Stairway to ... nothing

So Wednesday it rained, so not much was done. But something critical was - the steel columns in the basement were installed. So, the real work on the second floor could begin.

And today, they did. All of the joists and all of the decking, with a few small exceptions, were completed today. They also installed a temporary staircase, which leads to the second floor. I was excited to climb those stairs to get a look, but I quickly saw that the decking had been installed right over the opening. I presume they will cut the hole tomorrow, but we'll see. They may need to keep it closed to keep kids out (though there are no stairs to the basement, so that's just as much of an accident waiting to happen). Anyway, we can see more and more what it is going to look like when the walls a covered over and things start getting installed.

The stairs are straight, not how they will be in the finished product. We tried to figure out how they will look when the real stairs are in, but it is hard to tell. The real stairs will have a small section, maybe four or five risers, then make a 135 degree turn, or thereabouts, and continue straight up. One of our concerns has been how much room there will be between the wall on the left and the stairs on the right. I think it will be fine, but it is an open question. Not that there is much we can do either way, it is what it is.

We're still unsure about the island bar in the kitchen. We tried to peek into the house next door, as they have one, to get a better idea, but 1) is it too hard to see from the windows and B) theirs is laid out differently than ours, so I'm not sure it is a good comparison.

My new thing is figuring out how to arrange furniture in the family room. Let's face it, I like TV. I don't want a layout that will suck for watching TV, bottom line. One absolutely perfect plan is to put a plasma screen above the fireplace. But that means buying a plasma screen, and that's no small purchase (plasma, LCD, whatever, I call them all plasma even when they're not). So if we don't do that, how do we lay things out to make sense with what we do have? We have an HDTV - but it is not a small item, so the choices of where to place it are not unlimited. It is a great screen for our family room now - but if you double the distance between the screen and the couch, will it be enough? One plan has the screen at an angle to the couch - yuck! Who wants to watch football, or "Grey's Anatomy" for that matter, at an angle. We have an appointment with a local store to talk about wiring for TV - what we can do now to give us options in the future. We'll see what comes of that. Who knows, we may walk out with a plasma in our arms.

So tomorrow is supposed to be a gorgeous day. I hope they can get a wall up on the second floor. In the best world, they would have our second floor skin by midweek and fully framed by the end of the week, and if so, they could theoretically have the rafters up by the week after. That's when things really start happening inside.

I took a look back at our photos. Two and a half months ago, the outer skin on the house next door was up, and my guess is that they are now a week away from being done. If they can stick to that schedule for us, we will be in by December 15.