Hello!! We are in a very exciting part of our build. We have our floors and walls!
I was just going to include the framing in my update, but I realized my last update had a dirt basement floor. On May 29th, we had our concrete slab poured. What great progress for the first month of our build!
The framing process has gone lightning quick. On June 6th, we left our house to go look at countertop slabs in Omaha. When we came back later that night, we saw ALL of our exterior basement walls up! It was so cool to have to walk through a doorway and see how big our basement windows would be.
That next day, June 7th, our interior load bearing or otherwise necessary walls were up! We’re not finishing the basement right away, so this is how it’ll look until we finish our framing in the next few years.
We had a little bit of a waiting game for our floor trusses. They arrived on June 12th, and the crew got started with putting them up!
The next day, we had to go to DSM for our dentist appointments. When we came home that night, the floor trusses were all setup AND we had our stairs!! This was such an exciting part. Hands down, the stairs made it feel like a home even though they led to an unwalkable part of the house!
Friday, June 14th, the crew got to work on our upstairs subfloor. This was an exciting milestone because we could finally ‘tour’ our main floor without having to remind ourselves or whoever else that it was actually upstairs!
This past Monday, June 19th, I went back to work and our baby started daycare. Being away from the window (we work in our basement) made the progress seem so much faster! This was the day that the rest of our subfloor got put down and our exterior main floor walls went up!
And finally, our most recent updates! Our interior walls and garage walls were put in place yesterday and our top plates installed. It seems like the next step will be our roof unless there’s more to do on the subfloor or if windows/exterior doors would need to be installed first.
We also met with our kitchen designer a couple weeks ago. I think we landed on a good plan, with just slight changes here and there. We’re currently waiting to hear back on our cabinetry/countertop quotes. Our cabinetry estimate was created with framed cabinets, so there will be an upcharge to switching to frameless (more storage space!). We also wanted a tall skinny cabinet with a pullout for cans, appliance panels for our fridge, and some hidden drawers which will increase the cost. I think I’ll do a separate post for our final kitchen design including cabinetry, appliances, hardware, etc once we have all our decisions 100% done.
Speaking of the kitchen, we recently had the day I’d been most excited for — countertop slab day! The day we got to officially pick out slabs for our island and put them on hold. We’ve looked at slabs many times, but always just browsing. We saw some awesome ones at Midwest Marble Tile and Granite (Midwest Marble from now on) in Omaha back in March, but we didn’t have a build contract at that point. Once we had our kitchen design meeting, our builder wanted us to look at slabs to see where we were falling within our countertop estimate. We looked at Midwest Marble in Des Moines and found some White Venatino slabs that were nice, but wanted to keep looking. I put some on hold in Omaha ahead of our trip there, just to get the estimate process going. When we went to look, we were a little unimpressed with the ones I’d put on hold and much preferred the ones that were still there from March. Unfortunately those were already claimed, but we had a couple other places to check out. Those places were a little lacking when it came to marble options, but we asked Midwest Marble to show us the second slab we had on hold before we 100% committed.
“Unfortunately” the second slab had a big stain from how it was stored. My wonderful husband asked if there were any like the unavailable ones we liked better, and the manager did a bit of research. After finding out the slabs from March had been on hold for a while, he called the fabricator that had been listed and lo and behold, they were no longer needed! We could not have been more excited about those slabs freeing up! We put them on hold and immediately emailed our builder that we found our dream slabs!
Moving on from our kitchen island, we recently bought our laundry room and hall bath flooring from Floor and Decor! Our laundry tile we’ve actually had picked out for over a year. Imagine our surprise when we’re killing time at Floor and Decor and find it discounted $2/sq ft and about to be discontinued! Of course this was the perfect opportunity to buy all of our pieces!
Here’s a picture of what it looks like! There’s a ton of variation, so I was practicing laying them out in the order I’d like. There’s also a piece of our engineered wood flooring to visualize how they’ll look next to each other.
We also decided to just go ahead and buy our hall bath flooring too! This is more of a creamy marble. We’re both so excited for this one!
Well, that’s all of our new house updates so far! I can’t believe that next time I do a house update, it’ll most likely either be boxed in or we’ll know more about our final kitchen/bath designs!
Thanks for reading!
Davien
fluted wood & marble 
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