefully make it seem less imposing somehow.   Our house is at the minimum HOA roof slope requirement intentionally, with the roof pitch being consistent with this type of home style.  My husband was a little dismayed with the lack of pitch compared to the surrounding homes, and I got a little laugh at that.   It's funny how something like a roof pitch makes a difference between oozing charm or looking overbearing.   Here it is, below.  Can you imagine if the roof were much higher?   It would have looked even more large and daunting. 

Frustration - mistake on the overhang

Originally my architect had drawn this house to have beautiful exposed rafters under the eaves.  I nixed this idea, however, since our old home had tons and tons of wasps making nests in the eaves all the time, and all I could think of was how many extra opportunities every bracket would offer to an insect to make a nest.    Now that construction is coming along, I was kind of regretting that, and had asked my builder if there were a way to preserve the exposed brackets now that the roof was coming along.  In that process, I sent my architect a photo via my cell phone and asked her opinion if doing it the "cheap way" (i.e. since the construction is already there, and not the more elaborate way she had documented to do it "right") was even worth it.  Much to my surprise, she replied that it looked like my eaves were not large enough as per the plan, even though she was just basing this assumption off a mere cell phone pic.   Sure enough, my builder took a look and confirmed that all my overhangs had been constructed at 16" and not 22"!   I was feeling a little frustrated that both my GC and my framer missed this, even with the plans clearly marking the layout of everything.  What if I had never sent that picture to my architect? I would have ended up with hardly any overhang.  Now, they are having to extend the rafters another 6" and I'm guessing that somehow I will end up paying for it, even though supposedly I will not see an increased cost.  We shall see.

A blip in the scheme of things, but frustrating nonetheless.