Drees Homes Update: May & June

In case you haven’t read about our big, exciting house news or our adventures in design choices for the house, you’ll probably want to start there. If you’re all caught up, let’s chat about where we are in the house building process with Drees Homes!

Last Week of May — Pre-Construction

They officially broke ground on our lot on June 1, which meant I dragged Spencer out to the property the weekend beforehand to take pictures because we obviously needed evidence that it was once a lush, green field. (But honestly, wouldn’t you think we were out in the country somewhere based on these photos?)

At this point, the lot had been staked out for excavation and foundation purposes. The stakes that you can barely see running to the left of Spencer are the edge of our lot, and the ones on his right are where the edge of the foundation would land.

First Week of June — Excavation

A week later, we had a big hole in the ground, and I promise you that I have never been so excited about a bunch of dirt in my entire life!

In the picture above, you can see that they’ve excavated the area where our house will sit and poured the concrete footers. Plus there’s gravel underneath where the basement slab will go for drainage purposes. It all looks pretty tiny from up here…

…but then you get down on the ground and realize that they actually had to dig out a pretty deep hole.

Second Week of June — Foundation

We get weekly email updates from Shelly, the Drees Homes Market Manager for our area, so we at least have some idea of what to expect when we visit the site each week.

As you can see, we had our foundation walls installed!

And for those of you who are curious, that lovely black tar-like stuff is water sealer that is sprayed on any part of the foundation that might have the potential to leak in the future.

Third Week of June

A whole lot of nothing happened this week. It was supposed to be filled with backfilling and pouring the foundation, but Cincinnati decided it just hadn’t been leonine enough in March, so it poured buckets on us all week. Oh well…

Fourth Week of June — Foundation/Backfilling

When Spencer’s parents were in town to take on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail with us, we had a chance to take them out to see the house!

We’re on a corner lot, which allowed us to have our garage entrance on the side of the house instead of the front. Once they completed backfilling the dirt around the foundation walls, they were able to put down gravel where our driveway will be.

From this angle, you can also see that they poured the foundation and installed the beams for the floor on the main level. They should be hidden within the walls of the basement.

That’s the foundation for my bay window jutting out from the back there, and it also gives you an idea of where our deck will be built.

And finally, they poured the concrete for our garage. This photo also gives you a view of the other side of the street, which I don’t think I’ve included up to this point. It’s fun because that house to the left is only about a week and a half to two weeks ahead of ours, so we get a sense of where we’ll be in the near future when we go to see where we currently are in the process. I’m pretty excited to begin the framing!

If anyone is planning to dive into building a new home, please leave any questions that you might have in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them. I’d also love to hear from others who have built homes! How was your experience? Did you use Drees Homes like we are?

P.S. If you’re looking for advice about staying within your home design budget, check out this post.