First Day Cottage Walpole

The foundation walls are poured and up!  We are moving along nicely.  Next steps are laying the radiant heat before they pour the slab and putting on decking to stabilize the foundation before they backfill.  Also we are waiting for town approval to get the new utility pole set.  After the approval it will take minimum of a month to get the pole installed and who knows how long to get the utility company out there to run wires.  This step has been the most cumbersome.  Many many calls by my husband to various utility companies. Photos courtesy of Chris Porter

The forms for the foundation are set and concrete is getting poured this week.  It is looking amazingly tall to me right now considering this is all going to be below grade so there is a tremendous amount of backfilling to be done.  I hope we are not sitting on top of a mound at the end of it like a cupcake!  We will be back in NH in a few weeks and it will be good to see all of this in person.  These photos were taken by friends who are keeping an eye on the project.  Thank goodness for friends! Hello Jana!

Starting to see some real progress on the foundation work.  The footings have been poured and the walls should be poured next week.  They will stick way up high and then be back filled and the soil will be graded away from the house.  Because there is so much grade the architect changed the size of the side basement windows so we wouldn't have so much cement exposure which is good.  They put foam on the outside of the cement and there is supposed to be some sort of stucco applied to that they assure me so you don't see foam along your foundation! It's exciting to see the footprint clearly now.  Thomas says it's looks like three train cars hitched together. We are also trying to untangle the mystery of how to get electricity run to our new place.  Many people have driven out and checked out the pole situation on Old Drewsville Road including the electrician, electrical engineers from the Liberty Utility Co. and a site person from Consolidated Communication (aka

I finished a paper house model of our project.  Our architect, David Howard, gave us one but there has been some changes and I wanted to put the windows on the interior so I could visualize the rooms and the light.  It helps!  Also after doing this model we realized that the windows in the basement would not work on the courtyard side of the house because I wanted it all level.  Just in the nick of time because the earth movers are figuring out all the elevations right now and we can still make changes.  When I get back to NH I will play around with landscape ideas.  I doubt we will have any money left for landscaping but I dare to dream of cobblestone courtyards! Front of house showing the garage and courtyard where the main entrance will be. South elevation showing walkouts underneath (my studio) and back porch.  Ignore Golden Retriever lurking in background! West elevation showing the long kitchen/dining wall, small back porch and back of garage where my laundry yard will