Appraisal Ready

Whew. We spent the entire weekend getting ready for the appraisal tomorrow. We are in the process of refinancing from the 18-month construction loan to a regular 30-year mortgage. The appraised value of the house will determine the loan-to-value ratio, and could make a big difference in how "comfortable" a monthly payment we end up with. So we went all out spiffing up the house to hopefully get a nice high value.
Here's what we did:

• Repainted the stairway walls,


• Washed the windows,


• Vaccumed and swept all the floors,


• Deep cleaned both bathrooms, including scrubbing the hard water deposits off the shower wall and polishing the fixtures,


• Cleaned the kitchen & did all the dishes,


• Unpacked the remaining boxes from the move,


• Cleaned & rearranged the office,


• Cleaned & organized the sunroom,


• Cleared everything off the porch except the bench, the big planter, the BBQ & the firewood,


• Put away all the shovels, rakes, ladders, flower pots, hoses & sprinklers,


• Mowed the lawn,


• Cleaned up the garden,


• Straightened up the mechanical room,


• Cleaned the main entry room,


• Took down the rest of the wedding lights & signs,


• Washed, dried and folded all the laundry,


• Cleaned & rearranged the spare room,


• Cleaned & decluttered the TV room,


• Bought & installed a blind in the TV room window,


• Uncluttered & dusted all the windowsills,


• Swept the ceilings for cobwebs,


• De-cat-haired the living room furniture,


• Put a new shower curtain in the upstairs bathroom,


• Hung curtains in both bathrooms,


• Hemmed the bedroom curtains (finally!),


• "upholstered" the bedroom window seats with blankets,


• Hung pictures & decorated empty walls,


• Put a clean tablecloth on the dining table,


• & put a bouquet of flowers in the living room.

All of this to make a good impression on a stranger who will be here tomorrow at 9 am, and probably only stay for half an hour. I'm exhausted, but I'm confident our effort will pay off. I'm also really anxious to have it done & over with...

Topsoil, Lovely Clay-free Topsoil

Yesterday we had dry weather, so Dad was able to get a LOT more work done on our lawn-creation project. He brought in 5 loads of topsoil to dress the ground right around the house. This brought the level of the soil up to just a few inches below the top of the porch slab, and then he smootly graded it into a gentle slope back away from the house. It looks amazing.
He also topped the driveway and parking area off with a load and a half of crushed gravel, which is just super. We need to do a fair bit of hand raking still but then we'll be ready to seed the grass, at least in the area right around the house. We also need to get some stepping stones or something to make a path from the driveway to the house.
I can't get over how much better it looks with the lower, rough part of the slab covered up by the soil! This is how it was intended to be, but I just kind of got used to seeing the rough edge, not to mention parts of the gutter drain system. Of course, we still need to clean up the porch to really see how nice the house can look, but we'll get to that... someday.
In the back of the house is where most of the hand raking needs to be done, as dad couldn't work too close to the septic, and the sun-eves made it tough to get too close to the foundation. I'm pretty motivated to get out there with the rake though and then to get the grass seed down asap!
Back away from the house, the larger part of the eventual lawn area still needs to be worked over, so we'll have another work weekend soon. All that area, although it is large, will be much easier to work with, because there's no house or other structure that has to be carefully worked around.

Thanks so much Dad, Dave, Jack & Cary... I'm really pleased with what we acomplished this weekend, despite the heaviest rain we've had in 4 weeks on Sunday. I'm just so ecxited - we're going to have a lawn! There's no burn pile! Yay!

Sunburst Cha-Chas

The guys from three-sixty design came out this morning with to put the finishing touch on the house: the sunbursts (referred to by most of the guys as Cha-Chas) for the gable ends. In a heavy St. Patrick's Day downpour, I should add. One of the guys found a FIVE-leaf clover behind our house, which he was pretty stoked on. I hope that makes up for having to work on saturday in the rain!
The sunburts were cut & assembled quite a while ago, then taken to be primered and painted... and I had pretty much forgotten that they were still in the works! Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. The house looked good before, but it really looks great now, as you can see: They aren't overly ornate or frilly like on a victorian (which wouldn't suit me OR the house at all), but they sure give the house a nice finished look, don't they? What a nice surprise! Now I guess it's back to our regularly-scheduled weekend house cleaning... :0

p.s. Look at all that firewood! Cary's been busy this week...

Doors: For Going In & Out.

I just realized that I never posted any pictures of the exterior doors after they got their final coats of paint! It's been over a week. The front door is a happy pumpkin-y orange color. It really enlivens the appearance of the house.
Here's the sunroom door, on the other end of the porch. The window had been covered in a protective wrapper for so long we'd forgotten it was there, so it was a pleasant surprise when Nick the painter unwrapped it to put on the final coat of paint.
The reason I was thinking about doors in the first place (which caused me to remember about the pictures of the paint) is that they are suddenly getting a lot more use. Saturday was the first day we let the cats outside at the new house. They had a great time, investigating the porch and surrounding environs. Sanford roamed quite far from the house, but Iggy & Sprout both seemed to think that the ground was too muddy and wet to go far from the porch. Mostly, they wanted to do what all cats want to do: make the humans get up and open the door as often as possible.

You may remember that we installed a cat door in the west wall of the front entryway. So why are we still opening the doors for our feline masters? Well, although all the cats have gone through the cat door at least once (with assistance), it is taking a little time for them to get used to it. Unlike our old cat door, this one has TWO flaps, one on the inside and one on the outside. This is a VERY complicated thing to comprehend when your brain is the size of a hazelnut.

Not that they aren't all genius' when it comes to what really matters: getting us to do their bidding night and day.

Much Progress

The end of last week (been a while since I posted, huh? oh well...) I mentioned that due to the warm dry weather the painters had gotten out and primered the exterior trim. Well, not only that, but they came back over the weekend and put on the finish coat as well. Boy, does it look SHARP:
Here's a close-up of the porch rafters, you can see the subtle details like the corner blocking/column toppers. Not to mention the clean lines. I had gotten so used to the overspray from when the siding was painted that I stopped really seeing the separations.
Inside, more trim & doors were done. Here is the office door (left) and the bathroom door (right) off the main living space, all trimmed out and with the cork flooring completed as well. The trim isn't painted yet, but doesn't the wall color look nice with the floor? So warm.
And what's this? Steve is using the tile saw... which can only mean...
He's started laying the entryway slate! Pretty nifty.
He expected to finish cutting and laying the rest of the tiles today, so I expect to see a big "don't use this door" sign on the front door when I get out there tonight. I can hardly wait...

Also today, Robin was going to meet with the closet shelving people and measure all the closets & the pantry. We're using the coated wire shelving systems in all the closets, which are nice and utilitarian.

Robin also pointed out that Cary and I need to go pick out & buy our bathroom fixtures, things like TP holders and towel racks and the like. They aren't in the budget for the Schramer's to buy but if we get them they'll install them for us. Which is definately worth making the effort to get out to a hardware store and pick something up later this week.

We're so close to moving in now I can just about taste it!

Porch Light

Porch lights! Pretty... One by the mechanical room door, and one by the sun porch door.

Exterior Painted

Yesterday Brad Martin the painter (of Brad Martin Painting, naturally) painted the house! And just in time too, because the rain clouds rolled in last night and now it's pouring down rain like it doesn't plan on stopping until March. The trim isn't done yet, but that's ok. It can be done a little at a time on dry days, I guess. So, without further ado: the pictures!

Starting with the gabled east side...
The Front, with masking still in place:
and the West side. The small wall there that's still tar paper is going to be shingled, eventually. It's also going to have the cat door in it.
Inside, the bar was built and faced with wood veneer. With the pendant lights turned off, you can see the yellow/beige color of the shades that I mentioned the other day because they coordinate so nicely with the paint color. Not to mention the color of the wood itself.
Also in the last couple of days, the windowseat benches in the bedrooms were capped with boards which will bear the weight of sitting persons, and the countertop in the laundry room was connected to the workbench. The drain for the clawfoot tub was installed at the correct position, and the spacing box and it's pea gravel was replaced with concrete. I hope to see the marmoleum down on that floor soon, and following that the tub itself. :)

Weekend Business

A lot of work got done this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, Joel and Chris came out and worked on sheathing the treated 4x4 posts as well as the exposed beams on the porch with finish lumber. This is in anticipation of possibly doing the exterior painting this week. Mark says that if it doesn't get done this week we'll probably have to wait until spring, because it's just getting too cold and wet. However, right now the sun is shining and the sky is clear, so maybe we'll be lucky enough to actually get it done this week. Fingers crossed!
On Friday some more of the fancy light fixtures went in. Here's Cary with the main fixture in the living room (affectionatly refered to as the "giant nipple light"):
And these are the pendant lights which hang over the (not yet built) bar countertop:
You can't tell from these pictures because the lights are on, but the shades are shaded from white to a beige/yellow which almost exactly matches the color of the wall. Maybe Robin knew they would be that way, but back when we picked out the lights & shades we hadn't even started to think about the paint color. So in my mind it's just a very happy accident that they coordinate so well. :)

On Sunday, Jim the flooring guy came out and put down the marmoleum in the upstairs bathroom and the laundry room. It looks lovely, but my camera ran out of batteries so no pictures yet. The downstairs bathroom floor still has to be finished where the spacer was left in it to allow for fitting the clawfoot tub drain pipe. You might remeber that when the foundation was poured, we didn't have the exact measurements for the tub (obviously we have them now, see the post below!). The plumbers haven't been back out to finish off the drain, so the floor still has a gravely space. I'm sure that it won't be long before that gets fixed, and Jim'll be back to do the carpet in a couple of weeks so he can put down the marmoleum then.

Ding-Dong. Ding-Dong. Ding-Dong.

That's right, we have a doorbell now. It lights up, as you can see. Fancy. And what goes best with a doorbell? Why, a doorknob, of course!

The front door has been unwrapped, so you can see what it looks like with it's three little windows at the top. It will eventually be painted, but the color hasn't been decided yet. I'm leaning towards a dark redish-pumpkin color.

I now have a KEY, which is psychologically a HUGE thing. It's right here, on my keychain, reminding me that the house is real. Really, really, for reals REAL. And here is the lock the key goes to:

Inside & Outside

More Progress on various fronts yesterday. Outside, the soffits were finished, with a neat little ventilating strip running all the way around the porch roof. It's a little metal grill, like a miniture register, set in a few inches from the outside edge of the eave. It looks good and is also very funtional.

Also, someone (probably Steve) started primering the fascia boards white. Obviously still a work in progress, but off to a good start.

Inside, the cabinet installation continues! The cabinet in the far right of this picture (the one with one door on) is the one that will support the kitchen sink. Out of the picture to the left is where the refridgerator will go.
These are the drawers that will go in the middle unit in the above pictures, among other places. They are currently stacked in the pantry. I think they are really striking, all stacked together like that, and you can really see how beautifully the paint color compliments the wood.
In other news, the fifth coast of porcelain/epoxy on the bathtub turned out beautifully. It's glossy, smooth and uniformly white - everything I wanted in a bathtub! It's still possible to see some spots where I didn't do a perfect job fixing some of the chips, but I can live with that. Considering what we started with and what we went through to get it back into shape, I think it's actually good that it doesn't look precicely perfect. I'd hate for anyone to mistakenly think I just toodled out to the store and bought a NEW tub like some kind of wuss. Nope, this tub's got character, and history, and no amount of restoration can cover that up. And it's a good thing, too!

Siding Finished

On Friday the siding was finished, and it's just beautiful.
They also started putting the hardypanel stuff up on the underside of the porch roof. Looks like there'll be a day or so more of that, and finishing the soffits. There's a bit more exterior trim work to be done, and some more shingles to put up, but feels really good to be so close to being finished. Fingers crossed that the weather will remain good, and we'll get the painting done too!

Textured!

Yesterday the texturing went on the walls. However, after several attempts to photograph it I had to just give up and admit that little white bumps on a white background just don't really make for exciting images. Plus they're hard to get in focus. The 2nd coat of primer was scheduled to go on this morning, and if the painter's schedule allows they were going to try and come back in the late afternoon and put on the color! That would sure be exciting. If it doesn't work out though, they'll do it on Monday.

Which means that by Tuesday or so the cabinets will start going into place. Frank and Andy are scheduled to come mid-week and do the electrical finish work. Cabinet installation will take a week or maybe a little more, and then the floor coverings will start going in. Actually, that may start before the cabinets are finished. Mark says this is the calm before the storm and next week things will really start to hop!

Nothing has happened on the siding front this week, presumably because it's been pouring down rain the whole time. I wouldn't want to be going up and down a ladder carying peices of hardiplank up to the roof in the rain either. But today the sun has come back out and they're supposed to be out there with a full crew to finish it all up. There'll be a bit of trim work left for Steve to take care of next week still, but mostly it should be done today, according to Mark. The exterior paint is still a little bit of a question, it's going to be a bit tricky to work that in with the rainy season starting up. Worst case scenario, we may have to leave the painting until next spring, but that's not really so bad - I could live with that, if it comes to it. Still, though, I'm holding out hope for a few dry days...

Speaking of weather, the coolest site is http://www.bellcold.com/bhambaycam.html. It's a feed from a camera on the roof of the cold storage building looking out over the marina and the bay. They've also got a little animation of the last hour's worth of pictures. Since I work in the next valley over (Skagit) the weather can be pretty different between the office and home! I check the pictures on the baycam to see what to expect before I head home at the end of the day. :)

Siding at Sunset

Sunsets this time of year are amazing. This picture doesn't do it justice at all, but it DOES show that the siding is almost done! There's just the the front gable face left to go, and that probably got finished today. Well, there's also one wall still to shingle, the west side of the entry/mudroom (around the corner to the right as you go in the front door). Then the porch ceiling soffits need to be closed up, and I think at that point we'll be ready for exterior paint!

More Siding Goodness

The south and wast sides of the house are both finished now! They didn't add any more siding to the front yet, because they will need to move the scaffolding first. But maybe today. I don't know why exactly but I'm all fired up to see the front of the house with all the siding on. It's especially wierd when you consider how imprssive the view from the SW corner is:
The east side was started yesterday as well. I suspect that cutting all the shortie pieces for all the dormer faces will be slow and tedious. Sorry guys!
Notice anything funny about the windows in the above picture? Maybe a little darker and more opaque than usual? It's masking! That's right, they started masking off the interior of the windows with plastic in preparation for painting. Here's a shot from the top of the stairs, showing the masking as well as the results of the last couple weeks of mudding and taping and sanding.

There's also butcher paper stuffed up into the recessed can fixtures, and taped over the stovepipes and doorframes and things. Not everything was masked off yesterday, but they made a good start. I'm not sure if the painting will actually start tomorrow, but it's nice to see things moving to the next step. I've been trying hard to stay excited about the drywall mudding & taping process, but frankly it's gotten kind of boring. I guess I've gotten pretty spoiled by how fast everything else has happened. :)

Curved Window Trim

The siding started going up on the front of the house yesterday! Not that it hasn't been exciting to see the west wall finished, and the work they've done on the south wall as well, but this is the front! Of course, it's not done yet but I have high hopes for what I'll see when I get home from work today.
In order to side the front wall they had to trim around the curved half-circle window. I have to admit I've been wondering how they would do that. I just kept forgetting to ask Mark about it. I knew it could be done - it seems like every other new house I see has this sort of window on it somewhere - but I just didn't know how it would be done. Would they painstakingly warp a trim board with clamps and pegs, the way my mom's grape arbor was made? Would it be a pre-fab peice of synthetic trim that was factory shaped to the exact curvature of the window? Well, yesterday I climbed out on the porch roof and got the answer: they cut a bunch of small curved segments out of the regular trim board, and set them together to follow the arc of the window. I love it when the solution turns out to be so beautifully simple.
You can see that the grain of the trim stays horizontal all the way around the window. When you're right up close to it, you can see that the arc has a few little wobbles in it, but from a few feet away (not to mention from the ground) it looks perfect. All the joints - both between the trim peices themselves and between the trim and the window - are all sealed up with caulk. Once it's all painted over I'm sure it'll be impossible to tell that the trim is made up of several segments.

Inside, the sanding of the drywall looked to be nearly complete. Almost all the boxes of mudding compound and most of the tools have been taken away, so they can't have that much more to do! Someone (Mark?) had gone through and circled a few spots with a pencil, like a teacher circling misspelled words in an essay. Presumably these are places where a little more mud or sanding is needed. I suspect they'll take care of those spots today, and then we'll just have to clean up and then mask everything off in preparation for PAINT!

Digitally Painted Siding

So you know how in my last post I instructed you to imagine that the siding was painted Bronze Green? How archaic! We've got computers now, so I can digitally paint the house. Here it is: the latest picture of the west side of the house (notice they got more done on Friday) with the paint color photoshopped onto the siding. Looks pretty sweet, doesn't it?
Inside, the mudding was finished up and left to dry over the weekend. Here's a picture of Cary examining the mudding in the window arch pop-up in the bedroom. It really is turning out nicely. One of the best mistakes I've ever made. :)According to Mark the sanding began today. I'm not sure if they can do the whole thing in one day or if it will take a few, but it won't be too much longer anyhow. If all goes well we should be painting (or at least primering) the interior by the end of this week! Mark says it will take less than a week to do all the painting & texturing, and then after that the cabinets can go in, along with other interior finish work, like the flooring and the electrical fixtures.

Siding Siding Siding

Nearly the entire West side of the house has been sided, and the bottom half of the South side has also been done. Try and picture the siding painted this dark "evergreen" green (Sherwin-Williams Bronze Green #2846), not the putty color it is now. The trim will be white still, although it has to still be painted because that's just primer on it now. Well, it won't be exactly white, because Robin says that white would look blue, but a color that will look white. I guess you have to be a designer to really know what that means. Me, I'll just take her word on that...
Here's a view from the front of the house, you can't see the siding as well because the bright sunlight washed it out, but you still get the idea.
Pretty sky, no? The view from beneath the scaffolding caught my eye.
Siding will continue today and probably the better part of next week. Don't worry, there'll be more pictures on Monday. :)

Soffits & Trim

The second floor windows and corners were trimmed out yesterday, and the tarpapering was finished in preparation for the actual siding. Here's a picture of the dormer windows all trimmed out:
You can't really see it in the picture above, but the soffits were also closed up yesterday, with ventilated hardyboard. Here's a close up of what they look like now:
I expect a lot of siding will go up today, since it looked (to my admittedly totally untrained eyes) like they had all the prep work done. I realize it's been a while since I put up a picture of the whole house, but it's because the exterior appearance hadn't really changed for a while. The sidning will change that - you can expect a couple whole-house portraits here sometime in the next few days.

The bathtub finish wasn't as good as I had hoped on the first coat, we had some drips and runs and some "texturing" around the edges where the plastic we tented over the tub on sawhorses (to keep dust from getting on it while it dried) touched it. Drat. I sanded out what I could and put on the second coat last night. Now I'll let it cure for 5 days as instructed, and then we'll evaluate the finish. I think it's likely that we'll need to sand a little more and then go for a third coat to really get the nice smooth and even finish that I want. {sigh} But we're making progress, even if we aren't quite done with it yet.

Mudding and Taping continues, although it looks like it's pretty close to done. Again, I'm not necessarily a good judge of these things, but it just doesn't look like there's that much left to do. They'll probably leave it to dry over the weekend and hopefully the sanding can start early next week... bringing us ever closer to painting. :)

Progress Report

Folks keep asking me if we're almost done. "Surely there can't be THAT much more to do" they say. "How can it possibly take 3 more whole months?" (Hardly any of our friends have ever built or remodeled anything before - how'd you guess?) So, I thought it would be useful to detail what's left to be done, roughly in the order which it will all occur, on the way to completion. (At least as far as I understand them. I'm probably oversimplifying and leaving important stuff out.)

On the exterior, we've got a crew coming sometime soon to do up the siding & the rest of the trim. The soffits need to be closed, and then everything needs painting, except the shingles. After the painting, gutters & downspouts will be installed and that will about do it. So really, most of the work still to go is on the interior...

...where we're currently at the sheetrocking stage. Yesterday the hangin' crew finished up, as you will see in the pictures below.

Next, the Scrapping crew will come take away both the unused sheetrock and clean up the scraps. They'll also put plastic down on the floor to prepare for the mudding.

The Taping crew will then come mud and tape all the seams and corners and stuff of the sheetrock. This is aparently very messy. It will then take a while for all the mud to dry. It will help the mud to dry (and make the taping crew happier) if we can get the heat turned on, which means connecting the propane (scheduled for next Monday) and installing the boiler (Tuesday?). It will take the radiant heat floor a couple of days to come up to temperature. We also need to have the attic insulation put in asap so we don't waste too much of the heat.

When the mud is dry, the Sanding crew will come through, and as you might have guessed, sand down the mud. This is also rumoured to be very messy.

After that, the whole mess gets cleaned up, and then the whole house will be masked off in preparation for painting. First everything will get a coat of primer, which will probably have to dry for a day.

Once the primer is dry, the texturing goes on - "orange peel" is what we've chosen.

After the texture dries, they do another coat of primer to help seal it.

Then the actual wall paint goes on. When it's dry, they'll unmask everything, and clean up from all of that.

Then, Andy & Frank, the electricians, will come back and install all the light fixtures and outlets and stuff, so we'll have light and power accessable in the house.

Around this time they'll probably put in some of the plumbing fixtures too, like the toilet for instance. Because no-body wants to spend more time in a port-o-potty than necessary.

Interior trim and doors is the next thing. Once all the trim is in place, it needs to be painted, so that's more masking and drying time and unmasking and clean up.

At some point here towards the end, the flooring gets installed. Cabinets, shelving appliances, the rest of the plumbing fixtures and the wood stoves are also towards the end, but once they're in, we're done! :)

So now for the pictures (sorry about the dirty lens! I promise I'll clean it before taking more pictures) here's the kitchen and main room:
Here's the finished arch in the upstairs front bedroom:
And here are the windows in the sunroom, looking out on the swamp at dusk on a rainy day. Ahh... so peaceful and wet.