@Joy M thanks for the feedback! That makes me feel better, we were going back and forth on this or closed cell foam spray.

@Laurel C - that makes sense on the color.

@Janice B - luv the pics and looks great! Is that built-in finish white oak? Stain? Looks nice!

Met with kitchen cabinet designr today and worried about the cost. we are considering white oak quater sawn with glaze for the kitchen. Anyone considering white oak option and can give advice on pricing? My cabinet designer cannot give me a price or even estimate until design is complete and final selection is made. I love the look of white oak but not sure if it is worth the price...

I believe we've settled on a color for the hardie panel siding. We're going with Raccoon Fur, an off-black. It looks OK with the roof, looks fine with the floor, contrasts enough with the Tricorn Black trim, and looks phenomenal with the cedar on the soffits. It should look good with any wood tone we end up with for the siding on the taller volume.

Appliances have all been delivered, with the exception of the vent-a-hood range hood that I FINALLY ordered yesterday and should have within the next couple of weeks. Everything is just taking up space in corners of our farm shop. I have another pile with toilets, plumbing fixtures, and ceiling fans.

Builders have been working a bit on the house. Roofers came to finish up some trim, HVAC guys are working, the plumber is coming today to work on something (not sure?) and get our gas line stubout completed so we can get a propane tank delivered and plumbed into the HVAC. Our builders have been working on trimming out our fixed glass walls and repairing the damage done by the scaffold decking that blew off in the wind storm.

And a bonus - my hair sheep are presently blowing their coats and are all super itchy, about half of them are letting me use a dog brush to brush out their coats, and we are leaving tons of fur behind for birds to build nests out of. It's so fun to watch them shed out. Their summer coats are more colorful than their winter ones, so it's fun to see those coming in.

Weather has been holding us up on siding, it just won’t stop snowing 😭. But working on getting insulation put in and then hopefully we can get the drywall down to the house next week. Our landlord just told us he’s putting up our place for sale in a few weeks, so now it’s major crunch time to finish the house.

@Liz888 thanks! the built ins are just waiting for white paint! I am actually not sure what kind of wood they are.

Some of our floor coverings came off today which was exciting. Appliances were installed but the dishwasher drain was wrong so that has to be fixed.

These finishing details seem to take longer than I think they will:)

French doors are also stained, I love how they turned out:)

@Janice B - I love your floors and doors (and everything else). Beautiful! I haven't kept up with the forum for a year, so haven't seen the building process, but it is beautiful. What stain did you use on the floors?

@jkent9024 - If you are still reading the board, last year, you shared a photo of the sky lights on your back patio that bring light into your living room. Do you have any photos of the finished area from the patio and the living room that you can share? I'm still thinking about doing this to bring light into my living room (which doesn't get enough light due to a 12+ ft deep covered patio. Thanks!

@Janice B LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the style of your house. Beautifully done!

Busy day (which is what we like to see!) at the house today. HVAC is wrapping up, electrician is starting, plumber is wrapping up his stuff, builders are continuing to work on framing windows, and dirt work at the back of the house to revise the grade/flat area and slope behind the house commences.

Front deck went in last week. House is on a flagpole lot and faces west, so this will be a great hang-out space. Blue (trim) and yellow (siding) boards are now caulked and ready to be painted the same color as the siding. First picture is the main entrance. Second is the ADU entrance. They were originally drawn as two separate and smaller porches but we decided to connect them to provide more continuity and avoid awkward “holes” that would just need to be filled somehow anyway.

I have reached out for two more structural engineering estimates today, and spoke with the PUD field engineer. I have a quote now for ~16K for the power to the site. Things went up about 40% since the quote last year.

Thank you Joy!

Karen our floors are European Oak from Northern Wide Plank. They are prefinished with an oil finish:)

Our fireplace brick is almost done, I’m so impressed with the mason. It really is an art. I know not everyone loves painted brick but I do and we are planning a lime wash with Romabio paint once the masonry is dry. Next we need to figure out the mantle.

HVAC guys came back out and finished up the fireplace yesterday. Today we decided on clear-coated pine soffits for the covered porch, deck, and patio. ADU floors will get their final coat tomorrow. We’re inching toward final inspection and. fingers crossed, our CoO.

Hello, Everyone! We've been at the house. Whenever I am there working for a week, I cannot post. Houzz doesn't like my phone and I have no internet yet. So All I can do is read your posts.

@Sofia We still haven't decided what to do with our porch ceiling, so it's nice to see yours.

@Janice B I cannot wait to see the lime wash on your fireplace.

@Kelly M Holy Cow. I hope you can find a more reasonable solution.

@Liz888 Janice's built ins are probably birch, if they are being painted. White oak would be spendy to paint. But they do look good raw!

And to all you modern home builders, I love the look! Thanks for all the pictures.

Here is our progress this past week: finished wallpapering Junior primary bath. Forgot picture. Primed and painted one bedroom. Primed and painted the kitchen. Continued on with kitchen cabinets. Finished painting, then hung the uppers. Hung almost all the antique doors (that I've refinished, and shared progress here months ago.) Worked on trim. Began refurbishing chrome antique sink legs...again...forgot picture. I was literally working from dawn til dusk, chowing down and falling asleep.

Enjoy the bonus picture of one of the little guys who washed ashore. They are called sea rafts. Hundreds of them got stranded!

Keen those doors are gorgeous!! Your hard work will all be worth it:)

Looking great, Keen B. Love the dark upper cabinets. What color did you use?

Thank you, @Sofia and @Janice B The color is Benjamin Moore Old Navy.

It does look nice. I am a wood working guy and those are nice for painted cabs.

I stopped by the glass shop next door to the office and found out that they had an extensive boneyard of builders grade vinyl windows.

I have been all over the place on window styles and had a pretty large budget set aside, but now I am going back to the drawing board. There are some really good deals to be had there!

For example, they have (10) 6'0 4'0 sliders for less than $400 each, probably a lot less.

I had 4'0 4'0 drawn in and now I will go re-imagine some areas.

They have the perfect 7x5 for the one picture window.

@Kelly M The deals, if you have the time and the storage are wonderful. We found a place for one of our glass french doors--$150. They had windows and exterior doors, too, but we had to get hurricane rated ones. Our can lights were half the cost since we shopped about. And of course, my antique doors are solid wood, heavy, and about 1/16 the cost of the cheapest, hollow new doors. (That is, if you don't count the cost of my labor since time is money.) The difficulty there is they are not all uniform, so fitting them took a little more effort than prehung new doors.

Insulation is almost done, seeing the space transform from just framed walls to walls of white is SO exciting! Going to go pick out some fireplace material tomorrow (need to find something that is both interior and exterior rated) and place our flooring order.

In some other news, our landlord just told us he is planning to sell the rental we are living in. I’m assuming this place will sell immediately as property is flying off the shelf in our town still, so we are officially under the gun to get our CO by June. 🙀

Forgot the pic. Think we are gonna do a black brick for fireplace which wraps around to the outside. 🤷🏻‍♀️

French drain completed this week! Waiting for floor joists to arrive then the floor will go in.

What kind of roof did you go with? You live where there's snow right? We are working with an architect on plans right now. And have some samples .

Heres a link for what we are considering

https://youtu.be/MKbQepppo28.

@ C Smith those windows are incredible!

Thank you, took 9 months for those suckers to arrive!

@Laurel C I like your combos. Is there actually an issue with rough exteriors being harder to keep mildew and dirt off? I've never heard that. (Yes, I can see they are problematic with paint, but not transparent stain). We have issues with those things with regular, flat cement siding, but it all comes off with pressure washing. Red clay and a certain type of spider web both act like kevlar, so not sure if it is the texture of the surface...

Either way, that shiplap is perfect. I love everything about it for your style of home.

I met with some of the city planners and have an agreement on the driveway, and met with a draftsman/builder who is going to put the plans into cad drawings and review my design as he does it.

He hopes to have enough ready to get to the structural engineering firm by the end of next week.

We can polish it up after I get the structural engineer going.

I figure it is cheap insurance to get a plan review from a current builder/framer/designer, so when I submit the plans I don't get bogged down in red ink.

He will also come out and help with some of the more complex walls, like the rake walls and a 23' tall balloon rake wall section that I will put up with the forklift.

I was trying to build that wall floor-by-floor, and it is just not as neat and elegant as a balloon in this case.

@Laurel C your house is coming along so nicely, I can't wait to be at that stage of my house build.

@C Smith Wow your two story windows are amazing!

We finally broke

ground a week ago.

@Liz888 That's exciting! Things will roll right along now.

@Keen B I don't believe that a rougher textured exterior is inherently more prone to mildew, however dust will stick to a rougher texture more readily and be more difficult to remove, same with cobwebs. I'm sure pressure washing might help, but ideally we don't have to pressure wash all that often, and with a smoother surface, it should be easier to just run a broom over any cobwebby/dusty spots as they're less likely to adhere quite as strongly.

@Liz888 It will come sooner than you think, and also as painfully slow as you can possibly imagine. Somehow simultaneously.

The excavation looks great! It must feel great to see physical progress finally happening!

Love seeing everyone's progress!! We have lost at least 6 weeks waiting for floor trusses because of design delays, but they're supposed to arrive next week, and soon after that, steel. Hoping to see some action around the site soon.

@Laurel C are those your sheep? (I'm eager to raise some sheep, myself, once I get this house built!)

I’m behind on making decisions and orders. We are doing a long panel, stamped carriage garage door (ordered) and custom iron front door. Our back patio doors are all sliders. But I have a door from garage to outside that I need to pick out. I had one selected and spent two hours at Lowe’s and Home Depot to discover it doesn’t come in the size I need (2’8”x6’8”). (This was after finding out local supply store can’t get it and also calling Masonite. Plus we live out of town, so I wasted all Saturday morning.) The interior and garage to laundry doors are 2 panel Roman Masonite doors. Any suggestions for the exterior door? I’m just mad I can’t get what I wanted and now my brain doesn’t want anything else.

Attached photos are CAD of front entry door and then the side of the house with garage and garage exterior door.

A quick update...all interiors have now been painted. Woohoo! This is a beach house, which helped dictate the colors a little bit. I wanted subtle, background colors.

I have SW Intimate White in my art room and my sitting room (notice the "my." DH nixed me from putting it past those points.) Intimate White is actually a pink. The photo does not do it justice. Sometimes it looks white, sometimes it is the prettiest, sunset pink. It looks gorgeous with seaside art.

And the rest of the house is Valspar's Fluffy Slippers, another "white" that is actually blue. I cannot get a good picture of it, since it is so pale. I pulled from a website. It looks less gray than this. Yes, without the art pulling it together, it looks like a hospital nursery, LOL, pink and blue, but finished, I will love it!

The house is really starting to look like a house! Our interior doors were delivered yesterday, and our smoothed-out shiplap for the siding of the tall volume arrived as well. This is the view of the house from my orchard, and behind the house, you can make out the little white dots that are my sheep in their present paddock.

The painter has been around this week, so he's repainting the black trim with a more skilled hand than our builders, and painting all of the hardie panels as they get cut, before they go up. We're at probably 75% coverage with the panel right now. Still loving the color.

We have had a bit of a rough road with the HVAC. We went with a variable speed heat pump with a backup propane furnace, which should allow us to go all-electric the vast majority of the time, but since we are rural, if we lose power, it could be a while before it's restored - so the gas allows us to keep the house heated if that outage occurs in the winter (in Dec, our farm was without power for 14 hrs, which isn't all that long, but it was -8 degrees F) by using the propane and a small generator to keep the circuits that need it going.

First, we had a propane tank delivered after getting the plumber to run our propane stub-in, and having our dirt guys trench and run conduit under our gravelled area behind the house, the propane guy went to connect the tank up, and looked under the house only to find that the furnace hadn't had the conversion from natural gas to propane done. So we've been unable to have the tank filled or hooked up fully.

Then, we had our HVAC inspection scheduled for last Friday, and the inspector didn't show. The county's previous inspector apparently was quite the lush, and often didn't even get out of his truck, just asked the contractor working to take a few photos and show them to him (based on what we heard from the electrician). He was fired on Friday, and replaced by a new guy, who came and did our inspection on Monday. The new inspector failed our HVAC because he wants us to run a vent fan in our (conditioned) crawl space. The crawl space that we have paid to insulate and do air sealing on, he wants us to vent conditioned and filtered air directly out of it. He claimed to understand that the sealed and conditioned crawl, with HVAC running an ERV is technically better but that Kentucky code is out of date. He did not offer a variance. My husband also found exceptions in the KY code specifically for our type of system and the inspector either was not aware of them or didn't care, so now we are waiting on our HVAC guy to deal with getting the approval, so we can move forward with getting our spray foam done and be able to run the HVAC for drywall work to be done. As a worst-case scenario, we install the vent fan, then when we've gotten all of our final approvals, remove it, seal the hole, and replace that piece of siding or skirt board or whatever, but it's a dumb thing to have to undo because the inspector's proving that he's not as useless as his predecessor.

We are meeting with our builder this afternoon to discuss the kitchen. We were originally planning to save some $$ by going with Ikea cabinets, then kept finding that due to supply chain issues, it was near impossible to get all of the correct door/drawer fronts, so the new plan became to do ikea boxes and go with a third party for doors/drawer fronts, but the quote I got from the company that I really wanted to go with came back so high that our relatively modest kitchen was going to run about $22k in cabinets and faces. Our builder makes gorgeous plywood cabinets, and we initially were going to have him build them but cut back to Ikea due to budgetary concerns, but now if it's going to cost that much anyway, might as well get custom cabinets with high quality boxes. So, we are prepping to discuss all of the specifics. Here's a piece of unfinished hickory ply that we're thinking of using for the faces. And below is a rough estimation of what we are thinking for the layout. The back wall will be 21" pantry, 36" fridge, 24" drawer bank, range, another 24" drawer bank, and then a corner cabinet. The back wall will have closed upper cabinets and of course a range hood. The other wall will just have a single open shelf sitting at the height of the bottom of the upper cabinets (probably 24" off the counter height, to keep the range hood even with the rest of the uppers), and the bottom cabinets on the side wall will be a corner cabinet, sink, dishwasher, and another bank of drawers, probably 36" wide. Then an island with drawers on the sink/DW side, and shallow door boxes on the back side for overflow storage (we also have a large laundry room/pantry just around the corner).

@Laurel C Look at Fastcabinetsdoors.com They are actually pretty high quality, for a very reasonable price and have pretty much every style. I think they are less expensive than ikea and deliver quickly. We've gone this route before.

Your property is amazing.

Thanks @Keen B, now that we've made peace with the increased cost of cabinets, we are pretty excited to have the hickory ply made by our builder. We are kind of fussy about the style, so this seems like the best option for us.

Also, thanks! We fell in love with it the first time we laid eyes on it. The hills continue to provide challenges, but the views and interesting terrain more than make up for it. If we wanted flat land, we'd have bought a place in Iowa.

My plans are sent off for an estimate by the structural engineer. Carpal tunnel surgeries start on May 3, so my nail bending abilities are going to be down for a while. I had entertained a late 2023 occupancy, but that ship has sailed.

We will still get started ASAP, but now the goalposts for 2023 are dried in with the metal roof on, and work on the outside.

With the renewable energy tax credit, you need to spend the money the year you apply it to your taxes and you also need occupancy.

I'll put off all the geothermal and solar until 2024.

Subfloor is in!

Got to like that!

"Valspar's Fluffy Slippers"

You have to wonder about the marketing people that come up with paint color names!

@Laurel C, house is looking great, but we want more cute critter photos! :-)

Have you been living in the RV in the photo while building?

@chispa hahaha, I can provide those! They're looking a bit bedraggled while in the midst of shedding, and my pushy gal Eleanor was checking out an airplane that flew over. I had no idea that planes even registered with sheep. I'm not sure what the rules are with self promotion here, but I did set up an instagram for our farm in hopes of using it as a marketing tool when operations get ramped up. The name of the farm is Crow's Bluff, I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to find on IG with a quick search.

And this is the mutt, Cirilla. She's a lucky girl, and loves being a farm dog when we are out there.

Re: the RV, no. That belongs to a friend. He has 10 acres down the road from us and is working on getting water and power set up at his place for the RV. He wanted to move out of his apartment into the RV, and we figured having someone living there while we have lots of expensive construction supplies and appliances on site wouldn't hurt. I have a feeling that he may overstay his welcome, but for now it's nice to have him there. We are living at a rental house about half an hour away.

Poor Eleanor, probably thought it was some huge predator eagle!

We see Bald eagles regularly in my area of FL. Here are a couple we saw high up in a pine tree on a morning walk. Would never have seen them as we walked by below, but the dogs noticed them and then we saw a fish head lying on the ground!

@Laurel C what breed are your sheep? (Not on Insta, or I'd check it out...)

Ending March pretty much exactly how we started it. Still working on siding and hopefully starting drywall next week. The weather has been a massive pain and has caused major delays. Endless snow still, which ended up closing schools today. Resort near us hit 800” of snow! We are supposed to get another few feet next week…sigh

I am SO ready for warm weather! 🥶

Love seeing/hearing everyone’s progress. After 18 months, we have a foundation! It’s been a journey. Basement forms and concrete this week depending on weather. Hope to be framing in May and finally moving forward.

@K_ Dub that is great! I know you had quite an ordeal getting that foundation designed and implemented.

@Laurel C it is priceless to have on site security. We are 2 hours away and will be relying on the elderly neighbors to keep an eye on our place.

@Kelly M, get some game cameras or similar. Many here have used them.

We are in a gated community, so only had to worry about neighbors walking through the house, which I am fine with until you have doors than can be closed, then they need to stay out!

@chispa The color does sort of look like those old fashioned slippers that had the poof of feather on top, or the quilted nylon bathrobes of little girls who didn't want to wear pink. The color name Intimate White is the one I find questionable, haha. Pink? Uh, Intimate?

Time for the New April thread. Holy Cow! April. Usually I use other folks pictures to spread the experience around, but I'm in a hurry and that takes me a bit more time. Soon! See you in April. Next month, hopefully I will be passing the baton on. Or maybe June...the never-ending-build.

Click Link>> April Building a Home Thread