When a Lot Becomes a House!

Hello everyone!

polishing the office floor

We have a floor, we have a floor, we have a beautiful floor!  Yes, my friends, the slab has been poured and the surface ground down to show the aggregate in the concrete and polished to a lovely sheen!  Super hubs and I are really excited how it has come together!  It's hard to explain and hard to see in the pictures below what it really looks like.  This floor is going to be extremely low maintenance.  I was told by the installer there will be no wear pattern or fading.  How cool is that!  The look is not for everyone, but I think it suits our plan for the house nicely!  When the concrete for the slab is poured you never really know what you are going to get, so we expected the size of the aggregate to vary throughout the house and it does.  It is a very unique look and I think it will really provide some visual  interest and a neat foundation to build on.  Now that I have a better idea of the color for the flooring I can begin to refine the search for the right color tile, counter tops, cabinets and trim.  The aggregate ended up being more in shades of brown than the grey I expected which is actually a good thing since most of my furniture is in the brown family.  The whole idea behind the style of the house was to showcase the art collection I was given by my dad and Karen.  I really think all the beautiful and colorful Cuban and Haitian art I now have will really pop in this house whereas in my current home it is really all spread out which I feel lessens the impact.

pre-polished slab

Next up is the framing!  Within the next week it should really start looking like a house.  Our builder said the roof will likely be on in the next 3 weeks!!  Our builder is also considering making our house a "show house" which means we would open the house up for tours for a weekend or 2.  There are pluses and minuses to this. The minuses are it would delay us moving in (although this might not matter much because we have to sell our current house and who knows in this market - but Dallas/Ft Worth seems to have weathered the housing crisis better than other areas), people touching our stuff (I'm kinda weird about that stuff) and pissing off the new neighbors by having cars lined up all over the street (the builder had a show house that had 800 people visit in 2 weekends!) and having them hate us before we even move in (and as you know we are actually quite fun people!).  The pluses include upgraded stuff at a discount, the house would be 100% done (landscaping, pool, water capture, solar) when we move in (our plan had been to do the landscaping and water capture a bit later for financial reasons) and educating people on what is doable if you want to go green (I LOVE this idea most!  If one person puts up solar panels or does rainwater capture because they traipsed thru my house it would be worth all the hassle).  If you can think of other pluses or negatives I might not have considered, please share!  I respect your input!

I'm so glad we are only about 20 minutes from our new house (I can now call it a house instead of a lot!!!!) because Chuck and I are out there constantly!  It's actually kind of a nice drive past horse farms and wide open spaces - although I don't think those spaces are going to be wide open for long the way this area continues to grow!

So far this process has been pretty exciting.  I'm not fond of  the hurry up and wait part.  We had a bunch of rain, 3 or 4 inches a few weeks ago, right after the slab was poured which delayed the grinding and polishing that needed to  be done before the framing could go up.  In a normal build, the framing could go up while the slab was curing, but the equipment to grind and polish won't fit (especially into corners) if the framing is up.  So, now we are off and running.  Be expecting posts more often and I look forward to sharing this process with all of you!

Much love and please recycle,
Lori