Railings, Flooring, & Tiles - Thursday, September 27, 2007

I took half the day off on Thursday so that Dad and I could go and pick up the tiles for the bathroom and the Flexitec (a type of Vinyl flooring) for the kitchen and the mudroom. Apparently I forgot to mention to Dad that the tiles were going to weigh 1000 lbs, so he was a little surprised at that...he had loaded a log splitter into the back of his truck, and hooked a trailer up to the truck for the tiles and the flooring. When we picked up the tiles, we had to put them in the middle of the trailer on the axels, just to be safe. When we went to get the Flexitec, it was 13 feet long, and we didn't think at first that it would fit on the trailer properly. We couldn't run it down the middle of the trailer, so it had to be off to the side, and we were thinking that it might not work that way. But it ended up working, with only a little bit of the flooring hanging off the edge of the trailer at the back. We got it out to the house with no problems.

We started to unload the tiles from the trailer, and now know that it will be really fun to move everything into our house when the time comes...those front stairs are a pain! We got all of the tiles in but one box before Ryan even got their after work. We made him carry the last box in. Moving the Flexitec was fun too. That stuff is heavy. It took four of us to move it up the stairs and into the livingroom. After that was done, we moved the tiles from the main floor up into the all of the rooms on the second floor. We didn't want to put all 1000 lbs of it (1010 to be exact...that's what the guy at Ceratec said) in one room, or in one spot. That, too, was fun.

After we finished moving everything around, we took some of the tiles out of the boxes to see what they looked like, and took some pictures of them. They look much better in the pictures than they do in person...I still can't figure out why.

Glen & Joey were working on the stair railings during the day, and got the hand rails all up. It'll be interesting to see the spindles once they get them installed. He was worried that we didn't buy enough spindles, but Ryan talked to him once we got to the house and he said that he figured now that there would be enough.

And here are the stairs from the garage to the house:

I keep looking at the house, and thinking "We're supposed to be in by October 15th...". Let's do the math on that one. As of Thursday, that's 19 days away. 6 of those days are weekend days, bringing us down to 13 days. One of those days is Thanksgiving day, bringing us down to 12 days. There are only 12 days left until we're supposed to move in...It'll never happen. Now, if we were to be in by October 31st, that would give us 35 days...10 of those are weekend days, leaving 25 days. One of those days is Thanksgiving day, bringing us to 24 days. That might be a more realistic time frame. We'll see. I just want to be in before it snows. October 31st might be pushing it.

We know now that we couldn't have built it ourselves - Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Clearly...we would never have been able to build this house ourselves. We both don't know how Derek is building their house...we both would have threw our hands up and walked away by now...

Wednesday we went to the house to put in a piece of 2x4 behind the drywall in the shower so that when we get a door for it, we will be able to attach the door to something other than the drywall and the ceramic tiles. Sounds pretty easy, right? Well...keep in mind that although there is electricity in the house, nothing is wired up, so there are no lights, with the exception of one that they have in the mudroom...which doesn't shine much light upstairs in the bathroom. We brought one of those million candlewatt power light things...which lasts for maybe 20 minutes or so and then dies, and when plugged in, it doesn't get brighter, it still dies. I would have thought that plugging it would charge it, but also allow us to use it at the same time...wrong. We also didn't have a ladder or anything else to stand on, so we were using pieces of 2x12's to stand on, which are oh so sturdy. Ryan was taking the piece of drywall off the wall, and I was trying to put up our lights that we bought to make sure that the framing wasn't going to be in the way. He got the piece off, and grabbed the tape measure and started measuring how long the 2x4 was going to have to be. He marked down where to cut, and proceeded to cut...with a hand saw...That's right...No electric saw around. Instead of cutting it either downstairs in the mudroom where the light was, or cutting where there wasn't a 9 foot drop to the livingroom, he cut the piece of 2x4 on the catwalk upstairs...which is open (and I mean OPEN) to below, in the dark.

He finished cutting the piece, brought it into the bathroom and tried it out...it was too short. I think about 2 inches too short. What's that construction saying? Measure twice, cut once? You'd think we'd already know that by now... So that piece was shot. He grabbed another piece but this time, before measuring, he decided to move another piece of 2x6 that he had put in there a few months ago, and just measure from the floor to the ceiling. After doing that, he realized that he didn't have to cut anything at all.

Next, he started to nail the board in place. Then he decided that instead of nailing it in, he would screw it in. He would put the board in place, and then measure everything to make sure it was the same distance away from the wall at all points. He asked me to come and hold the board in place while he used the drill. He would start drilling, and the board would move. He'd get mad at me because I was moving the board. I told him to just put the screw in part way, and then we could measure it up and make sure it was level (we did bring a level...however, it was the size of a sand timer/hour glass thing that would come in a board game). He did that for the bottom one, and then we measured again and tried to do the top one...same thing. He would start the drill, and put pressure on the board while I was holding it, and it moved, and he would get mad. It was pretty funny. We finally got the board in there, and replaced the drywall that we had removed.

In that time, throughout the interuptions, I was able to figure out that the lights that we had bought for above the bathroom door on the outside and on the inside, weren't going to work, unless the guys move the lightbox up a few inches. That was disappointing. Then I decided to try and see if the lights that we had ordered from the States to go in the livingroom and the hallway downstairs would work in those spots...and they fit perfectly! We decided that we would return the other lights to Home Depot and buy three more of the lights that are going in the livingroom to use where the others were going to go.

Glen the Finisher got the windows in the livingroom done. They look pretty good, although the pictures don't really do it any justice. The stairs were built going from the garage into the house (no pictures, too dark in the garage), and the holes were cut for them to start building the staircase railings. I think that was about it...Oh, no, wait. Murray the Framer was out and built the walls downstairs, so I would imagine that on Thursday they will be insulating and polying.

Here are the pictures from Wednesday...

If a picture is worth a thousand words... - Tuesday, September 25, 2007

...how many words are 28 pictures and 1 short video worth??

We didn't get out to the house until it was dark again on Tuesday night, which made it a little bit easier to see one of the things that happened during the day...we got our Emergency Number!! For those who live in the city or don't know what I'm talking about...it's almost like a house number, except that it's a stick at the end of the driveway that has a number on it that we use to identify our house, and to use should we ever have to call 911 or something of the sort. It was glowing when we turned into the driveway. I was happy to see it, seeing as how I had called probably six months ago and asked for it, to which I never received a response. But there it was...welcoming us...LOL...okay, that was a little much. We're now known as 49192!

Most of you probably already know that I get excited about the smallest things, so I was pretty stoked after seeing the emergency number. We went into the house, and the excitement just kept growing...

The doors were all hung and completely framed up. They look great! All of the entrance/archways are all completely done as well as the windows, with the exception of the livingroom windows, which they will hopefully complete on Wednesday while they are there. All of the shelves are up in the closests and the pantry is finished as well. We have a few concerns with some of the framing above the bathroom door on both the inside and the outside...it seems that the framing is a little too close to the light boxes, and I'm not sure if the lights that we have for those two areas will fit or not. The same with the light in the closet in our bedroom. We're going to take the lights out there Wednesday night after work and see if they will fit, and see if we either have to get them to move the light boxes and patch where they were, or if we have to just pick different lights for those three areas...I hope that they'll fit, and that nothing will have to be done...but we'll see.

Here's just a few pictures of the house and where it's at right now...

Here is the pantry in the kitchen:

And here's some random shots from around the house.

The back door, I guess you would call this...it's the door off the kitchen:

Are you still reading? Or have I bored you to death with pictures? Well, there's a few other major things that happened yesterday at the house...

This:

(The water pump was finally hooked up and we have running water!)

And this:

(The geothermal unit was delivered...nothing was really installed yet, but just having the unit there has to count for something, right??)

And this!:

(Murray the Framer is back! And he's ready to frame! Looks like they'll be framing the basement walls sometime soon...)

Monday, September 24, 2007

The framers were working hard again on Monday. They framed pretty much every window in the house, with the exception of the living room windows, and the tops of all of the windows. Dale the Stucco Guy was supposed to be out on Monday to start working on the scratch coat, but he didn't get out there. I'm not sure if it was the rain that kept him away or what. On Tuesday, the Geothermal is supposed to be going in...we'll see...

Here is our front door...I love it (as you can tell by the three picture's I've posted...).

Here are the diningroom windows:

Here are the livingroom windows...they haven't yet put the framing together, but when they do, it will look really good...I hope. They're going to put panels of oak plywood between the upper and lower windows. It was hard for me to picture at first, so I had to draw it out. Hopefully when we get to the house on Tuesday, they'll have put the panels up so I can post a picture of it.

Here are some of the door frames throughout the house: