Framing...Finally

As a happy birthday to me, the framers finally came and stuck around all day on Saturday.  They framed the walls around the stairs and the main load bearing wall down the length of the basement, and set the huge beam that will allow us to have a nice large open family room.  Then they left again (really, all that took most of the day).  They came back today and got all of the floor joists, and plywood down.  It feels really neat to be in the basement now that it is enclosed more.  Kyle is thinking that he'll start framing the rest of the basement tomorrow or tuesday.

They had gotten all the floor joists in place at this point, and were finishing up the plywood around the edges and starting to lay the subfloor.

In the basement, the dark room is under the front porch.  All the framing in there is in preparation for pouring the floating slab that will be the front porch.  I'm really excited about this room, even without the cement poured, stepping into this room was noticeably cooler than the rest of the basement.  This will be the food storage room, and I'm picturing shelves for potatoes and onions and garlic and squash...  Also all the rows of canned foods.  :)

This framed area is where the stairs will be, as well as a closet and a door to the toy storage/kyle's home command center room, which has another door leading to another storage room behind the cement wall that will be for all our non-food storage.  We're debating putting the freezer in that room instead of the garage too- any suggestions on which would be the better location?

This picture shows the big beam and one side of the hallway.  The three doorways framed are (starting from the one closest) the bathroom, a mechanical room, and CP's room (and E's as soon as he's big enough to move downstairs).

We think they're coming back tomorrow so hopefully we'll have another update with the main floor rooms and the stairs all framed- that would be so cool.  Either that or we'll get cement poured for the garage floor.  Stay tuned.