Are you ready for some Foot(ball)ers!

Everybody has been worried about the potential NFL lockout and whether or not we're going to have a football seasons this year.  We have been more worried about when we were going to get our foot-ers formed and poured up in the mountains.  Good news, Greg has made huge progress since we got the permit last Friday and we now have a lot that has been cleared of (gulp) many trees and we have the excavation complete for our footers.  The forms are almost 100% in place and the concrete should be poured tomorrow.  Below is a picture of the hole with a form in it.

To get a sense for the scale of this, here's another picture that shows the twins standing in the front part of the lot.  This is taken with the girls standing next to the concrete piers for the deck and looking towards the front of the lot.

We have a lot of wood to use for firewood after the house is built.  Looks like we'll have to find a friend with a chainsaw who likes to chop and split wood :

Dirt is a flyin'

Well, the mountain house is finally happening after all this time.  We got the building permit yesterday and trees are coming down today!  Here are some photos our builder took for us of all the action:

1) Material for some serious blazing fires in the wintertime:

2)  The makings of our driveway (we think....).  The backhoe is where the house will sit on the lot.

3)  View from the back deck looking east out to Red Mountain 

4)  A girlfriend for Bailey perhaps??

5)  Serious equipment!!  

6)  View from our front porch looking West to Mt. Quandary - the only 14,000 foot peak in Summit County.  The car you see in the picture is on our street - Kimmes Lane

We're hoping to make it up there next week and check it out for ourselves.

Let's get the dirt flying!

Permit. Almost. Done.  We are told that all the departments have approved the building permit and it's being typed up while we wait anxiously.  Meanwhile, on the job site, the silt fence is going up today and the builder is going to start with some topsoil and tree removal tomorrow.  He's also going to have some of the older 'debris' (brush, cut down trees, etc) pulled out of the lot so that we have a clean building area.  We are very excited!

We've closed in on some decisions as well for our windows.  We are going to go with the Weathershield Encurashield product that will look roughly like this from the inside :

We have done a bunch of research and decided that a fiberglass window with wood cladding on the inside would be the best way to have a long lasting, non rotting product that would still look good from inside the house.

We are closing in on our kitchen design and our appliances as well, hopefully we'll have some real decisions there pretty soon.

We expect to have excavation under way for real on Monday and get the footers poured by the end of the week.  Things should start getting pretty real here!