I made a quick visit to the property today and took the following pictures. These show the forms in place for the foundation pouring, which is scheduled to happen on Thursday afternoon (the day after this was posted).

The second image, which is the river side of the house, shows a cut out area where there will be a few basement windows. Not visible is the door opening, which has been reserved with an insert added inside the frames. Its right behind the horizontal boards you can see in the inner corner.

Meanwhile, today was yet another Wednesday session with the architect. We are almost done with these design sessions. This time there were no adjustments to the house at all – no walls moved, no windows got relocated, no ducts were rerouted. We did slightly move two plugs, but just two, and just a little.

One of the interesting things we did at this session was to look at the “sun study”, specifically for the game room. The architect has software where she models the house and then she can dial in a day of the year and time of day to see where the sun would come in, not including any trees (which were not modeled).

Here are two screen shots from the sun study of the game room. The first one shows morning light coming in from the east side. The second one shows afternoon light coming in from the south. Both for March 21 (so around the time of our March gaming party).

The light from the south is particularly welcome, especially in winter since it provides a sunny place to sit. Unfortunately, we expect most of the light to be blocked by the evergreen trees on the south side of the property.

Separately, we have in hand a proposal from the AV company for the internet, doorbells, entertainment systems and speakers. The proposal is very detailed, and very expensive and we are thinking about it.

We also have the proposal from the alarm company for the door alarms, security panel, motion detector, low temperature alarm, water alarm and all the fire and CO alarms (which get centrally wired into the control panel). The good news is that these are centrally powered as well. No batteries in the individual units to start chirping, and these units are much less likely to randomly fail and set off an alarm at 3am. Most of these are either required by code or strongly recommended by possible insurance companies.

Well that’s today’s update. Hopefully this weekend I will post the week’s construction camera video showing the foundation framing and pouring.

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