Our fab first floor

As you can see from the photos, the framing is almost done on the first floor! Our guys still have to level, tie and fasten the walls, but they're definitely up. Walls, glorious walls!

Our builder is planning to finish framing the first floor tomorrow, complete the second floor on Thursday and Friday, and then move on to the third story next week. Things are happening quickly now, which is great news. Encouraging for us, and encouraging for the crew, too. Now if only the snow could hold off just for a few days...

Now, about that persistent hole in front of chez Boucher-Thurston. It turns out the water pipe actually runs underground more than halfway across the street, forcing our excavator to tear up all of New Edinburgh to find it and hook us up. No, not really. But they do have to go farther than usual, which takes more time, of course. It also turns out we'd jumped the gun in a previous update and forgotten that our electricity will be coming in from hydro wires above and not underground. That was a choice we made what feels like years ago, based on the additional cost. Ah, well. We are, however, now connected to the gas line, the sewer pipe, and the storm sewer, which is all very good news. Our builder estimates that we'll be connected to the water line by Thursday, and that big hole can finally be filled in.

The stair saga continues, but progress is being made. The original engineer we hired to validate the stair design insisted on welding the entire staircase, making the stairs nearly impossible to repair and a heavy, unwieldy piece to handle. Our builder recommended that we tweak the stairs in a way that ensures the railings can be removed if we need to replace a tread (that thing you step on). We're waiting for a quote from a second engineer to validate our builder's suggestion, and once the final specifications for the stairs are finalized, the stair fellow we're pretty sure we're going with can submit his quote and hopefully start the work.

Finally, part of our builder-assigned homework is to start thinking about paint colours. Painting seems like such a distant task, but we don't want to leave colour selection to the last second, either. Sounds like a good weekend job to me.