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...

All Wrapped Up...

The whole downstairs of the house is masked off and ready for the trim to be painted (scheduled to happen this morning). All the masking makes the house feel even more like a giant Christmas present. And a particularly awkward to wrap one, at that. :)

Here's Cary checking out the masking in the Office. You can also see where they primered the cut edges of the trim boards. It's also all been spackled and caulked. Quality all the way!
The Jotul wood stove was installed yesterday. I carefully unmasked it so that we could take a peek:
Here's a close up view of the front of the stove. This particular model, the "Castine" is described in the Jotul catalogue as having a "nautical" theme. I was a little worried when I read that - after we had ordered it of course - because I thought maybe I had overlooked some big anchor and rope design when I visited the showroom. But nope, this is the stove I wanted. There is a little tiny boat (about 1" square) on the side pannel, so I guess that's it. It's a good thing I didn't choose this one because I had my heart set on a nautically-themed stove - I'd be pretty disappointed! Somebody should let their catalogue blurb-writer know not to beleive the design department's hype.
I would describe it more as a classic stove design. Pretty, isn't it? I can't wait to see it with a fire inside.

More Interior Finishing Finished

Things are happening so fast now! So many different things get done every day. For example, yesterday:

1. The slate tile backsplash in the kitchen was grouted, and it looks amazing.

Here's the tile along the bar. That tile there on the left is my favorite tile. It doesn't show up as well as I'd like in this picture, but in real life it looks like a landscape painting, like picture jasper that you'd see a jewelry setting. I'm glad that it was given such a prominent setting.
2. The hearth was grouted as well, and except for the light switch is ready for the wood stove to be put into place. I think that may be on the list for today. Those whitish splotches in the center look like fossilized lichen, which is pretty cool even if that's not really what they are.
3. The entry way, downstars bathroom, and much of the livingroom and kitchen were masked off and are ready for the trim to be painted. Masking this much area off is a HUGE job, in and of itself.

4. The upstairs doorknobs were installed.

5. The wooden forms that surrounded the slab have been removed. I had actually forgotten that they were still there. I guess they must leave them on to protect the slab edges - like along the front of the porch - from getting chipped or something during the construction process.

6. The stairway railings were cut to length and the angle ends were glued on, so they are pretty much ready to install.

And on top of all of that, a bunch of site cleanup was also done. There are probably a bunch of other things as well that I didn't notice!

I'm not certain what exactly is on the roster for today, but probably 5 or 6 of the of the following:

Electrical finish

Carpet

Closet & pantry shelves

Gutters

Interior trim painting

More doorknobs

Cabinet knobs & drawer pulls

House numbers

Stair rails

Wood Stove installation

Appliance Hook-ups

Closet doors

And more... Three days to go, counting today!

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!

December Already

Can you beleive it? Not quite 6 months ago (ground was broken for the driveway June 15th), the house site was just a field:
Today we have windows to look out of, walls to keep the cold out, floors, lights, a roof, trim, and even countertops! It really is amazing what a bunch of people (especially a bunch of pros) can do. I'm thinking of this today, because I just sent the move-out notice for the apartment to the landlord. I've never been this excited about giving notice before...
Friday and Saturday were busy days at the house, the painters finished up all the upstairs trim, and removed the masking leaving the coast clear for the carpet to be installed today or tomorrow. Here's a picture of the doorway trim, it changes from the bedroom trim color (off-white) to the rest-of-the-house trim color (orangy-tan) in the middle.
Here's a shot of the baseboard trim on the stairway, so you can see what the trim looks like against the wall color. Pretty nice, eh?
Down in the kitchen, Al Hale the Laminate guy was working on putting the kitchen countertops down. I'll get some shots of the finished countertops tonight & post them tomorrow.
As you can see, Steve finished laying the cork flooring in the kitchen, and even put the corner trim pieces on the cabinets to cover the end grain. I think all we need is the rest of the drawer pulls and the kick plates, and the cabinets will be done.
Well, except for a thorough dusting. :)

Thawing out & catching up

Temperatures are back in the 40s and the snow is melting away, so last night Cary and I went out to the house to see what was new. It was quite impressive - there were 3 days worth of work we hadn't seen. The biggest, most fun thing to see was the cork flooring in the living room & kitchen:
Isn't it pretty? It goes really nicely with the Cherry cabinets, which I was a little bit worried about. The grain/texture is totally different, but the color tones are similar so it really works. It feels really good to walk on too, it has just the right amount of give to it. In the right forground you can see (under the bucket and stuff) the slate tiles which will be the floor of the hearth.

The painting crew had masked off most of the upstairs trim, ready to paint.
They actually started painting the trim in the bedrooms, but they used the wrong color (they painted it the same color as the walls - it's invisitrim!). They figured it out and were just waiting for it to dry so they could go over it with the correct color today. The masking is what takes all the time anyhow, so it's not too big of a deal.

The painters also brought back all the doors, which they had taken off-site a few days ago so they could paint them in their facility. They'll go back on their hinges after all the trim is painted and the masking is removed.
Steve continued putting up more trim around the interior, including the baseboard trim on the stairs, which is kind of tricky stuff. Exhibit A: the tetris trim...
I don't even want to think about how many cuts that peice took. :)

Today Mark was going to start on the hearth wall tiling. It'll be tiled with the same brazilian black/grey state tiles as under the stove, but going up the walls (mounted to fire-proof cementboard). There'll be an airspace between the cementboard and the sheetrock for additional protection against catching the walls on fire. This air space will also create a small convective heat exchange, which will also be nice.

Also today, Al was hopefully going to come back and finish the laminate on the kitchen countertops, assuming the snow has melted enough for him to get out of his driveway. Fingers crossed!

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. :)

Now Featuring Color!

That's right, the painter came out on Saturday and painted the entire interior of the house! I was pretty impressed, considering that a) he wasn't scheduled to come until Monday; and b) when he showed up Saturday morning the power was out. D'oh! Mark called at about 11:00 and told me about it, so I called a neighbor to find out if everyone's power was out or if it was just something wrong at our place. She confirmed that the power had been out for about 20 homes in our area since 6 am, but that the power company said it'd be back on by noon or one. Since Cary and I had been planning to head out there anyway to put the finishing touches on the clawfoot tub (more on that in a minute) I told Mark we'd let him know when/if the power came back up. So, the power came back on about 1:15, I called Mark, he called the painter, and about 45 minutes later he was on the job. Cary and I didn't even get a chance to meet or talk to him, he was inside spraying paint so fast! We had to leave before he finished (Grandma Joy was serving apple pie at 2:30 - couldn't miss that) but we came back on Sunday to have a look. All the windows are still masked off with plastic so the lighting is a little wierd/dark, but here are the first shots of our house in COLOR:

This is the color that most of the house is painted, seen here in the sunroom.

Here's Cary in the front bedroom. All the bedrooms are done in this light grey-green color, which is very calming and restful. Behind him you can see the warm yellow of the stairwell through the open door.

Here are the actual empty cans left by the painter, which is about the only place you can really see both colors side-by-side. I think this picture also gives the truest sense of the colors. Like I mentioned above, with the windows still masked off (and painted over) the light inside is dim and tinted.

Now that the paint is done, they'll strip off all the masking and then start placing the cabinets. I can hardly wait!

Oh, and about the bathtub: we put a 3rd and 4th coat of the porcelain/enamel on the inside over the weekend. We're finally starting to get a good smooth finish that covers all the dings, runs, and dark spots. There is enough left in the spray can to do one last coat tonight, and then I think we'll be done! Also, I did the feet with a metalic dark bronze paint, which I think looks really nice and which I hope will match the oil-rubbed-bronze finish on the faucet and drain hardware. I'll get some more pictures up on the site here once the 5th (and Final - Yay!) coat is dry...

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. :)

Interior Primed

Last Thursday (Yes, I've gotten a little atrasado. I have many good excuses, but I won't bore you with them here.) The first coat of Primer was done on the interior drywall. I was lucky enough to actually catch the guys still working on it when I showed up about 6:00 pm, so I ducked my head inside and got an action shot:
The two fellows from Van Beek Drywall who were doing the primering took a break and talked to me for a few minutes. Friendly guys, I beleive their names were Thomas & Rusty. (I should have written your names down. Appologies if I got them wrong!) Like most of the tradespeople I meet and talk to about my house, they commented on how small it is - it seems pretty big to me, but the trend around here in new construction, especially custom, is for MUCH larger places. People just can't seem to wait to buy 5 acres in the country and build a 4 acre house on it. Well, I'm exagerating there, but 3000+ sq. ft. seems to be the average these days. Personally, I'd rather have extra room outside for some more fruit trees and berry bushes.

So, enough of me ranting, back to the pictures. Here's what the interior looks like now, after the primer has dried. It's a bit spooky, everything being uniformly white.
And having the windows still all masked off is a little wierd too. Makes the rooms feel small and kind of stuffy. But that will all change when the masking comes down...
The Texturing coat was supposed to go on Saturday, but the machine broke down. So it's been sent down to Seattle for repairs and we don't know exactly when it will be back in action. The painter was scheduled to come today, but unfortunately Robin had to call and cancel. We've been really really lucky though, I suppose we were due for some kind of a setback. Hopefully it won't be too long of a delay. Probably just a couple of days.

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. :)

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. :)

Design Specs

Here are the design elements, room by room. Robin e-mailed me the specs and I went to all the manufacturer's websites and clipped pictures of the various elements, then combined them together into room-specific swatches. Pretty nerdy, huh? It was so much fun I kind of got carried away. :)

















All the light fixtures, doorknobs, and most of the plumbing fixtures throughout the house will be oil-rubbed bronze, which is basically a matte dark brown.

You'll notice that most of the rooms have the same color of walls, a warm tan (it's called Boardwalk) with a darker tan (Desert Beach) for the trim. We may paint some rooms or accent walls with different colors at some point, but with the pro painters it costs extra every time you have them change colors. That's because they have to clean out their equipment each time. So for now we just have one color scheme for the bedrooms and one other for the rest of the interior.

The doors will be painted the same colors as the walls. The bedroom doors will have the bedroom wall color (Embassy Green) on the inside and the hallway color (Boardwalk) on the outside.

The hearth area will be done with the same black slate as the sunroom floor, in 16" square tiles. There'll be a decorative band of 2x2 multi-colored slate tiles between the top black tile and the next one down, just for fun.

In the bathrooms, there will be tile for the backsplashes around the vanities. The downstairs bath will have mainly white glass tiles with a thin black tile outline. The upstairs will have 4 different colors of tile mixed randomly together. The colors are red, yellow, blue and green, in tones that coordinate with the colors in the mexican sink.

I suppose I don't have to tell you that I'm beside myself with excitement, and can hardly wait to see it all installed...

Shingle Dipping

Last night Cary and I started dipping the shingles. It took a while to get everything set up, but once we had all the equipment (ladders, clothesline, buckets, gutters, and weights - it's like some kind of Goldberg contraption) in place, the actual dipping went pretty quickly. We dipped a whole bundle of them, and left them hanging to dry overnight. The stain color is more or less the grey of naturally wheathered cedar.
I think it will look nice on the house, the rest of the siding will be dark green, the roof will be dark grey, and the trim will be white. Here's a close up of the shingle stain color:

I've got pictures, but I'm still having trouble uploading them for some reason. I'll try again later.

Update: aparently it's not just me, everybody's having trouble posting pictures. They're working on fixing it. Hopefully it'll be fixed by tomorrow, so I can put up pictures of the framing that went up today.

Update 7/26: fixed now!