North Georgia House

Here’s a shot of the living room and keeping room.  I just finished the keeping room built-ins. The keeping room will likely see different furnature eventually, and the living room will get matching built-ins around the windows soon.  

We’ve got all our landscaping in now as well. I’m holding off on an updated photo of the exterior because I will be putting in shutters in the next two weeks. 

One of the reasons we liked this floor plan was the stairway wasn’t in a traditional location between the formal living and dining.  The stairway is in a “hall” between the kitchen and garage and lands in an upstairs living room.  Its a more private area, and the two pocket doors between the hall and kitchen and the hall and keeping room can be closed to completely seperate all the upstairs bedrooms from downstairs entertaining space.

I also get lots of questions on our flooring.  It’s 3/4 in solid pine floors installed by a local flooring company I highly recommend: https://www.facebook.com/laynehardwood/
    
 

Perhaps a little different than most, we wanted to use a good bit of space for the dining room.  We enjoy hosting large gatherings, and are looking forward to all our tables being full this Thanksgiving.   

    
 

Having to move in early is making getting to 100% difficult, but we’re making progress. I’m attaching some picture of the interior, so you can see how great it turned out.

As I mentioned, we had to move a little sooner than we wanted.  Unfortunately, this meant that we were moving in to a completely un-landscaped house.  We just got the grass completed, and it is great!  Due to neighborhood rules, I had to do about 10 ft of grass along my 600 feet of road frontage (remember, we have a 2.5 acre corner lot, and the road wraps around it a bit). Grass was a big ticket item, but it’s in now and looks great! We still have to add the shutters and landscaping, but we’re happy with the progress.

 

Thankfully, with the fiasco with our rental company, our builder came through and got us a Certificate of Occupancy and the house “done enough” for us to move in from our rental.  No hotels and storage for us! I’ll post some updates over the coming weeks, as we’re still wrapping up a good bit of work (eg. we had to ask the painters to stop painting the stairs so our movers could get stuff up without getting paint on them.  It’s been crazy, and our preference would have been to wait until all the punch list items were done, but we had no choice since the switcharoo of our rental contract. Thanks to our builder for making it happen–4700 square foot house done in 6 months with a month delay for rain during the foundation phase.

Check out the total timelapse for our build. Unfortantely, the strap that was holding my camera to the tree deteriorated and the camera fell down, so we won’t be able to go to the final state.

Build Time Lapse

Now that our rental company is kicking us out a month earlier than I thought, and we offered a bonus to our builder for bringing the date in. Things have been going at warp speed.  I’ve been at the house every night for several hours finishing the doors.  Now the final grade is in, cabinets, countertops, and much of the plumbing. Major items are floor refinishing and electrical fixtures.

Not too much time, so we’ll just do pictures!

For the last year, I thought my lease for our rental ended Sept 30.  We were going to finish mid-Sept, and slowly move our stuff over and call mover for the big stuff.  It was going to be perfect, non-stressful and easy.  Well, at the beginning of this month, I got a letter from my leasing company (that will remain nameless for now, as I don’t want to trash talk), saying that my lease was ending Aug 31.  I quickly scrambled through my old emails and sure enough, there it was, Aug 31.  I thought that I was just going crazy.

About a week ago, I was going through the lease to make sure I have everything in place for move out in a few weeks, and I found out why I thought for the last year my lease ended a month later than it did.  Originally, we were going to move in on Monday, Sept 8. I had a lease signed for a month and just waiting on move in day.  Well, the property became available a little earlier, and we were offered the opportunity to move in on Friday instead of Monday, so they sent me an updated lease on Thursday to change our move in day to Friday the 5th.  What I didn’t notice is they also changed the move out date to Aug 31 from Sept 30.  They have refused to give me an extra month because it will get them out of the “busy season”.  Now, I’m trying not to impart bad intentions, but I feel like I’ve been had. Of course, I should have noticed the move-out date change, but I had a lease with my preferred move out date signed for a month, and I was only expecting a change of 3 days in the move-in date.  Now, they conviently are able to relist the house in the “busy season” for future renters.

 

Regardless, now we’re out on Aug 31, and our targeted move in date is Sept 22.  Thankfully, our builder is going to let me put our stuff in the basement, so we have a place for our stuff.  To try to make sure we’re moving as soon as possible, I’ve offered the builder a graduated incentive for getting us in the house before the 22nd.  If they can get us in on Aug 31, they’ll get 2k, Sept 5: 1k, and Sept 12: 500.  I’ve told them they have to tell me the targeted date by Aug 4 so we can plan, and they seem interested, so we’ll see if it works.

I took last week off my real job to do some trim work around the house.  Really pleased how it turned out.

The brick has been going in over the last several days .  We weren’t sure when it was wrapped up that it had enough variance, but now that it’s going in, it’s beautiful.

The house I grew up in had a pine front porch–the gapless stuff, not the 5in pressure treated we use on back porches. My parents always said they wished they’d done a brick floor so they didn’t have to worry about painting the wood. We did it here, and it’s really amazing.