Our new house was delivered today! The local builders told us
yesterday that the house would be delivered between 12 and 4, so I took
the day off hoping to get the once-in-a-lifetime view of my house coming
down the road on tractor-trailers. The local builders finally called at
3:30 saying that the house would be delivered between 4:00 and 5:00
(just freakin' figures, I could have gone to work for most of the day),
but not to go out there until after 6:00 because they didn't want us
getting in their way. Immediately ignoring this advice, Bob and I set
off and got to the lot about 4:00, carefully parking well out of the
travelway of the trucks, then climbing the hill to the lot. Only to find
this:
Well, so much for getting to see it arrive! I'm going to get out there
as early as I can tomorrow, though, to see if I can see them put it on
the foundation (that's what the big crane is for). Here's the
foundation, ready, I assume:
We have a full basement under the bedrooms, and a crawl space under the
living room/dining room/kitchen. Of course, as long as we were there, we
got as good a look at everything as we could. Here's the "box"
with the living room and foyer:
And here's a glimpse of the fireplace. The living room is going to get
hardwood floors, but that will come later:
These two are the bedroom boxes. The door on the end of the near one is
the door that's going to lead to the screen porch from our bedroom:
That door happened to not be locked, so that was the one really clear
look we got into a room:
The first doorway you can see is the master bath, the second is the
walk-in closet, and then finally the door to the rest of the house. Bob
also drove himself crazy trying to get a decent picture of the kitchen
(it had to be Bob, I'm too short to have even really been able to see
in) - this is the best one:
Just to orient you, here's basically the floor plan - there were a
couple of minor changes after this, like Laurel's door ("Bedroom
#3") and the bathroom door lined up and a second window added to
Bedroom #2, but this shows how the boxes go - one's the living
room/foyer, one's the dining room/kitchen/utility room, one's our
bedroom, Laurel's room and the main bath (which will be accessible), and
the other is the third bedroom, the office and the master bath:
Hopefully I'll have some more pictures tomorrow!
FINALLY, I've got the pictures of the house organized! We took so
many the day it went up (Wednesday, June 11) that I just got
overwhelmed. But here are pictures from the house raising and also some
pictures of the progress since.
When we got to the site, one of the first things that greeted us was
devastation! We've had several bad thunderstorms here this month - we
had lost three trees from our current yard just a couple of days and one
storm before this. Turns out we lost nine large trees on our new
property (one of which fell on one of the trailers, missing the house by
inches!). You can see three of them here:
And a couple more:
I got there first about 9:30 AM (Bob waited for Laurel's caregiver), and
they were just getting ready to put the second box on the foundation at
that point:
Here's the third box going up:
And down:
This is what the fourth box (the living room and foyer) looked like with
its wrapper off:
And up it goes:
Now that all the boxes are in place, next thing is to raise the roof!
This guy goes on a ride on the crane to get things started:
The roof is already attached by hinges. The crane is used to help lift
it:
The trusses are unfolded and put into place:
At this point, the workers started having a major discussion about some
darned thing, so we took the opportunity to finally walk inside our new
house! Here's the living room:
And the kitchen:
And the star of the master bath!
(There's a shower as well.) While we were in there, they started putting
up the roof peaks:
By the end of the day, this is what we had:
We came back the next evening with Laurel. They had finished the roof
line by then:
We got Laurel out of the van to meet her new house. Of course we didn't
have any way to get her inside:
The next time we came back was Sunday, the 15th. By that time, the
shingles were on:
We next came back a week later. We were floored by what we saw!
Well, OK, the wheelchair wasn't there when we pulled up. But obviously,
it was time for Laurel to go inside. This shot shows the arch from the
foyer to the living room, which had been finished during the week:
The flooring on the deck was done too!
We last went over this past Saturday. Things looked the same from the
front, but here's the new view of the back:
The other major visual difference was the tile in the kitchen and dining
room:
It was also obvious that they had done a lot of duct and electrical
work, but I didn't think that was worth posting a picture of. 
So that brings this up to date! Hopefully now that I'm not faced with
hundreds of pictures to sort through, I'll keep up a little better.