LittleJoe

Kidde smoke alarm: beep 4 times ...off and on

Man, this was driving us nuts. Sometime over the past couple of weeks, one of our smoke alarms started misbehaving. It would beep 4 times, each beep about 30 seconds after the prior beep ...and then stop. And then it would do this again randomly through the day and night. This would happen a few times a day.

The smoke alarms (we have 7 of them) are wired together with the house current, and each also have a 9v battery. We tried changing the batteries, blowing them each out with compressed air, testing them all, and nothing worked. So yesterday I bought a new one and replaced the offending smoke alarm. That made things worse.

Last night Shirley heard the thing go through it's little cycle twice within 1/2 hour or so ...conveniently at around 2:30am. So since she was awake anyway, she searched the web and found this posting from an electrician (scroll to the bottom of that page).

We had recently changed the batteries in the bedroom smoke alarms (4 of those), so for the other 3, we followed the steps listed by the electrician. For each smoke alarm:

1. Remove the smoke alarm from the ceiling (twist counter-clockwise, and then pinch the 3-wire plug to release the wire plug, freeing the smoke alarm)
2. Remove the old battery
3. Press and hold the TEST button. The smoke alarm started to beep and then the sound very quickly trailed off to near silence
4. Insert the new battery
5. Plug the 3-wire plug back into the smoke alarm and re-mount it on the ceiling

Our house is again nice and quiet :)

Garage hose - possible thanks to solar water heat

Back in April of this year, we completely disconnected our gas-fired hot water heater/tank, and had a passive solar water heating system installed. In the pic to the left, the silver tube hanging down is a vent hose from the old water heater. We'll need this if we hook up a tankless water heater as a backup to the solar system. Over to the right are the 2 water pipes for the solar water system. The nearest pipe (wrapped in black insulation) is the cold water feed, running up to the unit on the roof. The far pipe returns the heated water down to the house.

Well the installation included a spigot on each of these pipes, and given that there's really not a convenient outside spigot if we need a hose in the driveway (like to rinse the car off), today I picked up a hose and a hanger and hooked it up. Shirley's been wanting this for a while (I believe since April), so a few minutes time, and it's done. She only had to wait 6 months :)

Our banana tree has fruit!

I was out mowing the lawn Saturday and when I was mowing by the side of the house I noticed that our dwarf banana tree has babies! The first banana tree we ever saw was in Hawaii. Next was in the Cook Islands. So to me, seeing bananas growing just screams that we are in the tropics. I've no idea if these babies will ripen into something tasty, but I sure hope so. There's not much to compare to picking and eating fresh fruit and veggies from your own plants. Hmmm... I bet with a fresh banana or two and some rum and maybe some coconut and pineapple ...I think we may be doing some recipe experimentation in the not-too-distant future :)

Timer for outdoor compact fluorescent lights

A year or two ago we replaced the 3 lights outside our garage with compact fluorescents to save on energy use. That's good, but sometimes we'd go somewhere and not return until after dark ...with the lights still off, so that defeated the purpose of having outdoor lighting. And sometimes we'd neglect to turn them off in the morning, and they'd end up being on all day. Well I finally located a timer (from Swylite) that works with the low current draw of compact fluorescents. I figured this would be a pretty easy install - maybe 5 minutes. Wrong.

The switch for our garage lights is in this strip of 5 switches. The one on the far right is a timer for the 'holiday' lights (we string up a number of LED lights around Christmas, and they are all connected into outlets that are controlled by this timer). The second switch location in from the right is where the garage light switch was, so this is the location for the new timer for the outdoor compact fluorescents. This would have been a quick install, but one of the wires I needed for the connection was, as fate would have it, located behind the left-most switch. Sigh. So I had to remove 4 switches and do the hookup and then squeeze all of that junk back into the proper locations. Ugh! It probably took me 30 minutes to do this little hookup, since getting things to fit in there and to all align properly with the switch plate was far more involved than it should have been.

Ah, but all's well that ends well, right? It finally all went together and now the lights turn on and off at the proper times. One nice little feature of this timer is that it allows us to set a 'variable' mode. This means that the lights will come on and be turned off within 15 minutes plus or minus from the times we set. So there is not an exact time every day when the lights go on or off. Just a little more security. And some energy savings and convenience :)

Florida Building Code: Clothes Dryers must vent to outside

Well that was pretty easy to find. Yup, it does appear that our dryer vent is in violation of Florida Building Code 2004 Residential Section M1501. The first sentence of this section of the building code is:

Dryer exhaust systems shall be independent of all other systems, shall convey the moisture to the outdoors and shall terminate on the outside of the building.

We had hired a private inspector who caught a number of things that needed to be corrected during the construction of our home. And this is fairly common, really, since at the time there was so much construction going on and each construction manager was responsible for many simultaneous builds. It appears our inspector (with whom we are very satisfied, and will continue to recommend highly) ...missed this one item. There's so much to check, and he did find and document plenty of items. I absolutely would never purchase another home (new or used) without having the home inspected thoroughly first.

So I'll probably contact the builder on Monday and see whether this will be easy or difficult to resolve.

Sigh.

Dryer vents to open attic!

In preparation for a few things we're planning to do soon (solar water heater and some Solatubes), I was up in the attic area today to scope things out. I wanted to make sure that the areas where we'd need to be working will be accessible, and that we'll be able to position the Solatubes where we'd like to have them. While crawling around, I noticed that the vent from our dryer discharges the warm, moist air into the open area of the attic! Nice. In other places where I've lived, that is illegal. Our house is only two years old, so things should be up to pretty recent code standards.

So...I'm going to research and see what the local building codes specify and decide whether to mess with getting the builder to correct this, or maybe just add a rooftop vent myself. Sometimes one gets better quality by doing the job oneself ...even if someone else should have already done the job.

So THAT is what was wrong with our water pipes!

For several months we'd been noticing air in our water pipes. Once or twice a week, we'd get up in the morning and when flushing the toilet or turning on the sink or shower faucet, there would be air belching out with the water. Neighbors did not have this problem. Our water bill was normal, so no leaks.

The culprit was the water softener drainage hose. The water softener is in our garage. The drain hose goes up from the softener, over across part of the attic area, and then down into the utility room to share a drain with the washing machine.

Here are pics of the water softener in the garage, the spot where the hose empties, and what I found when I crawled up in the attic to have a look:

...and here it is after I used some good ol' duct tape to hold the hose up next to a stud, allowing a more gentle curve:

This was all discovered while we had a guy from Culligan here. The softener had quit working, and during the US$235 repair, he got things working (had to replace a worn piston, a circuit board and a switch), but said that the drain hose should have a lot more flow to it. He was a big guy, so I took my little runt self up into the small recesses of the attic to see if something was kinked. They had done the original install a couple of years ago, but the warranty on that was over. Anyway, the kinked hose (no doubt got soft and fell over during the hot summer) had caused some other failures, which led to the softener pulling in air instead of the brine that it would normally pull. They sent another guy out (a little guy) on Friday to do a more permanent fix than my duct tape workaround :)

Oh well. Things are working well now, and Culligan is giving us free softener salt and completely free maintenance for the next year (which is normally US$209) ...so it kind of evens out. Kind of.

Florida friendly planting

When we put up our back yard fence, we were required to install it 3 feet from the retaining wall that runs along the property line. Since it is such an incredible waste of water to grow lawns -- not to mention the harm to the water table with all the runoff of fertilizers and other lawn chemicals -- we've been slowly converting our back yard to a Florida-friendly landscape. That means plants that are drought tolerant, among other things. In this little strip of land we have now planted 60 golden peanut plants (the lighter colored ones with the little yellow flowers) and 110 dwarf jasmine. Despite the names, the peanuts do not really produce peanuts, nor does this variety of jasmine produce a fragrant bloom. But they DO fill in well and should serve well to hold the soil during heavy tropical rains. And I will no longer be mowing back there! We'll most likely install a little drip irrigation system in a few months when the dry season hits. So the bottom line was 170 plants at US$4 each (yee-ouch!) and a bunch of sore muscles from all that digging. But it looks nice, will not be wasting water the way St Augustine grass would, and it will be very easy to maintain :)

Broken sprinkler pipe

Last week I planted a dwarf banana by the side of the house. Turns out I also broke through one of the sprinkler water pipes with my exuberant use of the shovel. So...I made another trip to Lowe's and bought a few supplies and patched in a fresh piece of pipe. I knew that this would be a fairly easy repair and pretty inexpensive - mainly just needing the time to dig around the pipe and attend to the task at hand. But I'd never done this type of thing before, so I was quite happy to discover the wikiHow site, and specifically the very good instructions to tell me how to repair a broken sprinkler pipe. Following the instructions as posted on the wiki, I was able to patch the pipe, and everything appears to be working properly now. Ain't the Internet cool? :)

Pic of the fixed pipe:

Holiday lights - phase 1

Thanksgiving weekend means a few things: taking some time out and enjoying friends and family, eating too much, and of course, beginning the installation of Christmas :) Since it was 75 - 80F outside (quite a change from years past when we'd bundle up against the cold and/or rain to put up lights), and since I was going to be climbing up and down ladders and mucking about on the roof, I decided it would be a good thing to have a beer. This year we decided to put up LED lights. They consume far less electricity vs the standard bulbs, and are supposed to last much, much longer. They are also incredibly bright. So here's a rather poor picture of phase 1 complete (click the dark thumbnail to see the full pic):

Solar attic fan installed

After waiting for our backordered Solar Attic Fan to arrive, and then for a little time to do the install, yesterday was the day. I'd hoped to get the job done in an hour. It took about an hour and a half, so that wasn't really too bad ...considering that it usually takes me at least twice as long as I figure it will to get anything done :)

I've posted some pics of the fan installation up on Flickr. We've been planning to install two of these. We'd installed a temperature sensor up in the attic a while back, and have noticed that it's typically about 30 degrees hotter in the attic versus the garage. With the one fan in place, the attic is ten degrees cooler. That's not bad, but I was hoping for a greater difference. We're guessing that maybe after we add a second fan we'll see a better difference, although even the 10 degrees is not too bad!

Future Mojitos

Sometimes after a hot day we like to relax by the pool and enjoy a Mojito. One of the key ingredients for a good Mojito is fresh mint leaves. And one can't always predict when the mood will strike for a Mojito. So yesterday we planted what will probably be the first 2 of several mint plants. But WOW, that ground was hard! I only dug down about a foot, and I still had to use a pick axe for each inch! In this picture, Shirley is filling the dirt in around the containers in which the mint will be growing. If you didn't already know, mint is, in many respects, a bit of a weed; it will happily take over the earth as far as the eye can see if left unshackled. ...So we plant it in containers to restrict its spreading. Now we just water, fertilize, and wait :-)

House pics

A while back we bought Shirley a little iBook, and we've both come to really like the Mac platform. Well, SWMBO ("She Who Must Be Obeyed ...pronounced "Shwahm-bo") has been reading the manuals and has posted a number of pictures of our Florida home up on the 'net. Most of the outside pics were taken a number of months ago, and it amazes me how much things have grown since then ...but these will still give our out of town friends and family a good feel for the place. Cheers.

Bamboo planting...DONE!

Ben digging,
originally uploaded by Joe Litton.

Whew! I'm glad we're only doing this once! Last Sunday was a nasty bit of work digging and planting the first half of our 60-foot trench of bamboo. Fortunately for us, Ben's shift at Tia's yesterday didn't start until 6pm, so he was able to help us out for a few hours while we completed the other 30 feet of bamboo trench. I've posted several pics with commentary up on my Flickr page. It struck me while working that I must be getting used to Florida weather. It was about 90F (32C) and aside from sweating like a waterfall (which I do any time I exercise ...or eat spicy food :-) ...it actually felt about that same as what 80F (27C) used to feel like when we lived in Washington state.

Well, we now have a 60 foot trench planted with bamboo. It's a "runner", which means it spreads by sending out underground shoots that then pop up elsewhere and fill in the space. That is why we lined the trench with galvanized metal roof flashing. When the runners hit the metal, they'll take the path of least resistance and go up. With proper care and feeding, this should give us a very attractive privacy screen in a couple of years. It's already quite a pleasure to look out from the lanai and pool cage and see the greenery.

Dishwasher leak - soggy floors

There's a lot that goes into a brand new house, including brand new appliances and brand new leaks. This past Friday while Shirley was (thank GOD!) at home, the dishwasher started leaking. It wasn't ON ....but some connection in there went kaput! Oh joy. So she emailed me a picture of the setup under the sink and I told her which valve to shut to stop the water to the dishwasher. Then Shirley discovered that not only was there a little water pooled on the tile in front of the dishwasher, but there was also a very soggy carpet in the hallway. Oh double joy. Fortunately the home warranty guy responded very quickly, and within an hour or so the water damage expert was on-site. He pulled (actually bashed) off the baseboard trim at the bottom of the cabinets and set this blower to work drying it out.

In the hallway, the warranty guy had already pulled the carpet back. The water damage guy had some fancy gauge that he poked in all over the place to see how far the water had gone, and then removed and discarded the carpet padding for that area, set a large blower to work at the end of the hall, and then hooked up a big dehumidifier with a hose draining out into the bathroom. I was very impressed with the speed and the quality of the response to our problem. But man, it was a drag listening to those machines for a couple of days (it was important to ensure that things were completely dried out. Later this week the repairs will be done, and we'll (hopefully) be back to our normal state of insanity as we continue to settle into the new abode.

Cooking on the grill: Process Improvement

Last night I pulled a whole chicken out of the 'fridge (it was the body of a dead chicken, actually, and we had placed it there after purchasing it at the food store, so it wasn't a shock that it was in the 'fridge ...but I digress). Anyway, not knowing what I was doing - as shall become more and more apparent though probably not at all surprising - I cut the bird into pieces and proceeded to cook the snot out of it on the barbecue (to those in other countries, "cook the snot out of it" - or to do "the snot out of" anything - means to do it to an extreme). As the image here will attest (click the thumbnail to see the full-sized image if you dare), the exterior of each piece ended up a tad in the well-done category. Not well-done as in, "good job!", but rather well-done as in, "much time was spent with Satan". I may have been a little impatient and perhaps the gas was turned up a little too much.

Realizing that there might be an opportunity for process improvement, I had another go at it this evening. This time I first popped on the 'net and read how to properly cut a chicken into the standard pieces. I also took a moment to read some suggestions about how to cook the bird if one's goal was not to produce pure carbon. So this evening I started the grill warming up and put the cut pieces of chicken into a bowl with some Newman's Dressing, a little red wine (a cab/merlot blend), and some garlic salt. Once the grill was heated, I turned the front and rear burners to half, and turned off the middle burner. I sprayed the grill with some olive oil to keep the meat from sticking, and the meat was placed along the center so it would cook via indirect flame. This turned out much better. Every 5-10 minutes I turned the pieces and brushed on a little of the liquid from the bowl. There's still room for quality improvement, and in the best Deming tradition I shall continue in this pursuit. There is definitely hope.

Tomorrow I'll try grilling some mahi-mahi. Hopefully the first attempt with it will prove more successful than the first attempt at grilling chicken :-)

Pool and BBQ

About a week ago we had the panels installed for our solar pool heat. Solar Solutions did the job (these guys rock!) and also installed a unit that will use salt to treat the pool water, rather than using chlorine (we hate chlorine - yuck!). We've got 5 panels here on the south roof, and 2 more on the east. It's been cloudy, but the pool's already warming up :)

So now that we've been in the house for almost a month, last night it was time to just get in the frickin' pool and break it in. I'm on the right - easy to spot with the gleaming dome - and Shirley is somewhere hiding within or under that splash on the left. No, we didn't stay in long, but that was only because there was food and beer waiting.

OK. Out of the pool and into dry clothes. Now Karl gives us a lesson on how to prep shrimp, veggies, and salmon for the grill. It doesn't get much better. Invite some friends over, have some beers, and let the guest do the cooking! OK, the truth is that Karl's a great chef, and he's smart enough to know he's going to eat a lot better if he preps the food rather than I.

Here's some of the feast ready for the grill: shrimp wrapped in turkey bacon (we don't eat red meat, but we fake it sometimes), shrimp marinated in Karl's improvised sauce (Shirley made sure I took notes), all kinds of veggies, and then there was shrimp scampi done in a pan on the grill's side burner. OMG, we ate well. Karl, you should open a restaurant!

No cars in the garage yet

Here was the garage looking so nice after we primed and painted the floor. We were saying that we'd be parking in there within a few days of moving in. Yeah, right!

Now that we've retrieved all of the things we'd had in storage for the past year, the garage had gotten a tad crowded. At the far wall, you can see some of the shelving units we bought from a store that was going out of business. $25 for each of 4 shelving units, and they can hold a lot of weight.

So I picked up some plywood and laid a floor in the attic area above the garage. The tough part about it, however, was that the boards all had to be cut down a bit just to get up into the attic, and I had to do a lot of custom trimming for the boards to fit around the trusses and boards that were already there. This one was the craziest cut. Oh, and even though it is February, it is HOT up in a Florida attic! I can't imagine installing attic insulation for a living!

But after several hours and many liters of water, we had a decent-sized area for storage. Now I was able to start the real job of moving things up there. Oh joy. We still can't park in the garage, but Shirley's unpacking and putting things away as I'm typing, and we were able to put all the holiday decorations, luggage, ski boots, etc., up above, and will most likely move a few more things up there. We just have to be careful to only store things in the attic if they can withstand the extreme heat of the summer.

Ceiling fans

We like watching the do-it-yourself shows on television, but have noticed that often the first thing some of the designers do is to remove the ceiling fan from whatever room is being upgraded. Well those designers will never set foot in our house! This is Florida, and in the summer time (and much of the rest of the year) it is wonderful to have a bit of a breeze going. So last weekend I installed the fan we'd ordered for the family room. This was a job I estimated would take about 20 minutes. I was only off by 70 minutes :-)

Fortunately, the kit came with very good instructions, and I was, of course, freshly juiced with espresso. I later added a little white caulk where the fan housing meets the ceiling and at the screw holes to tidy up the appearance a bit more. Hey, and the thing actually works and with no wobble!

The lanai fan was a much quicker job. Ben helped with this one, so he did some wiring as I was unpacking other parts, then he was assembling the blades as I was installing them. This one was actually done in about 20 minutes. We really like this outdoor fan; it is metal and wood and cost a little more that the plastic ones, but it is worth it to have something we enjoy so much.

Water filter

The water around here is nasty! There's a very definite sulfur smell and all kinds of other stuff in this very hard water. So we've had a water softener installed to remove much of the minerals. Last weekend I installed an under-sink water filter to remove the chlorine and some more of the yuck. In the apartment, we were buying distilled water for drinking. It is so nice to no longer have to mess with all those plastic water jugs and thinking of how many eons those things would sit in a landfill.

The bummer about the install, however, was that I had to buy $20 worth of fittings to tap into the water line. The other sinks in the house have water valves like what I have always seen in the past at every place I've lived. But in the kitchen, the sink was plumbed with these weird valves that have the valve and hose as a single, integral unit. My guess is this was a cost-saving measure. For the hapless homeowner (me), however, this meant a trip to the store for several adapter pieces. It always seems that the jobs I think will take an hour end up taking 3!

Enjoying the house

One of the things I especially love at the new house is getting up early enough on the weekend to catch the sunrise. Here's a view looking east from the lanai, through the pool cage screen and out to the morning sky. Ahhh....

Here's a shot of Shirley and Ben last Sunday as we were sitting to down to breakfast ...outside of course :-)

Boy am I sore....

There's really nothing to compare to the unbridled pain after moving one's overabundance of stuff from one locale to another. I took off from work on Friday, and Shirley dropped me at the U-Haul joint at 7:30am to pick up the 26' truck I'd reserved. I should have taken it as an omen for the day when they had to dump TWELVE quarts of oil into the beast before I could drive it off (apparently that's only about half of the oil that they hold). So after waiting for the oil to finally get topped off, and adding 20 gallons of diesel to the tank, I made it to the apartment at 8:35am to meet the 2 gents we'd hired to help us move.

These guys had helped us before - actually they pretty much did ALL of our last move - and it's wonderful to hire some folks to do the schlepping of furniture and heavy boxes down from the 3rd floor apartment. Unless one of those guys has the flu. Great. So I ended up working with them, since I was at the post-full-flu stage of lots of coughing, rather than the full-on stage of weak and snot-filled lungs and coughing. By 8:30pm we had finally transfered everything from the apartment, along with the stuff from our totally packed 10' by 10' by 8' high storage unit, which had cradled much of our belongings for the past year. My body will never forgive me.

Knowing that my body would never forgive me (and it hasn't so far; each day it displays a new level of rage) - I've spent the past 2 days doing all manner of settling-in chores: fixing the plumbing in one of the sinks where the genius plumbers plumbed the hot and cold backwards, working on a leak in the sink in the other bathroom, installing an under-sink water filter in the kitchen (details and pics about that adventure later), installing a toilet paper holder in one bathroom, a couple of towel racks in the bathrooms, a swag hook and repositioning a kitchen light fixture, front door brass kick plate, front door security peep hole, repair damage to outdoor table (it apparently got some owies during the cross-country move last year) and assemble the table back to it's former self...

And Shirley's not gotten off chore-free either. She's been faux-painting and regular painting several walls (we hate plain boring bland lackluster white walls!), unpacking lots of boxes, assembled the barbecue that we bought yesterday, and much more.

Now I am going to skip the 2nd half of the Superbowl (I mainly just wanted to catch Paul McCartney in the halftime show), and I'm gonna go slather some Ben-Gay all over my shoulders and neck and go to sleep for many hours. I'm really looking forward to work tomorrow, when I get to just sit on my bum and think :-)

The house is done...er, ready for us to start

A few weeks ago, this was the appearance of our house. Lovely trim color, huh? What genius came up with that scheme? It was not us! But we had signed and agreed to what - on paper - looked ok. So we talked to the builder and paid a few bucks to the painter to change the trim color.

Here's how the house looks today, after landscaping and after, um, 'adjusting' the colors a little!

This is a pic of the pool and decking, after the pool guys applied the final coat of paint on Sunday. This just blows me away! Every time I look at this, I just feel a big Ahhhhhhh.....

And like any self-respecting anal retentive type, we primed and painted the garage floor before ever using the garage :) ...ok, to be fair, I wasn't feeling very well, so our son Ben did much of the priming, and then Shirley and I applied the paint this evening. If we're feeling well enough, we may see about moving our stuff to the house on Friday or Saturday. We'll see.

Almost move-in time

OK, Shirley keeps beating me to the posts and pics ...but here's one that she doesn't have (ha-HA!). Anyway, as my better half has posted , we're getting set to close on the new house. This pic is from the family room looking to the kitchen. We LOVE the openness! You can see into the front entry on the left of the pic. Next Friday, assuming all goes well with closing, we WILL be posting pics of us jumping into the pool! Hey, we don't care if it's gonna be some frickin' COLD water. This is Florida and we have a new house and pool, and we'll be damned if we're not gonna jump in the pool to christen our home :-) ...Anyone have a wet suit I can borrow?

Sod should be down tomorrow

houseSod,
originally uploaded by Joe Litton.

Shirley was still at work when I got home (Yup, she started a new job today...back to TWO incomes - yay!) ...so I swung by the house site to see what was new. There were at least a couple of gents working inside (final work on texture/paint), so I didn't go in. I know *I* don't like folks looking over my shoulder when I'm working, so I prefer to let these folks do their job without me peering at their work. But I could see all this sod piled up (how could I miss it?) In fact, there was a little more stacked in the lot across the street. So I suspect that tomorrow evening we will see that a lawn has magically appeared. And that means I'll be needing to mow. My goal is to find a battery-powered mower and rig a solar panel in the back that I can use to charge it. THAT will be another blog post (or several) as I get that figured out :-)

Pool pad poured at house

They poured the concrete today for the pad around the pool. There's still a coating to go on top of the concrete, and a screened cage that will go around it. After we're in, the solar panels for the pool heat will be installed, and a salt water filter system (keeps the water clean without using chlorine). I think I need to go do another test on one of our tropical drink recipes :-)

Oh, and a few more pics are in the "house" category on my Flickr page.

House status 01Jan2005

We are tentatively scheduled to close on our house at the end of the month. Below are a few thumbnail images taken today and over the past few days. Click any image to see the full-size image with some comments.

Roof going on

The framing started yesterday and was finished today. The roof trussess are up and they've started putting up the roof sheathing. Click for more pics.

House framing underway

There was apparently a crew of about 6 working on the house today and the framing is almost done! To me, that's impressive, since the framing just started today. We expect that tomorrow they'll finish the framing and put up the roof trusses. So it's quite possible that all framing and the roof sheathing could be done this week. Dang! Here's some more pics.

House - Concrete in walls

Today they filled the blocks with concrete and added the hurricane ties that will help (hopefully) secure the roof in high winds. ...And speaking of high winds, hurricane Frances - now a Category 4 hurricance - may pay a visit this weekend. We're just keeping a watch on the movement of the storm for now, but this is a huge hurricane, so we kind of expect that we'll at least get some wind and heavy rain. I'll post more news and/or pics when we have more :-)

We've got walls!

The workers were busy yesterday! We swung by the homesite this afternoon and the block walls were in place. This baby is starting to look like a house :-)  ....ok, it wouldn't be the best in the rain, but it will get there. Interior framing should be happening this week. I'm not sure when the roof will be going on, but that is when it will really look like a house. After 6 months of looking at an empty weed patch, it's soooo great to see a home growing there. Here's more pics from today.

Woo-hoo! The house is started!

On February 8, 2004 - a little over 6 months ago - we put a deposit down on a new house. Today the slab was poured. Apparently, this is a normal wait in Florida; the permit process takes a l-o-n-g time. So now the fun begins! By next week the block walls will be up and the framing (for interior walls, roofing, etc) will be underway. We're very used to construction of "stick" houses (2x4 or 2x6 framing on post and beam foundations), and have done a fair amount of remodel work over the years (framing, roofing, siding, plumbing, cement work, brickwork, wiring, laying carpet, hanging wallpaper, fencing...most everything a homeowner could do). But block home construction on slab foundation is new to us, so it will be very interesting to see how things are done down here in Florida. Click the small photo in this posting to see a few shots of the house beginnings.

You can also see in the pics a glimpse of some of the huge houses in the neighborhood. At about 2,000 square feet, we'll have one of the smallest homes in the group, and that's fine by us :-)

Cheers.