Window Shades

The blinds I ordered were installed earlier this week, and they look and work great! I'm really, really glad that I went ahead and ordered them custom-made, they were a bit expensive but they are high quality and will last us for years & years. I got them through Walls & Windows, a local window covering shop. The brand is Hunter-Douglas, the style is "Applause" and the color downstairs is butterscotch, upstairs is cornsilk. They are a honeycomb stlye shade, so when they are open they form air pockets which provide an insulative barrier. They also really help make the house seem quieter, which is nice. Here's the office, you can really see how well the color of the blind matches the color of the walls:

For the living room windows I splurged and got the "top-down, bottom-up" feature, which means the blinds can be open from the top or the bottom, or both! It's really amazing to me that they can do that, it's like magic.
All the blinds, except the kitchen one, have what they call "literise lift" operation, which means there are no strings, you just raise or lower the bar at the bottom (or in this case, the top) of the shade and it stays at whatever level you let go of it. Besides being neat, it's safer for babies and pets, which can sometimes get strangled by the strings. It's some kind of extremely clever counterwieght system. Again, magic.
In the kitchen I opted for the regular string operation. I would never be able to reach over the counter and raise the blind more than a couple of feet otherwise! I'd be in there whacking at it with my long wooden spoon - not good.
Upstairs, we got a new shade for the baby's room-to-be. We had a cheap roman shade in here, but it had the regular old string operation so it seemed like a good idea to get a safer stringless one. None of the other bedrooms got new shades, maybe someday in the future when we have more $$.
The Laundry room also got shades. While this might seem like a wierd place to put shades on the first round, considering that the bedrooms didn't rate, it's all about the insulation. This room has windows facing south & west, and on these sunny summer days it gets super hot in the late afternoon. We keep the door closed to try and trap the heat in there, but with our bedroom right next door the heat still gets through.
The most exciting thing is that we have these blinds installed, we can finally move the TV out of the baby's room into the living room, and I can start nesting! James & Aimee are going to come over for dinner tomorrow, and help us move the large things (like the couch) downstairs. Then I'll have a blank slate to work with, and I can start thinking about (and getting) baby furniture and stuff. Yay! :)

Cold outside, Toasty inside

Sure, the pictures are pretty, but more than that, they show what a great job our insulation is doing. We accumulated about 6" of snow by the end of the day yesterday, with temperatures staying just above freezing until late in the evening, but not a bit of the snow melted off our roof. You'd never know from the outside that the house was maintaining a nice, comfy 68°F inside all day.

A lot of the houses in the neighborhood have bare patches or at the very least you can see where the eves overhang open air vs. attic space because the snow is thicker over the eves. Not us; no bares spots, not even around the chimneys. We don't even have any icicles!

The cats apparently are getting the hang of the cat door, because there were lots of little kitty tracks in the snow outside, and little muddy footprints on the kitchen counter inside. Not exactly the sign I was hoping for...
In the evening the temperatures dropped quite a bit (to around 20°F) and the wind really started to howl and blow the snow into drifts. We built a fire in the stove and had a nice evening re-aranging the living room furniture. (I think we're getting close to a final arangement.) After living in the apartment, we are both really aware of how nicely weather-proofed the house is (no chilly drafts!). Except for the sound of the wind blowing ice particles against the windows, inside the house the storm was hardly noticeable. And with the car in the garage overnight, getting going this morning wasn't much of a hassle either. I really cannot describe how lovely it was to just get in and go... no frozen doors, icy windows, or drifts of snow to deal with before getting on the road. The roads, incidentally, were much better than I expected. And the sun is out now, in a clear blue sky...

I love my house!

Shhh... Insulation

Insulation all went in on Thursday and Friday. It really changes the feel of the house, it's very, very, veeeerrrrry quiet inside the house now. The blown in stuff is really interesting. First they staple up this fabric mesh stuff, kind of like interfacing, over all the wall spaces. Then they poke small holes in the fabric and stick the blower thing (I imagine it looking like a vaccum cleaner attachment) through the hole and blow in the insulation. The insulation itself looks like a cross between dryer lint and those little styrofoam pellets that are used to stuff "bean" bags. It packs into the wall cavities and thoroughly fills in around the pipes, wires or other stuff that runs through the walls.
In a few areas they used the regular batt style insulation, for instance in the smaller spaces like above the window framing. The attic will be done with the blown in stuff after the sheetrock is up on the ceilings of the second floor. The sheetrock will be the floor for the insulation.
The inspector is coming out today to sign off on the insulation, and then we'll be 100% ready for drywall. There may be a little delay before we get to the top of the job list for those crews (hanging, taping, & sanding) though.

In the meantime, I will be starting the renovation of the inside of the bathtub. This weekend Cary and I painted the final exterior coat: black. I know, I liked the red too, but it really didn't work with all the other colors in the interior design, and also the color it dried to didn't look nearly as nice as when it was wet. Black looks pretty classy, as you can see. I'm thinking the feet will be white, but that's not a sure thing yet.

Just Shinglin' Along

Steve's got quite a lot of the front porch wall shingled now, and I'm totally loving it. I can't wait until next spring, when I'm sitting on the porch in the evening drizzle, snug and dry (and well lit!) under the big porch roof. I'm thinking there'll be room to string a hammock between the posts...
Here's another view of the shingles, from the front. It's going to look so great, especially once the soffits are done and the posts are sheathed and it's all finished.
Unfortunately, yesterday Steve dropped something and cracked the upper pane of the right hand window. It's not a huge crack, you can't even see it in the picture above, but it will have to be replaced. I'm sure that windows get cracked or broken during construction all the time, but regardless, Steve felt pretty awful about it. Mark called me in the afternoon to tell me, so I wouldn't think it was vandalism or anything like that. He's going to take care of replacing it. I'm not sure if that means the whole window of if they can just replace the one pane that's cracked, but either way I have no doubts he'll make it right.

Next step for the interior is insulation, we're going with a blown-in fiberglass insulation with a R value of 23. It will cost a little bit more than the usual fiberglass bats which are only R21. Which doesn't seem like too big of a difference - it's only 2! - but it's actually about 10% better. Which I think will be worth it in the long run.

Tonight I'm meeting Robin to go over and finalize some of the interior materials and colors. That should be a lot of fun - and rest assured you'll read all about it here tomorrow!