Removing broken 3M Command Strips

We have tons and tons of 3M Command Strips throughout the house holding up picture frames... which means we are now taking down tons and tons of command strips to prepare for the move.

Most of them have come off perfectly... but on two so far the pull tabs tore right off, and those hooks were pretty well welded to the wall with no obvious way to get them off without risking damage to the paint. 

The solution (thanks internet) is to take some dental floss, get it behind the hook, and saw your way all the way down. At the end it will almost seem like nothing happened, but you give the hook a little tug and viola... its off the wall.  

You might need to pry a few small pieces off either the wall or the back of the hook, but those usually come off very easily and then you're done and on to the next. 

Wish I had taken a few pictures, but it really is that simple. 

Wood

Almost forgot the biggest news... it looks like framing should start next week!

Walls, garage floor and more

A lot has happened since the last post.

After the walls got poured, the plumbing went in:

  

Our basement window is now fully exposed, and because of the slope of our yard it will be fully exposed with no surround pan.  We should get some great light into the basement, too bad we aren't finishing it yet!

Not long after, our basement floor got poured:

And the garage floor is in:

Ominous

I love the eeriness of this photo, so it gets its own post. 

Foundation walls

This sure have been progressing quickly.  As I mentioned before, our break ground date was supposed to be May 1.  Here we are still 3 days away from that date, and our foundation walls have already been poured!

Here's a few photos from yesterday, pre-pour.




And here's a few after...

Project Manager meeting

We just had our first PM meeting.  We will also have a PM in training involved with our project as well. Sounds good to us... the more eyes on everything the better.

The meeting was fairly straightforward and took about 45min.  First we reviewed the site plan and then all of the architectural plans, including all of our option selections to confirm they had everything correct.   There were a few late minute changes we had made that had not yet made it to him, but our sales rep was already on top of it before we could say anything.

Then we took a ride over to our site and did a walk around of the property.  My one concern was over the backyard, but he addressed that before we even had a chance to ask.  Although we will definitely have a slope, he is planning to try and use whatever dirt is not required for the backfill to try and level out the yard as much as possible.  It looks like we should have at least 30ft level before it starts to slope at all, and even then its more of a gentle slope downwards than a big drop off.

We have a pretty huge, very level lot at our current house, but it's completely wasted on us.  So this should work fine.

A few photos below from Friday and today.

A hole is born

Drove by the lot on my way to work yesterday to see what progress had been made on our neighbors... and lo and behold there was an excavator sitting right smack in the middle of the lot.

Drove by again on the way home from work... and our dirt mount is now the beginnings of a dirt hole.

We haven't actually had our pre-construction meeting yet, it's not scheduled until next week.  The original plan didn't call for them to break ground for another two weeks, and now they think they may have our foundation footer in by the time we first meet the PM!