Basement enclosed

With much excitement we headed down last night to have a look at the basement with the hollowcore floors on top - seems like a small step compared to the last few weeks of effort but it seems to represent a notable waypoint in the construction.  The walls have been clearly visible for sometime, but as we pull up to it and walk inside the volume each room contains becomes tangible, finally.  The 3m high garage area suddenly has a massive ceiling, and feels much higher than anticipated, and we're already altering the uses of the rooms in the basement based on their look and feel.  But all in all we're both very happy and can't wait to start getting into the house.

Here is our engineer and Lorraine debating the age old topic of room sizes.  Yesterday, our engineer had prepared the layout of the next floor in red spray in order to direct where the foundations for the next floor need to sit.  It was a great opportunity to see how the whole house will sit.  We took the chance to move these virtual walls a bit, extending the rear wall and side wall a300mm out to create a slightly bigger kitchen.  Today we should get these dug and poured, and the ICF sits right into the foundation so we can then start the ground floor.

The next major part to decide upon is windows and stone.  Both of us like the real wood/alu-clad window, but the price of these may be out of our reach.  It's something like 30% more for wood than PVC, and then 20% over wood for alu-clad.  We have about 4 weeks until we can even start to measure the openings, so until then we'll have to visit some showrooms, cruise around peoples window and generally make a decision.  Never easy.