Uneventful

Pretty uneventful day, which is good.  I stopped by the job site and most of the basement is dug.  I’ve got to remember to grab some blue clay for my horse shoe pits and I’ve got some nieces and a nephew who want some to play around with.  My house may fall down but I’ll have the world’s nicest clay ashtrays come Christmas time (just kidding).

On the plans we moved the location of the main steel beam over the weekend.  Looking at the hole I realized I forgot to tell the excavator when I saw he’d dug one of the beam post pads already.  Hopefully it’s not too much hassle to move.  I suspect I’m not the greatest customer in the world, but I try harder than most.  Nothing some beer and a cookout can’t fix once it’s all over.  Or so I like to believe.

As we start to pick out finishes and select fixtures, I’m coming to terms with the fact that everything we pick out is the most expensive items known to man.  Our tastes run pretty eclectic yet mainstream, peppered with a dash of overspending.  We’re like fish in a barrel for Madison Avenue.  Our tastes subconsciously know nothing of “buying locally”.  I go to look up the websites of the porcelain tile and laminate we want and they’re all in Italian. That’s okay, I think a lot of our appliances are made in the USA along with some of the plumbing fixtures we’re looking at.  I’m not being religious about locally sourcing; it’s more a function of time, effort and doing the best I can.  Eventually I’d like to go to an antique shop or Habitat for Humanity shop and see what I can discover.  But everything else from big box stores, to contractor stores and online are in play.

As far as sustainable materials, we’re not going hard-core in that area either.  I would love reclaimed wood floors, but the preliminary pricing is coming in higher than cookie cutter common wood floors.  We’ve gone over in so many other areas, I’ll cut and run from that dream.  I will spec non-VOC paint and look for “green” carpeting though.  And we’ll have a metal roof with a high reflective value, that’ll help the cause.

There are a lot of other things we plan on doing and many things we still have to research.  At this point in many regards I’m like a caged animal living day-to-day, goal to goal, issue to issue.  There’s a fair amount of “we’ll cross that bridge when we get there”, which I have no problem with.  That’s my independent streak coming through I suppose.

Rest of the week is more digging.  They’ll lay down some stone and prep the column pads in preparation for the foundation install next week.  Hopefully the rain holds off.  I could use a week of sunshine and “uneventful”.