Its blue-tiful!

And then just last week, we got some color on the external walls. The sidings were put up, and the shake/shingles in the front. The only thing was, if you see the previous post on colors, we actually had two colors, one for the siding and one for the shingles/shake.  So, we called up the project manager, and he told us indeed that it was an error, and it would be corrected! And he indicated there wouldnt be any delays because of that.

The sidings and shake are visible in the front view. The area remaining which is covered up will be where the stone veneer will come

Side view

Siding on the side, and shake in the front. But they should ideally be different colors

Difference from the siding on the house and the vertical lines over the garage

And then there were rooms

Another month has passed. Our house continues its slow march to completion. In the last post, most of the exterior of the house was finished, and the roof had gone up.
Since then, we have had some more milestones. About two weeks back, since the framing of the house was complete and the next step was to put in the dry wall, we had a pre-drywall meeting with our project manager. He walked us through the house and showed us where the switches and sockets would be. Also showed us our air conditioning vents, and explained the whole Energy Star certification process. At this stage, we of course didn't see any issues there with the way the frame had come up.
During the meeting, they also informed us that they would be able to give us a firm date when we would get the house once the dry wall had been put in. That was exciting news!
So here is where I have to rant a little about the one sour thing in this process (so far!). Unlike an existing home where it might just take 30 days to close, building a home takes a while (but not as much as in, say India, where it might take a whole lot longer!). Unfortunately, this affects the one thing which everybody worries about when dealing with a first home, especially for people who don't just hand out cash to buy it. The Mortgage. When we started this process, the interest rates were at historic lows, enough to make buying a house seem very attractive (but wasn't mortgage backed securities that lead to the Great Recession? But its over, right?). But as luck would have it, with improving economic conditions in the US, the housing market picked up and the interest rates started moving up. Yikes! So, in a nutshell, Grr...Aargh... More money...
So, here's some of the photos taken inside after just the dry wall had gone in.

The family room with the view of the backyard.

Staircase...

Kitchen...

The view from the front door, double height at the entrance

A Roof over our head

Finally, after more than a month of construction, we have a roof! And the house looks like a house!

 Starting to look like a house! Now we are free of weather problems. Its all inside work now!

View from the left

View from the right!

View from the backyard

View of the backyard from what will be the dining area

First floor people

And just like that, up goes the ground floor (or first floor as its known in the US)! So, this is the part of the process called framing.

First floor in progress

Here is a view taken from the back, a little way off. 

It shows our house relative to all other houses on the same lane. Also as it can be seen, after our backyard, is a lot of space at the back.

Home Base

Work at the site is progressing and the foundation is done.

Finally we get to see some inkling of how the first floor of house will look like, if it was drawn on a paper.

A view from the back of the plot shows where the house ends, and the back yard begins.

And they have brought in the frame of the house too. It looks like some three dimensional jigsaw puzzle is going to be built. The pieces are all there. Somebody needs to put them in the right place

Ready, Steady, Go!

After considerable effort, we are done with designing our house. There's just so much you can choose from options and colors. Basically, our non-financial contribution to building our house is finished. Finally, its time to actually get work done. Its time to watch the house get built.
About two weeks back, we had our pre-construction meeting with the project manager who was going to oversee the construction of the house. He walked us through the details of the house, making sure all our options and requirements were in place. It was more like a transition from the sales rep to the project manager, as we move to the next process in our home journey. We went away from that meeting also with a tentative date - Mid July. Seems far off now, but like the project manager said, as we see the house come up, things will move really fast!
So last week, despite some rains, there was considerable activity at the site. Plumbing went in and then the slab was laid.

 A busy construction area. Wonder if the neighbors are disturbed much?

Plumbing work was complete and the work for laying the slab had started

Color on the walls

The final set of options we had to choose were the exterior colors for the Hardieplank siding and the shingles, and the type of stone veneer we wanted. But this was more difficult than most of the interior selections. How can somebody imagine what the house would look like, just by looking at small pieces of wood or a small sample of stone? Adding to the visualization complexity was having to process in our head, multiple combination of allowed colors for each sample of stone and this made finalizing a combination even more difficult. 
So on the first meeting, we spent a lot of time trying out different option of colors next to the stone. One of the main issues was that since we have an elevation which has siding and shingles, there needs to be two colors. So, somehow we chose a set of colors and stone, after we spent an hour and half trying to figure out a combination. In the process, Rhea got frustrated and started taking samples away, thinking we were playing some game, moving samples in and out! After all that effort, our final choices at the end of the meeting seemed to make sense.
But after leaving the place, we decided to drive around in a couple of communities of Ryan Homes to see if we could spot if somebody already had made the combination we had chosen. Well, that drive didn't turn out too good, as we were surprised how the stone veneer we had chosen, actually looked on existing houses. It was not the sort of look, we were aiming for. 
Lekshmi then mailed the Sales Rep and had her send across photos of different stone veneers in existing houses, so we had a better visualization of how each stone sample actually looked. It was another difficult process of selection.
The second time around was faster, since we had narrowed down to one stone veneer, and we just had a couple of color options for the hard.
... And so here are the final color choices

All of the colors together including the garage door color(Natural Almond), the hardieplank siding color (Light Mist), the shingle color (Cobblestone), the door color (Marooned) and the stone veneer (English)