Inside the front porch archway.

The front door arch.

The finished front of the house!

The finished fireplace with hearth. Now all we need is a mantel.

What a mess! This is where the 4 undeground geothermal loops and the supply/return lines from the house get connected together. The water is from an undeground spring (this corner of the property stays wet year-round) and was added to by several days of rain. When Josh came back to make the final connections, he brought a gas-powered utility pump, but of course it wouldn't start! At least they wore their waders and brought plastic to make a tent to work under. The connections between the supply/return lines and the field loops are made using 2 distribution headers and welding/fusing the connections with an electrically heated iron to make things permanent. Then everything you see here gets buried 3-4 feet deep underground.

I didn't know that what we were really building was a church!

The finished fireplace bricking, except for the hearth, which will get done tomorrow.

Bricking of the fireplace, in-process.

Finally, the welded end of the loop disappears underground!

As Chad retrieves the 200 feet of drill rod, Chris feeds the geothermal loop piping in behind it.

The horizontal boring rig drills over 200 feet underground to the far corner of our property, coming out in the hillside overlooking a drainage swale. Here Chris has replaced the drilling head with the puller head and is attaching two plastic lines that have been welded together at the far end to form a loop.

Chad at the controls of the drilling rig. Boring our geothermal loop was supposed to have taken place many weeks ago, but the bad storm that came through gave Chad a boatload of utility work that took priority over us. The delay wasn't a problem for us, though, as we're still doing mechanical rough-ins. (Actually, today Chad pulled off our job because a shopping mall lost power and he was called in to do some emergency utility boring.)

The directional drilling rig in place at the bottom corner of our property. Our geothermal ground loop will be installed by boring 4 loops horizontally across our property (roughly from corner to corner) around 10' below the surface.

All that's left to brick is the front door entry and arches, well, and the window well and fireplace.

Garage bricking in progress.

OK, Sue, here's your picture of the backside of the garage.

The backside of the house.

More soffit work on the bedroom side of the house. Isn't that brickwork nice! Sure beats the blue and silver patchwork. The window well will be bricked as well.

Keith and his crew arrived today and started wrapping the soffits. They set up a 10' metal brake in the garage to form the aluminum trim pieces that wrap the gable ends, gutter boards, frieze boards, and bird boxes. Ventilated soffit goes on the underside of the eaves. We opted for a no-maintenance exterior here so we don't have to repaint down the road, especially since Keith says it it will take a 40' extension ladder to reach the top of the Great Room gable in back! When I heard that, I thought "Man, am I glad I won't be up there painting that in the future!"

The yet-to-be finished screened-in porch. The backside of the house is a little washed out due to the afternoon sun, and how do you like that brick wall on the right? Well, what do you expect when I'm hanging out the garage back door hand-holding the camera to get the shot!