property – Primm & Property

Posted on November 24, 2020 by Emily · 2 Comments

Day 399

As we approach a very large number of days that this project has been underway, we are *this* close to starting drywall.

I feel like a broken record, saying for the last 8+ weeks that we are close to starting drywall, but we are actually almost there.

The insulation is nearly complete and drywall has been delivered, with drywall guys on standby.

Though the interior has been progressing slower than I would prefer, the exterior has made some big strides.

We’ve also had some visitors who came by to check out the property…

Lorelei was not terribly impressed with the raw interior, but enjoyed walking the grounds. She decided the yard was good for playing and that she will come back for many more visits.

Since Lorelei’s visit, the dirt pile has disappeared and the yard is completely graded.

Try to envision the hedged courtyard with a fire pit and herb garden that will be here in the future. Likely Phase 271.

Look how smooth and lovely the side yard is!

Also of note, the classical columns for the front porch arrived! They weigh a casual couple of tons each.

Funny/not funny story: The column company tried to deliver these to our builder’s office, which is in an office building in a busy part of town. They called and said, “We’re here!” and our builder, who was at our property, said “So am I! and I don’t see you…” And that’s when they realized the billing and shipping addresses had gotten mixed up.

I’m glad I wasn’t there for that.

The driveway is complete! It is now a breeze to pull up and park by the front door, which I intend to use frequently.

Lastly, the exterior painting is almost done. They will have to come back to paint the porches and garage doors, but the yellow is history!

We have a site meeting in a few hours. Wish us luck and hope that drywall is starting…

Posted on November 5, 2020 by Emily

Day 382

What do you think of our new furniture?!

Just kidding, we have a long way to go until it’s time for furniture.

We had a big inspection last week for the rough plumbing, HVAC, and framing. The inspector was cranky and came up with a list of things (several of which the builder and I have never heard of before) that need to be fixed before he’ll pass us. Still working on getting that completed.

In the meantime, we are bursting at the seams with insulation.

Progress continues on the exterior:

I am loving the paint color!

The black doors and shutters will add some much needed definition.

Less exciting but extremely necessary, they are putting in the septic system. I am not sure what all this entails and I don’t think I want to know. All I know is that the ugly orange fencing is gone and the open yard feels a million times better.

So much more open from the porch!

This will soon be a lovely, grassy field.

The cellar door is in! Getting close to being able to secure the house.

Perhaps most exciting of all in the last week, I selected our soapstone slabs for the kitchen and butler’s pantry. I am absolutely obsessed with them.

If you need me, I’ll be staring at pictures of my slabs.

Posted on July 26, 2020July 26, 2020 by Emily

Day 281

Some things have happened at the property this week. Let me fill you in:

I noticed last weekend that we had a rather significant framing issue upstairs. Not a structural one, thankfully. In fact, the house is built like a tank, with more lumber and hurricane ties than you can imagine. No, the issue was regarding measurements. I realized the issue when I walked into the master bath and the vanity wing wall was partially obscuring one of the windows. Per my plans, this should not have been the case.

I started investigating. Come to find out that the guest room had been framed over a foot too deep(!), thus throwing off every wall upstairs east to west. Mostly notably, the master bedroom was 10 square feet too small as a result. No bueno.

I did my best not to have a “come apart” (as they call it here in the south) and started documenting everything for the builder. I was particularly wound up over this because my plans are not only to scale but also dimensioned. I can forgive an inch here or there and realize there may have to be an occasional adjustment, but variations of more than a foot simply will not do.

Good news: I noticed this while still in the framing stage and not as we were trying to move in furniture.

Bad news: I was the one that caught this.

Good news: It can be fixed and our builder is on it.

Bad news: Nearly every wall in the main part of the upstairs has to be moved.

Good news: We will not be charged for this.

Bad news: It will delay us about a week.

I had two 2-3 hour site meetings with the builder this week to go through everything and mark what needs to be corrected.

I should have brought snacks.

OK, now onto the next critical item: the kitchen cabinet color.

It is well-documented that I am my own worst client. While I can be incredibly decisive with selections and decisions for my clients’ spaces, the same cannot be said for my personal spaces.

I have painted this poor door sample with 5 different colors and then my own custom blends of these colors to get the color just right. Let me just say that neutrals are complicated because they can take on various undertones depending on what time of day it is and what kind of light is hitting them. My struggle was that I liked some better in natural daylight and the others better at night with incandescent light. In the daylight some were taking on a fleshy undertone (which I am absolutely allergic to) and at night the others took on a green cast.

My cabinet guy will be delighted when I tell him he has to paint match a 50/50 blend of 2 colors, one of which is at 75%. Here is the winning combination:

This is the same color on the whole door. See how different it looks in light and shadow?!

While the cabinet color took an inordinate amount of time, it took me about 45 seconds to make the call on the roof material.

Back to regularly scheduled programming and progress photos:

They put on the underlayment for the roof and some of the flashing.

They started on the dining room chimney.

They have done some more digging around the garage, though there is still a bit to do.

Josh and my dad laid out where the 4 rail fence will go along our shared property line.

They have their work cut out for them as they put in this fence next weekend.

I will be providing supervision and snacks.

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Emily

Day 274

Well, as predicted, things have ground to a halt on the house. Nothing happened at the house this week that I could tell, unfortunately.

I met with the cabinet guy yesterday to go over the kitchen and master bath cabinetry. Though it will be months before any cabinetry is installed, just the thought of it makes me so happy. As an interior designer who designs a lot of kitchens, and as someone who thoroughly enjoys cooking and baking, I have put more time into perfecting this kitchen than perhaps any other space I’ve ever designed. I can’t wait to be in this space, whipping up a new recipe (likely from a Barefoot Contessa cookbook) for dinner with my family.

Probably about 6 more months until that’s a reality.

I’ll just be over here at the corner of the property, dreaming about gatherings of family and friends until then.

In the meantime, Josh and my dad have been working on securing the perimeter. Josh discovered that our neighbor along our tree line was perhaps unclear on the actual boundary of his property. We’re giving him the benefit of the doubt, but as he was clearing his entirely wooded property, he cleared almost 20 feet onto our side of the tree line. So, over the course of the past two weekends, Josh and my dad have put up metal stakes and wire along the property boundary to help make it clear.

Not the most beautiful thing, but effective. It’s hidden by the trees from our side.

Along that same side of our property, past the tree line, there is another neighboring property that has recently sold. We spotted some markers we think indicate a building envelope so we are being proactive and planning a four rail fence along that shared boundary. It will tie into our neighbor’s fence on the West side of our property, shown here:

As they say, good fences make good neighbors.

Posted on July 12, 2020July 12, 2020 by Emily

Day 267

It’s been a slow week at the house so I decided to check the trail camera footage for anything good.

Screen Shot 2020-07-11 at 1.27.28 PM There are dozens of videos of this man carrying in stacks of 2x4s like this one. He must have shoulders of steel. Each time, he gracefully managed to carry over 100 pounds of lumber as he walked the plank into the house.

Though there were 100s of videos, other than Mr. Hulk here, there wasn’t much of interest.

We did catch a few moments of our site meeting with our builder last week.

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Here we are practicing social distancing.

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Discussing the front porch…

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Going over all of the exterior trim details with some very helpful hand gestures.

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Josh and I are peeking out the dining room window here because in the middle of our meeting with our builder and the HVAC subcontractor (who were standing across the room inside) one of our neighbors starting screaming/yelling her dog’s name.

Now, normally this sort of thing wouldn’t send me into a panic, but this dog is trained as an attack dog. When we first met him, our neighbor had to hand us a treat to feed the dog so he would know that we were on the “approved” human list.

Another important piece of information here is that, when I was 3, we were visiting our neighbors who had a dog named “Fudge”, who was completely harmless but about 10 times my body weight at the time. He came bounding over to say hello to me and I promptly climbed my dad like a tree.

So, I immediately started to think about how I was going to scale the roof in the event the dog was charging toward our house. Since we don’t have doors or windows yet and the car was 50 yards away, the roof seemed like the best plan.

This went on for several minutes and we still had not seen the dog. Our neighbor then switched from yelling the dog’s name to yelling what I thought was “I have a treat”.

I chuckled and then realized she was actually yelling “retreat”, which seems like an intense dog command, so I quickly resumed plotting my ascent to the roof.

Several minutes later, she stopped yelling and we still hadn’t seen the dog so we assumed he had indeed “retreated” and we went back to our fascinating conversation about heat pumps vs. dual fuel systems.

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Emily

Day 250

Hey there!

I stopped by for a quick visit between meetings the other day and saw many interesting things as I turned onto our easement drive:

The property adjacent to ours that has been for sale for quite a while now has a gigantic septic fence in place.
The “For Sale” sign had been taken down, so this sale is likely really happening and we are getting some new neighbors. We were secretly hoping the seller would give up and offer to sell it to us and our existing neighbor for a fraction of the cost.
Due to the odd shape of this lot and the gigantic septic field in the middle of the lot, I have no idea where they will place a house. I really hope it’s not a big factor in any of our views.

On a more positive note, I spot a chimney!

A little imagination required, but can’t you see it coming to life?!

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The chimney was really exciting to see. There is another one on the opposite side of the house that is more for looks and balance. This one here is a wood burning fireplace in the living room, but the dining room and library will have ventless gas inserts.

I love fireplaces.

It’s hard to imagine wanting to have a fire right now because it’s almost 90 degrees and 80% humidity as I write this.

No worries, though, because I can just lay down in the puddles on the floor to cool off.

It’s sort of a panicky thing to see water like this on the interior of your house even when you’re still in this rough stage of framing. The good news is there are no windows and doors on the house at this moment in time so there will be plenty of time for this to air out and evaporate.

There’s that gigantic septic field fence from the other side.

As soon as I saw this, I told Josh we may need to go ahead and put up a fence along the shared property line…

Back to the progress! Check out these dormers taking shape. The bedrooms are going to be so cozy.

Though I know we have to have it for waterproofing, I really detest this paper they are putting on in a somewhat random fashion. It is very distracting and they are covering up the window openings.

I can’t wait until we can cover it up with siding and put in the windows. I’m hoping at our meeting tomorrow, the builder will tell us this is happening very soon.

I like this view because you can’t really see the ugly paper.

Also, it cracks me up that it looks like our house is hiding behind the tree, somewhat unsuccessfully. Sort of like when my cat sticks his head under the sofa and thinks you can’t see him.

I turned around from my vantage point and admired all of our little “volunteer” trees that have sprouted up. Hopefully some of these will make it to be big trees someday.

As I was leaving, I spotted a work truck at the edge of the other property adjacent to ours. It is entirely wooded and we have about 40′ of woods between us, but we haven’t see a soul or any evidence of human life on this property the entire time we have owned our property. A little strange that literally the same day that the other property looks to have something happening on it, this one does too. We went from feeling like we were out here by ourselves to all of a sudden having a bunch of activity.

Looking into that fence tomorrow…

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Emily

Day 247

Hi, it’s me again!

More framing progress to report over the last 24 hours.

We had a family site visit yesterday afternoon while my aunt was in town. It was neat to give the grand tour and walk through each room.

Our greek revival cottage is taking shape!

The office is feeling really good and looking like a disco in the afternoon sun.

As they add the sheathing, it frames the views and I just can’t get enough. I’m all about the views.

The second floor is still quite the maze of framed walls and temporary supports.

Here’s Josh looking out the dormer window in the back bedroom. I’ve always loved dormers so each room on the second floor has one. I might have gone a little dormer crazy in the design, but I think they make the rooms cozy and add a lot of dimension to the exterior.

We have some rain in the forecast, but I’m thinking framing might be complete by the end of the week. Stay tuned!

Posted on June 7, 2020 by Emily

Day 232

Framing is supposed to start this week – woot!

I can hardly keep it together. I am SO excited.

They have rough graded up to the house (and covered up most of the ugly black waterproofing).

This will be a lovely patio one day, shaded from the western sun once the house is complete. Currently, without the shade, it feels like 137 degrees. Welcome to June in Tennessee.

The exterior access basement stairs are formed and ready to be poured along with the basement and garage slabs. Fingers crossed this will happen Monday or Tuesday because lumber is being delivered on Wednesday!

There is still a bit of work to do on the hill by the garage, but John was focusing on grading up to the house this week. Josh should be level with the garage where he is standing.

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In addition to grading around the house, John worked more on the driveway.

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We have over 200 videos documenting this process…

Still not 100%, but getting there.

Josh, assessing the situation. He says there is another 3-4 feet in elevation to be built up at the low spot.

I told him that’s what I thought, too.

(I actually have no idea exactly what this all is supposed to look like other than the layout. This is why Josh is in charge of exterior items.)

We took a new route from the property to my parents’ house and stumbled upon some of our future shopping options.

I have never been in a “Dirt Cheap” before but I am most curious as to what they offer.

I guess there’s only one way to find out…

Posted on May 30, 2020 by Emily

Day 226

Well, the weather has been spotty and as a result the concrete guys are behind. So, no slabs were poured this week as hoped.

They did apply some lovely waterproofing. Though black is normally one of my favorite colors, I’m not loving the look here.

Good thing it will be covered up by dirt before too long.

John was there this morning working on the grading by the garage.

There’s still quite a bit to grade on this side so we don’t have to drive off a cliff into the garage.

I found a new pile of dirt to take pictures from. To me, it looks like our house is made out of giant legos.

Oh hey!

I caught Josh drinking his coffee on the front porch.

I think this is the first of many thousands of cups of coffee he will enjoy on the front porch.

On our way out, we noticed one of our neighbors seems to be drilling a well. We will be doing this too at some point soon.

Still so many things left to do for our house to be complete, but we are making progress, slowly but surely.

But mostly slowly…

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Emily

Day 221

We rolled up on Memorial Day to find that the block work was complete!

One day soon(ish), there will be a lovely front porch here, inviting you in as you come up the driveway.

(sigh)

We had the full crew on for inspection: Josh (left), Nate (middle), and Eugene (right).

It was HOT, so while I walked the perimeter, Eugene sat in the shade of the front tree, supervising me. The guys had moved on to cutting down a tree.

The dirt piles keep moving and flattening as John continues the grading, so this was as high as I could get. Looking good!

Next, it was time to “walk through” the house, which Eugene was kind enough to document for me.

That crawl space access is already coming in handy; however, this is the only time I ever plan to use it personally.

Walking through the kitchen…

…envisioning the island.

…sitting at the island.

Old habits die hard.

Next up, garage and basement floors will be poured!