Ready to Roll

The cement has been poured since Thursday and things are pretty much dried out and ready to be framed out. More importantly, we are getting a glimpse at the subtle parts of our new floor. As pictured above, you can see just how much variation there is in a freshly poured floor. The plan is going to be to cover it up with very thin OSB to protect it from things like dropped tool etc that can happen when working on the basement. Once they have the majority of the work done down there, we will pull up the OSB, polish the floors, put down an acid stain, and then polish again. This is one of the features that I am most excited about in this house. We wanted to do this in the original house we were going to build, and we are happy it was able to be done here. I just hope we are as happy about it as we think we will be. Only time is going to tell on that.



The only work that has been done since we poured the floor has been cleaning up the opening of the doorway into the basement. Because we ended up widening the stair area from its original width, there was a bit of a jagged edge on the west side of the door opening. Figuring that it made sense to come as close to centering the door on the stairs as possible, we had a mason come out to cut and tuckpoint the door area. He was in and out in 4hrs on Friday and did great work. This is going to give us a real nice wide 36" entrance door to the basement. Being this is the main entrance in / out of the house, it will be nice to have the widened opening.


Close up of the tuck pointing here. Good old Chicago common brick was used for the foundation walls, and is found under the skim coat on the inside of the walls throughout.

The new stairway in all its glory. I am really happy with this new opening. I think its going to go a long way to making the house look updated from the outside. I am not hoping to distinguish the house from the neighbors so to speak, but I am hoping that the house will appear as though we have thought about all aspects inside and out when re-doing it.

Tomorrow we are going to being all of the framing in the basement, including basement stairs...for the first time in a month or so. By Wednesday, we will have a really good idea about the exact layout of the entire house. By the end of the week, plumbing and HVAC should be done, and the house should be ready for the electrician to come in an do his work.