The Blog Post Where Framing Happens

You know what’s insane? Framing a house. Because one day a pile of wood gets delivered…

And then like two days later, BOOM. House.

I don’t know how they do it, but it’s very satisfying. Especially when the resulting house looks exactly like the the one you designed. I know it’s supposed to and all, but it’s just so cool to see the thing you’ve created in your head come to life before your eyes.

Before we move on, here are some clips of the process that I put together for your viewing pleasure.

So now let’s talk about the real life crappy part of this post.

I feel like you may know where I am going with this…

Lumber prices.

As you may have noticed, the framing crew and my kids are wearing sweaters in these photos. I’m behind on blogging about the house, and framing happened in April of this year. I’m writing this in September, so five months ago. Do you remember what was happening with lumbar prices five months ago? The memes? The jokes about wood being worth more than gold? Yeah…that’s all fun and games till you find yourself building a house at that exact moment.

Here is a graphic of the lumber prices over the last year, from September 2021 till today, September 2022.

Uh huh. Yup. It pains me to look at that graph.

Just for funsies, let’s look at the lumber prices from 2004 to 2022 (red dot is when I purchased mine).

So yeah… I paid a lot for lumber and was severely over budget. We’re talking like $20,000 over. Looking at that graph now it’s painfully obvious that I should have just waited another month for prices to come down….but, that’s hindsight for you. At the time it was just as likely that prices could have kept climbing and I would have been even worse off and closer to my apartment lease being up.

Anyway, it is what it is (you’re going to hear me use that line a lot) and we’re just going to keep moving forward and not let the crappy parts kill the fun and excitement of the journey. You will definitely be seeing me cutting costs in other areas to make up for the overages and keep myself on budget though.

Anyway….more pictures. Look how pretty!

After the house is completely framed, cornice starts. This is a different crew than does that framing, and the cornice crew wraps the house…sheathing, siding, eaves, etc (roofing is another different crew).

This is a fun stage too, because you can see the house really start to take shape.

Now let’s head inside. I’m not going to do whole tour because it’s too hard when there’s no interior walls, but here is the floorplan and a few pics just so you can get a feel for it.

This photo is from stating at the door to the garage/utility room, so that is th kitchen on the right and dining room/fireplace/living room on the right.

This is from in the living room looking out the front door.

And the one hallway, standing in the office looking all the way into the master bedroom.

And speaking of the office, can we just take a second to appreciate how magnificent these windows are going to be?

Here is from the living room looking into the kitchen. Also, that big hole in the wood siding isn’t a door, it’s a sheet of glass that looks into the courtyard from the kitchen.

So there you go, a short post that covers a whole lot of progress. I’m super ready to start blogging about the pretties…tile and lighting and paint colors, and I promise we are getting there! Just got to play catch up first.

So in Summary..

• Framing might be the most satisfying part of building a house, because it’s so quick. The day you get drywall is probably second.
• Volatile markets suck, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t let it steal your joy.
• Want to read more posts about this house? CLICK HERE. Want to get new posts delivered right to your inbox? CLICK HERE