Here is the north-east corner of the family room. As you can see, the fireplace is operational! This week they rolled the insulation into the walls. It was very quiet in the house (for the 2 days the insulation was exposed). Now we know what our house would look like if we painted the walls pink!

This is the kitchen with insulation. These pictures were taken Thursday morning. As you will see in the next pictures, by the weekend all the walls in the house were covered with sheetrock..

Here is the east wall of the family room today! It's all sheetrocked and looks like a house. It's amazing how quickly they put up all this rock! Eventually the entire surface of the fireplace you are looking at will be covered with assorted rectangular bricks of flagstone. The tall rectangular space to the right of the fireplace opening is for storing wood inside the house.

Here is the dining room (on the right) and the kitchen in the background on the left. There's lots of junk around (like the table saw on the right), but we can really get a feel for what it's going to look like. A woodburning stove will sit roughly where the scaffolding is on the left -- probably our most usual source of heat, next to forced air heating. Having the sheetrock on makes it seem like the house may be ready before the baby (of course, the table saw will have to go!). We're still hoping for February.

Here is the deck off of the family room. It's neat to be able to walk out here. This deck is especially interesting without the railing that will eventually be added. The drop off is about 35 feet! It's pretty eerie walking near the edge of it. You may be able to tell that the rain gutters are all full of water. We've gotten lots of rain (probably 15 inches in the past week) and the gutters don't have down spouts yet, so they just fill up and overflow.

Here is the house as viewed from above the driveway. The big tree in the foreground came down in the last storm. It was old and dead, and the arborist had pretty much condemned it. Craig is getting ready to chop it into pieces so we can get it out of the driveway.

Here I am cutting up the fallen tree. As you can see, the ground is very muddy. You can see how big the root crown is (compared to me).

This is where the road turns down toward our friends' house. They were just putting in drainage when it rained. You can see the water is collecting in big puddles (not quite deep enough to do laps in).