Finishing Touches

With our final bank appraisal and inspection now scheduled to happen on May 23rd, we are scrambling to finish up the work that the bank expects to see done. This includes all the touch-up paint, trim pieces, the kitchen backsplash, and putting in a new back door. We've finished the backsplash and putting in the door, but we still have lots of other little things to do.

Still, we like to think that we're in the home stretch, because once the house passes inspection we'll be able to work on it at our own pace. We do have some immediate things that we'll work on through the summer, including the dining room and attic, but we if we want to take a day off from house projects, we'll finally be able to do so.

Attached are some pictures of the finished kitchen tile, the lighting in the pantry space, and the finished exterior paint (we'd been waiting a long while to stucco the basement pony wall and get this painted). And you can see that our new lawn is starting to come in, although it's already been infiltrated by weeds.

Okay, you'll hear from me again after we've had the final inspection. Fingers crossed! (For the curious: if we don't pass this inspection, we basically get hit with a bunch of fees and we have to pay for another $600 appraisal, but we don't lose the house.)

Portico

A quick update with some more photos! Eric completed our front porch a few weeks ago (note that the gutters drain inside the columns!), and since then we have been racing the clock because the porch was Eric's last big ticket item and now he has moved on to other, non-Harvey-related jobs...meaning that the completion of the house is now in our hands. We miss Eric and his crew, so we try not to dwell on it. He'll be back to finish some work on our pantry and some other little things at a later date.

Randy has been working on the "sunroom." This is the small room that sits just off of the living room and that was originally designed as an exterior sleeping porch. We have carpeted it with a remnant we were giving by one of my friends, and we bought a couple of consignment shop chairs and now it serves as a TV/game room.

We also had 4 yards of topsoil delivered just this weekend. The whole family spent Saturday smashing up and moving clay in order to get the grading right, and then today Randy hired a day laborer for 4 hours to help him disperse all the topsoil. It's looking pretty good, but we'll have to get some grass seed down soon.

In other news...

You're probably wondering what our contractor, Eric, has been up to in the last few months. Eric and his wonder team (comprised of his daughter Lisa, his friend Gavin, and his dog Parker) have moved back outside. A couple of weeks ago we came home to find new steps up to our side East entrance (currently our main entrance) and I cannot tell you how thrilled we were to say goodbye to our super-treacherous stairs.


They also designed and put on some new columns on the sunroom (on the West end of the house), and began work on our front porch. Right now we remain a neighborhood curiosity because the entire front porch is covered in tarps...as if we are preparing for a big unveiling. In reality, the porch is tarped off because we've been having record cold weather, and after painting the porch floor with a sealant and anti-slip paint we needed to set up space heaters on and below the porch in order to keep the temperature high enough for the sealant to cure properly.









Other things that are in the works:

• I have ordered the wallpaper for our dining room. As mentioned in an earlier post, one of my NZ cousins recently started a wallpaper business, PaperHands, and I love every pattern. We ended up going with a more traditional print...vice in silver/green, for the dining room, but I hope to order a bolder choice for the Ladies' room eventually. This reminds me that I need to tell everyone about the Ladies' room...coming in next post.
• Eric is constructing a new front door. We love our existing one, but the lock and frame are so badly damaged (possibly from break-in attempts), that we had to get a new one. I was very disheartened to have to replace the door until Eric came up with a brilliant solution: buy a new door, cut out the glass panes from the old door and drop them into the new door. Yay!
• Eric and his team also hung drywall throughout the attic. We weren't planning on doing this anytime soon because it's not within the scope of work for our construction loan, but Eric wanted to keep some folks busy during a slow period and he very generously paid their labor as a gift to us. If I haven't said it often enough, WE LOVE ERIC!
  
• I have decided to try my hand at design consulting by representing WillowHouse. I'm NOT a designer at all, but I do love to entertain, and I do love the WillowHouse product line. They have an ongoing special: buy $40 worth of items (including Outlet items) and you can get any full-price item at 50% off (up to $40), so I've already purchased some much-needed kitchen and tableware upgrades.
• Yesterday we got a cat. The cat's name is Cat. Cat is a mellow boy who came to us from a from a friend who is packing up and traveling around the country for an undetermined amount of time. We'll see how we do as feline owners.
  

February Update!

Let me start off by apologizing for the awkward placement of the photos in my blog updates. I cannot format tables using this blog editor, so the pics end up floating around. It's pretty annoying.

Work hasn't slowed much on the house since I last wrote in December, but the work we're doing now is primarily finish work, so the noticeable progress is taking a little longer.

We now have a kitchen floor, granite counters, and finished windows in the kitchen, so all that's left in that room is some door trim and the glass tile backsplash (which I'm getting anxious to see completed). I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but I designed this kitchen so that almost everything under the counter is a drawer, and there is a sizable pull-out pantry next to the refrigerator. So far, I'm pleased with this layout--no more pulling stuff out in order to get to things in the back of a cupboard!

Randy has been working tirelessly, and I do mean TIRELESSLY on the trim on the second floor, and the doors. This is a complicated process that involves using harsh chemical strippers on the wood, scraping it off, sanding a bit, staining, wiping, varnishing, varnishing again, and then filling in nailheads. I should mention that we have 17 doors in the house...all of which needed the full strip/sand/stain treatment on both sides. This week was a landmark week because Randy started making his way down the stairs to the landing (as seen here--the left side of the window hasn't been stripped yet in this picture).













The newly-stained trim does look pretty incredible, I have to say. Here is a shot of the recently-finished upstairs hallway.













Stay tuned for some upcoming shots of the exterior! Nothing too glamorous, but progress nonetheless.