Finish To Do List status: 46 done out of 211.
| Painters have been out at the house, patching, caulking, sanding are are going to start masking soon. |
| Mark has finished all the additional trim work; installing beadboard in the powder room and guest bath. We're still discussing if we'll put any in the pantry. |
| Mark and Cody installed the chimney pipe so we now have a working fireplace. Yeah! third time is a charm! |
| The floor vent covers came and they are perfect. Check them out here. We got them in cast iron black. |
| Jean expanded her 'what we still need' spreadsheet to include a To Do list
of all the finish stuff. Finish To Do List status: 46 done out of 211. |
| Spent Saturday out at the house, Cody came over and finished installing the tankless hot water heaters. We have hot water!!!! Yeah!!!! |
| Mark and I spent the rest of the day cleaning the tile in the spa to prepare the grout for sealing. Scrubbing each tile and grout line on the entire floor on my hands and knees made the house feel a little more like my home, cuz I sure ain't doing that for anyone else. |
| Another thing that got done this week was the excavator came and placed some more rock stairs on the kid bedroom side of the house along with some gravel. Also dug some drainage outside the Maple leaf room. It's a mud pit again after only a bit of rain (by Seattle standards). |
| We've have a fair amount of progress this week: |
| The plumbers installed the ceiling tub filler for my tub in the spa. It's pretty darn cool. See the pics! They also installed the pantry sink so we finally have a working sink. |
| The electricians have been out this week to make more lights work. |
| They poured the concrete for the garage apron and the front walk & stairs. Very happy with it! |
| The painters finally started work. They've been there for two days and have only been filling holes so far. |
| We extended the loan for another 30 days until October 15. <sigh> It's only money. |
| Mark said it the other day, that the house had become work. There is so much left to do, and the finish work takes so long. Being so close it gets so hard to keep going. |
| I went to the house today and it still seems very surreal. That we'll get to live there some day, hopefully some day soon. We're getting so close to the goal, but there is still so much work left to be done. The progress seems very slow but I'm hopeful that we'll be able to meet the new deadline, but I've been hopeful with each previous date. Trying to stay optimistic and positive, but we're both pretty tired. |
| We're cleaning and sealing all the tile in the house this weekend. Oh boy. |
| Dad was going to put the carpet in before they left on their year-long RV trip, but since the painters hadn't finished, we told them not to wait. Yet another reason why the painters not doing their work screwed things up. You can follow along on their blog if you like. Bye M&D, we'll miss you! Drive safe! |
| Long time no update, due to being in Hawaii in the corporate house for 10 days. So relaxed, but it's not going to last long with all that's coming in the next few months (crazy amount of work at job, house building, moving, condo selling) |
| So we flew out the early afternoon of Tuesday the 5th. Mark had been working at the house since 8am on Monday. He finished all the trim except the baseboards and got the house ready for the painter to come in and work while we are gone. By the time we got into Hawaii and got him to bed, he'd been up for almost 48 hours straight. I'd stayed until 3am Tuesday morning, but I'd at least gotten some sleep. |
| So, the whole point of Mark's marathon work-fest was so the painter can have the whole house to himself with no other contractors involved. (does my use of 'So' set the appropriate foreshadowing?) In Hawaii Mark arranged for the finish carpenter to finish off the baseboards that Mark hadn't been able to finish before the painter was to start. This was important to get this going while we were gone to keep things moving. So, we fly the red-eye back from Hawaii via LAX and get in Saturday morning. When we get home we head out to the house. The baseboards are done, but no sign of the painter. Mark is royally pissed. The whole reason he worked like crazy was so that it could be done while we were gone. |
| The house is fine, no signs of mischief. |
| We ran around today and did errands.: -Shipped snorkels & fins to Hawaii house. -Borrowed Cody's pick-up truck. -Picked up the carpet. -Tried to pick up our garage doors, but they'd thrown them away. Apparently they were in some other part of the warehouse and someone thought they were a return and tossed them. At least that was the story. Good thing we didn't have anyone lined up to install the doors. -Ordered our butcher block countertop & bar top at Direct Buy. -Tried to pick up our bar stools, but they weren't in boxes anymore (they'd sent them to the store for pick-up, then back to the warehouse) and we didn't have any 'packing' type material to put them in the truck safely, and they wanted to close early for the holiday weekend, so I said, OK, forget it, we'll pick them up after we're back. -While at Direct Buy, we decided to cancel our order for Mark's chair since we're waiting for the leather sample to come in. -Try and get Mark's phone fixed, but they don't have the right parts. argh. -Visit the metal grating manufacturer that we're going to use for our speaker covers and air returns. They have really cool stuff! -We pick up the carpet pad. -We have lunch/dinner. -We go shopping for clothes for Hawaii at Old Navy. -Direct Buy calls, and our leather sample is in. Somehow it arrived in the last three hours. whatever. -We go back to Direct Buy, figure out which leather we want, and order the chair, again. -Went to the house and dropped off the carpet and pad. -Returned Cody's pick-up truck. |
| Mark has been working like a fiend on the moldings. We decided this week to have the moldings professionally painted while we're gone. That way the painters will have full run of the house with no other contractors to create dust/mess to get in their way. |
| We're not going to have the house done before the 9/15 due date, so we'll do another extension. Mark will have four weeks from the time we get back to get it all wrapped up. We're hopeful, cuz it's really starting to drag on. Construction started 7/25/05, so we're just over 11 months right now. Part of the issue is that Mark is doing alot of the finish work, and all that type of work is condensed into the last part of the schedule. He does really, really good work, but he doesn't do it fast. I'll be helping over the weekend before we go. |