We had a meeting with our contractor this morning.  We needed to discuss all kinds of thrilling things like where we wanted the access to the crawl space to be, how we were going to lay out the HVAC units, electric meter, and gas tank behind the garage, and where we would like gas stub outs.

Have I lost you already?

Here’s Josh, waiting patiently for our contractor to arrive…and most likely looking up equipment he’s decided we need for the property.

I decided to take a lap.

They finished filling in around the house.  It is now much safer to walk the perimeter.  And, they are supposed to start laying block tomorrow – woot!

So much dirt.  Our contractor told us they also ran into some “chert”, which is a new term for me.

I asked my landscape architect of a husband what that meant and he dumbed it down to layman’s terms for me:

J: “it’s rocky soil in the substrata.”

Oh, of course.  I knew that.

The trees have really filled in.  Just a few weeks ago we could see our neighbor’s house through the tree line.

The front yard also looks nice and neat (if you can see past all of the dirt…).  Our other neighbor mowed for us this weekend.  It took him 4 hours on his tractor.

This is not good news for me as it means Josh will be adding more and/or larger equipment to his list.

We may have no budget left for furniture, but he assures me the yard sure will look great.

To distract myself from the equipment budget concerns, I focused on finalizing selections.

One of the last selections to be made was the chimney brick.  I knew I wanted it to look like the brick fireplace in my Grandmother’s house that came from an old jail.  This one is pretty darn close!

I’m leaning toward the bottom mortar color.   Or I could do a 50/50 mix of the bottom one and the right one to warm it up a little.

The sales rep described the top two as “similar in color to peanut butter”, which immediately ruled them out for me.  First of all, it’s to yellow for me.  But, more importantly, I just can’t get past the thought of there actually being peanut butter between the bricks as they are stacked.  Not only does this gross me out, but it seems like the antithesis of mortar.

So, in summary, we will not be going with the top two options for multiple reasons.

Which do you vote for? 1) light gray or 2) light gray and light buff 50/50 mix?