November 13
November 14
This is the dining room area at the end of the kitchen.
Most of the interior walls are framed and ready for the electrician to start work. This photo shows the stairway. The opening at the top of the wall will be a built-in bookcase at the top of the stairs. On the other side of the bookcase is the bonus room space above the garage, a nice 41' long x 12' wide space (aka Mary Lou's walk-in closet!) Without a basement, this will indeed be a useful space.
More Snow...November 21
Just a note about the power poles you see in the foreground going across our driveway - these are not our power poles, as the power to our house is all underground. The power poles are actually a dedicated line that serves the aquaduct for the city of Ely's water supply, which comes from Burnside Lake a few miles away and runs directly under our driveway on its way to Ely two miles away. We had to obtain a special permit in order to build a driveway over the aquaduct, which also included supplementing the soil and building everything up approximately 8 feet from the original level, in order to protect the aquaduct as heavy vehicles use the driveway.
The exterior doors have arrived and will be installed in the next few days. We will have to wait a couple more weeks for our front door to be shipped. In the meantime, Mary Lou is busy figuring out lighting with the electricians, has finalized the cabinet plans for the kitchen with the building center in Eveleth, plumbing fixtures etc. have been selected, as well as the appliances and most of the flooring. We also visited a stoneworks facility near St. Cloud, MN called Stone Holding and looked at granite slabs for the counter tops. The stone place was extremely interesting - like going to the library but instead of books there were rows and rows of 1,000 pound slabs of granite. There were 3,000 slabs in the particular warehouse we visited. We had an appointment and had previously looked at samples at the tile & counter top place in Duluth, so we knew what we wanted. An employee at the warehouse takes you to the exact spot where the granite you are interested in is located (in the granite library), then they use a crane type machine to lift each piece up and set it down at the end of the row so you can get a better look at the piece and put your tile, cabinet etc. samples next to it (which we brought along). Quite the process, we wish we had taken photos of that place! We selected two slabs of "verde butterfly" - a dark greenish/blackish stone. Stone Holding ships the actual slabs we selected up to the fabricator in Duluth to make our counter tops when the time comes. Enough about the granite...we'll add photos of the finished counters, etc. as the house progresses.
Here's Herman making his way up the driveway to the house...
More later from WINTERY Ely!
Thanks again for reading our blog!
~Mary Lou & Herman
