The builder wanted to meet with us because of the fireplace issue in the master bedroom. Call me silly, but I've been dithering about this now for the past few weeks - should we or shouldn't we, and all the while Richard has patiently waited for me to come to the same conclusion he came to much earlier on. After finally making up my mind to do it, we discovered that we had *just* managed to squeak this one in.

The builder has this expression that we're beginning to recognize. It's sort of a half-smile, full of tolerant amusement, as he tells us that we've passed our window of opportunity, or in other words, what was once a $50 change will now cost hundreds of dollars, and do we really want it *that* badly?

I made the decision this week to take half-days on Fridays to deal with house things like this. He needed us to be there, on site, to show us some things, and we really can't do that at night. So I drove straight from work to the house this afternoon, where Richard met us, and we put the fireplace issue to rest.

He's got little red lines drawn all over the floor now. There's where the fireplace will go - in the corner in the master bedroom and it's perfect - exactly what we wanted. There's the lines where our sinks and bathtub will be in the master bathroom, and we needed to make a decision on the length of the sink today because he had to worry about all the plumbing.

In the kitchen, red boxes marked where the refrigerator would stand, where the oven will be, where the sink sits. And then blue lines drawn onto the floor indicated cupboards. I'm not a slouch when it comes to imagination, but I'll admit that it's not the easiest thing in the world to look at a blue line on the floor and extrapolate that into cupboards on the walls, five feet up. The whole cupboard and cabinet issue is looming closer now and can I just admit here that that particular decision is *not* one I'm looking forward to? I haven't been looking forward to it ever since he asked me, in the very beginning, back when the house was just plans on paper, what sort of wood I preferred for the kitchen. Um....huh?

He'd dropped off a sheet full of composite roof samples. For a bit of fun and giggles, take a two-inch by four-inch chunk of composite and then attempt to guess how it will look on an entire roof. For our house in particular, this is more important because, as you can see here, the roof is rather prominent. We pondered the terra cotta red, and Richard was rather taken with one that had an odd shade of bluish green, but in the end, we decided to go with nicely generic slate gray. The biggest reason for this inability to decide on roof color is simply that we haven't managed to make up our minds what color the house will be, period. Luckily, we've got a month or so more before that becomes an issue.

As we wandered the house staring at little red lines, the roofers arrived. Apparently no one told them quite how steep the roof was. One of them asked our builder if he could have built it any uglier. Heh. I'll admit I do have sympathy. I wouldn't want to be climbing around on that roof either!

They've installed most of the windows now, there are piles of siding outside, and the sheet rock was to be delivered later in the day. He started to detail out the schedule for the next few weeks - putting up all the siding, tiling the roof, installing the fireplaces, setting up the air conditioning and heating vents. Things are continuing just as quickly as before, I suppose, but at this stage we have to be involved a lot more often than before. More decisions I'm not even sure how to make. Gulp.