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After the foundation is complete, the next step is putting up the exterior. It is hard to express how cool it is to watch the house go up. We'd "lived with" the plans for almost a year before the masonry started. Then, in a few weeks we went from having a generic hole in the ground to seeing our house go up. It started to look just like the pictures!
The general pattern for each floor is that the masons to do the brick and limestone up to the ceiling level (starting, of course with the celiing of the basement) then the carpenters come put in the trusses that go between the flloor and the plywood that is the sub-floor of the floor above and then the masons come back for the brickwork on the next floor.
Our house is a little more complicated because we have a lot of structural steel, so our schedule has been more like. The masons come and do some work, the steel guy comes and does some work the carpenters do some work, someone notices a problem and calls the architect who figures out a solutions which invariably involves getting the steel guys to do more work. Needless to say, things have progressed a bit more slowly than we would have liked. However, as I type this, the masons are working on the parapet walls on the fourth floor. In a few weeks, the carpenters will frame out the fourth floor structure and the roof will go on.
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