The Big Reveal

The Adirondacks from our deck

Kitchen

Well we did it!!  After seven months, we are firmly planted in our new home.  Sure, there's lots left to do, as you can see in some of these photos, but we're here, it's starting to feel like home and even with the blemishes, we love it.

Here are several shots.  It's a beautiful sunny day, the windmill next door is not moving, which is very unusual, and it feels like it will be warm enough for a bike ride later.

Kitchen

There may be a follow-up post when we see a few electric bills or when the landscaping is done and the outside is looking better, but more likely, this will be the end of the road for this blog.  The process has been very educational, sometimes incredibly frustrating, but never dull.  I'm not sure I would do it again, but now that we are living in a brand new, energy efficient home, there's little reason to think we will ever need to.

So long, thanks for reading...

Enjoy!!

Dining area

Living area looking southwest

Cool light fixture in stairs 

Cool light fixture's little brother in front hall

Main hall.  Pantry and closet on the left, 1/2 bath on the right

South guest bedroom

Master

Master bath

Awesome shower

Looking like a home.

When you think about building a house, you imagine what it will look like when it's done.  You don't think about 6 months of looking at concrete and framing lumber and sheathing and plumbing and wire and every other thing that goes into building a home.

In a little more than two weeks, the moving van will show up in front of our rental home and we'll finally settle into our new digs.  As I look around, this is what I imagined it would look like when we started this process.

The kitchen cabinets have all been installed.  This is a view from the dining area.  The cabinets you see in the lower left will support a breakfast bar.  The stove will be installed in the space dead-ahead and the fridge will fill the opening just to the left of the opening to the mudroom.

The hardware flooring has been installed throughout the downstairs and in the hall upstairs.  Most of it is covered with cardboard for protection, but this photo shows the opening for the range with the flooring exposed.

Crown moulding has been installed above the cabinets where they meet the soffit.  We don't like the empty space you see above the cabinets in many kitchens, so soffits eliminate this dust trap and allow us to bring the can lighting down closer to the work surface.  We'll also have this cool LED tape installed beneath the cabinets for task lighting.

Most of the doors and molding on the first floor have been installed.  Because the exterior walls are so thick, we have bench seating near every window in the house.  All of the windows on the

south side of the house are oversized and triple pane.  They're designed to produce heat in the winter time.  Sitting in the window well on a sunny day you're bathed in nice warm air.  Next week we should have the heat recovery ventilator fired up so it will distribute this free heat evenly throughout the house.

Upstairs tiling has begun in the laundry room and guest bathroom.  We chose white subway tile for the tub surround in the guest bath.  This was an upgrade from the fiberglass enclosure you see in some homes and I think well worth it.

We also added upgrades in the master bathroom with a separate tub and shower and dual sinks.  Here the shower stall has been been prepped for tile.  Based on our tile vendor's suggestion, we added a foot to the width of the shower stall to accommodate a built-in bench.  This is actually constructed from thick styrofoam so it can never rot.  Here it is covered with the tile backer board and sealed with some magic purple sealant.  We chose a white porcelain tile that looks like marble.

The attractive orange floor will hold a heating coil that is embedded beneath the tile to keep our piggies nice and warm.  There is nothing like stepping on an ice cold tile floor in the middle of the night and now we can count on that being a distant, unpleasant memory.

Next week the tilers should be finishing up and the plumber should be back to install the fixtures and fire up the heating/cooling and ventilating systems.  Electrician and painters should be behind him and lastly (I assume) the carpeting will be installed on the second floor.

Lots more to come - stay tuned.

How about a little color on this project?

All of a sudden, we've been transported into one of those Extreme Home Makeover shows, except in our version, we started with a hole in the ground instead of a **ithole of a house.  (see what I did there??!!).  We are expecting the movers to show up in 37 days, and there sure seems like a lot left to do.

There is a lot that has been done, you'd know this if you have been following along, and there is a lot that has happened since my last post.

We've seen several different photos from this same vantage point, and you can see that the siding is now finished.  If you zoom in a little, you'll see the vinyl "shakes" we chose for the big peak on the south side (to the right in this pic) and the smaller peaks above the porch roof and front door.  These are the same color as the rest of the siding, but I think it gives it a little texture and a lot extra "cool".

We'll add shutters to the front of the house, probably a darker grey-green, but we have not settled on a color.  The window above the front door looks a little lost in that big expanse, and I think the shutters will give it a little more balance.

Guest bedroom colors

The inside is also brightened up significantly.  The taping is done and the painters are nearly finished their phase one.  That basically means finish ceiling colors on all the rooms and the first coat of finish on all the walls.  They'll return later to second coat the walls and finish all the trim, doors and stairs.

We, and when I say we in relation to any color choices on this project, I really mean my better half.  Have I mentioned I am color ignorant?  I can tell one color from another, but I really could not tell you what goes well with what.  I have other strengths.  I plan to identify them some day...

Anyway, we do not have strong feelings about the colors of some of the rooms, so we have chosen a neutral cream color that we'll likely change after we've lived with it for a while.  Here is a shot of the cavernous room above the garage.    As you can see, it's pretty basic right now.

Master bedroom color

We do have some ideas about the master bedroom and bath.  The bedroom color is one that we used in our last place, that we really liked.  Here's a shot of the master bedroom.  It's a little hard to see, but it's sort of a light grey, very soothing.

The painters should be finished in one or two more days and then the flooring installers should arrive.  When I stopped by today, the hardwood for the downstairs had been delivered.

Now we get to revisit some of the choices we made months ago.  Initially we thought we would choose a site-finished maple flooring to eliminate the micro-bevel that is standard with pre-finished flooring.  When we met with Kyle, our flooring vendor, he talked us into the pre-finished instead.  With the multiple layers of finish applied at the factory, pre-finished is much more durable than site finished flooring.  It's also twice as fast to install.  Now that time is so precious, I'm glad we made that call.

Hardwood is here

Here is a sample of the floor that will cover all of the downstairs, with the exception of the mudroom, which will be tiled.  More on that next time.

So the next few weeks should be fast and furious.  We'll see the hardwood and tile flooring, tile shower and tub surrounds, kitchen cabinets and countertops, finish wiring and plumbing, trim, finish stair components and closet fixtures all come together magically.

At least that's how it happens on TV!!

Until next time.

Done and done, but not without controversy

Welcome to the New Year dear readers.  We are excited about having a new home in early 2015.  Progress this last week or so seems to support us moving in sooner versus later.

The insulators finished their job and moved on.  I mentioned in an earlier post that they had installed fiberglass insulation in the ceiling above the garage.  The plan called for dense packed cellulose instead, so they returned to carefully remove this so it could be reused.  They will return later to fill this cavity once the sheet rocking has been completed.

Kitchen view.  Taping has begun.

Which it has been.  We toured around the house today and all of the walls, with the exception of one more sheet for the basement stairs, are now clearly defined.  The space looks really great, only slightly different than what I expected.  One of the things that is clearly evident now is the height of the ceiling on the first floor.  These are set at nine feet and it makes the entire space, including the closets, look much airier.  We'll need to devise a clever way to use this extra space in the many closets and pantries on the first floor.  I'd hate to waste such a valuable asset.

The front door has also arrived again and has been installed.  Nate and Jamie brought one small ceramic heater that has been keeping the entire house very bearable.  It was well into the single digits last night.  The house seems extremely tight, even though there are two holes in each door where the doorknobs and deadbolts will be installed and we have yet to have insulation in the guest bedroom floor.

Sheetrock debris waiting to be recycled.

When the last of the sheetrock was hung and the place was cleared and swept, there was an enormous pile of sheetrock debris covering most of the front porch.  I wish I had a picture of it, as it looked like half of the sheetrock that was originally delivered.  At first I thought this was left on the porch because the dumpster was full.  I was really pleased to find a guy there today carefully creating neat pallet size stacks of used sheetrock.  He told me this will be returned to the factory and ground up to make new drywall.  I read somewhere that the majority of construction debris in our landfills today is sheetrock. It's cheaper to use a new sheet than it is to pay a taper to cover the seams of small pieces patched together, so this creates an enormous amount of waste.  Having a recovery loop in place for this makes me feel good about the way this house is being built.

The garage looks cavernous with sheetrock installed.

And speaking of, I mentioned last time that cellulose insulation is the preferred method of filling thick walls, instead of the foam insulation.  Nate mentioned that it is also 50,000 times better for the environment.  If you look carefully at the cellulose insulation, you can see the individual letters that once made up newsprint.  This too is a recovery loop for the newspaper industry.  In addition, the chemicals in the foam insulation create environmentally harmful byproducts.  So clearly we are champions of the environment and I've barely gotten off my ample butt!!

We did have some excitement at the job site this past week.  Sometime Christmas day or night, the site was broken into and the siding and sheet rocking crews had most of their tools stolen.  They even took the half empty box of sheet rock screws.  The siding installers had their stuff locked in boxes on their trailer, but the trailer was taken apart and ransacked.  They also stole the pump jacks that are used to raise their work staging up vertical poles that are temporarily attached to the house.

The delay was only a few days, but in the case of the dry wallers, most of these were their personal tools, only a third of which was covered by insurance.  At the time of writing, Nate and the subs had a pretty good idea who was responsible, but as yet, there is no closure on this unfortunate event.

Master bath.  Lots of green in this project.

The siders are scheduled to return on Monday, and a bunch of five gallon buckets of sheet rock mud are on site, awaiting the tapers.  Steph and I have made our final paint decisions and have relayed these to the painters and we're starting to think about appliances.  All very exciting!!

Till next time...