The Interior of the New House

Here's some pictures of the interior of the new house. The house is pretty basic-3 bedrooms, 2 baths, living room, kitchen/breakfast nook and utility room. As you can see, the interior is still going to need a lot of work. As soon as we have the heat and electricity hooked up, the drywall guy will come and finish the walls and fix some of the cracks. When he's done, the flooring guy will come in and finish the floors. The bathrooms and kitchen have the same vinyl flooring, while the rest of the house will have wood laminate flooring. The siding guy will also probably come down with one of the other guys and finish the outside siding. All of these different people, including the guys who came to set up the house are employed by the dealer from whom we bought the house. If the other guys are half as good as the ones who were already here, I'll be extremely happy. Our set-up crew was great-not only did the set-up the house, but helped us to fix our neighbor's fence that we took down to bring the house in.

Matt wanted me to put up this picture of me and Avi sleeping in together this morning

Looking through the house to Ross Peak

The living room

A closeup of the living room floor

The master bedroom and bathroom

The master bedroom-living room in background

Front of the living room

Back of living room

Bedroom #1

The other bathroom

Bedroom #2

Looking across the living room to the kitchen and master bedroom

A view of the front porch

The Kitchen

Kitchen Sink

Looking back at the living room

Sunlight on the countertop

Breakfast Nook-future sliding glass door on left

The house is set!

Too many pictures to upload them all to this page, so take a look here at all of today's excitement.

The house is here!

We're getting really close

The house will be delivered tomorrow afternoon and we'll set it first thing Wednesday morning. Although we are essentially ready to set the house, we still have a ton of work to do before we can officially move in. Anyways, here's a couple of pictures from Saturday-the i-beams over the foundation and Avi helping.

The house rolls offline. . .

Tomorrow! We're looking at a delivery date in the next week or two. Are we ready? No. Will we be by then? Probably ready enough that the house could be set on the foundation, but otherwise, no.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We (once again, mostly Matt) poured the 2nd half of the walls late yesterday. Matt braved the freezing temperatures (around 0 when he finally finished) to get the walls done and covered. I helped a little bit, but I wimped out and went inside. Although we are not close to being done, we only have to set our I-beams across the width of the foundation before the house gets here. Everything else can be done after the house is here, including pouring the basement floor. I still haven't heard when the house will be here, so hopefully we will have a lot more done before then.

Construction

We've been making progress getting ready for the new house. Today, we (well, Matt and his friend Glade) poured the 1st four feet of the basement walls. The house is still expected to be here at the beginning of December-hopefully we'll be ready by then!

Day 8: Another Bus Tour Around Guiyang

Today we went on another bus tour around to sights around Guiyang. This trip, however, was much shorter and did not involve a highly annoying tour guide or broken air conditioners. We were picked up at our hotel early in the morning and spent the first hour of our "tour" picking up other sightseers at their hotels. We then headed out to our first stop: another boat tour through a cave. Even though we had been through several caves at this point, I still wasn't tired of them. We first took a boat through a short cave with lots of colored lights everywhere. When we came out of the cave, we continued our boat tour along the river. We disembarked at the entrance to another portion of the cave. We walked through this section of cave and discovered that the Chinese tourists aren't taught cave etiquette, such as don't touch the formations. The Chinese made a point of touching every stalactite and stalagmite within reach. Pieces of the formations had also been broken off. We Americans were pretty surprised by the shoddy treatment of features that took millions of years to form, but the Chinese, tour guide included, didn't seem to care.

Rice Paddies

Walking to the Cave

Inside the Cave

The next stop on our itinerary was a Bouyei minority village. The Chinese tourists weren't very interested in visiting a poor, rural village, but the Americans were more curious. The village was set into a hillside above a river, with buildings almost on top of each other. Buildings were connected by alleyways and narrow stairs. Chickens wandered freely throughout the village. A pig housed in a small shack next to one of the alleys scared a couple of us when it snorted at us when we walked by. Dr. Liu is friends with one of the village women, who served us tea and sang us a traditional song of welcoming and friendship. After a quick stroll around the village, it was back on the bus.

Scenes from the Bouyei Village

The third stop was a Ming-era village that had been preserved along the lines of historic Williamsburg. Dr. Liu had a terrible headache, so he elected to stay on the bus while the rest of us toured the village. Unfortunately for us, we were left without a translator, and were unable to understand or appreciate everything we were seeing. We did pick up that a famous scholar once lived in the village, which is one reason why the village is a tourist destination. We spent our time wandering amongst the different sights, along narrow streets lined with souvenir vendors and small restaurants, as well as more important and historic buildings.

Ming Village Street

Outside a temple in the Ming Village

After the Ming village, we headed back to Guiyang proper and to a large and beautiful park near the outskirts of the city. Dr. Liu told us about coming to this park when he was young and swimming in the creek.

Cooling Off

We were about a day to early for to see the water lilies in bloom