Amy has asked before when we were going to stop referring to our past and future address as “the job site” and start just calling it “the new house.” I’m starting to wonder if that day is soon approaching.

In the past we’ve renovated several homes, always working room by room while we were living there. This is a very messy and time-consuming way to work, as you have to contain your chaos and restore it to some semblance of working order to keep a functional home. We may have even taken this to new heights in our first house where we eventually gutted both the kitchen and the only bathroom over a months-long time lapse while still using those rooms every day.

One thing we were looking forward to and I can say I’ve quite enjoyed in building new construction is the ability to set down your tools at the end of the day and just walk out. When you come back everything is where you left it and you can dig back in. With our project going on and so much of the work being done ourselves, we’ve eventually ended up by necessity with as many as 6 or 8 distinct activities in partially completed states waiting on parts or dependencies on other project tasks. I think mid-May marked the moment of “peak construction site”:

From that moment forward a transformation has begun. To get everything to a state for drywall to go in, all the rough-ins and little framing tweaks simply must come to an end. Ready or not, its time to close the pipes and ducts and wires and sticks of wood all behind that magical smooth surface we’re all so familiar with. As those individual projects close out, the tools, materials, and even packaging and scraps from those projects can finally clear out. And clear out they must, lest they be coated in spray-foam insulation overspray or caked in drywall mud.

As all the active projects wrap up and vacate, the house must also reach a modicum of cleanliness so that the dust won’t be captured forever in the foam and the drywall. It can mess up those jobs if there is too much dirt and grit flying about. And that means in just two weekends the house went from what you see in the video above, to what you see below:

I’d say that’s quite a transformation. Maybe enough to say its crossed the line from being “just a job site” to being more of a “new house”. And if a little tidying up didn’t do it, then I suspect the appearance of permanent walls will do the trick. There is something about being able to see straight through from one room to the next and routinely walk straight through the stud walls that makes it decidedly less house-like. Now that those days are coming to an end, I suspect the old address may start to feel like something new again.