The last few weeks have just been a flurry of activity on the house. All the walls are up, the roof panels are on, and the interior rough framing will be finished in the next couple days.

Once that’s all done (and inspected) we’re moving on to roofing and siding. We’ve got two different outfits lined up for those and after the work is done, we’ll be completely weather-tight! The can snow, storm and shed water as much as it wants and we can continue to work happily inside.

The inside work will initially consist of electrical, plumbing and planning. Plumbing will be fairly straightforward but we’ll have to figure out a few odd places and how to route pipes so that they’ll have the correct fall with minimal disruption to the structural elements. I’m sure we’ll have to build some soffits to hide things but that’s just part of the project.

Electrical work will be a challenge because we’ve got a lot of exposed ceiling and routing wires will be a challenge. I’ve got a brother who’s a commercial electrician up in Alaska and he’s going to come down and help us out for a week or so this spring. Before he comes though, we need to have everything planned and prepped as much as possible so that he can just work on what he’s good at – running wire and hooking things up correctly. I’m sure that he wouldn’t mind helping out with some construction-esque work to route the wires but there are reasons that he’s a commercial electrician, not a residential electrician.

Once all the walls are up and the space is clean and dry, we can also start planning the kitchen layout, figuring out how our flooring will be arranged and thinking about what sort of railing we’ll using on our numerous edges. The pace of work will slow down considerably but it will be more directly driven and handled just by us – a change we’re definitely looking forward to. It’s been nice (and necessary) to hire some outside help to get us to this point but I’m looking forward to getting back to our original intent of doing it ourselves.