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! :)

Drywall & Sheetrock & Wallboard, Oh My!

Whatever you call it, they started hanging it up yesterday! I know it's just one of many steps in the whole house-building process, but psychologically it's such a HUGE one. Not to knock the plumbing or the wiring or any of the other things which have been going on, but this is the most exciting thing I've seen since framing. I was so excited I did a little happy dance as soon as I saw it. It's still a long way from finished, but it's so cool I had to take (and post) a bunch of pictures.
The house had a strange feel to it, not just because of the mess of drywall fragements all over the place, but also because many of the windows and doorways haven't been fully cut out yet, so it's strangely dark. This is the doorway into the living room from the front entryway. Looks like a sasquatch just busted through...
Here's the upstairs hallway. To the immediate right is the stairway down. Straight ahead to the right at the end of the hall is the laundry/craft room, to the left is the back bedroom. Between the stairway and the laundry door you can just make out the bathroom doorway.
In the bathroom you can see the "greenboard" which is used in areas that will have moisture or high humidity. It's sure a lot harder to take pictures now that the walls are rocked. I think every previous picture that I've taken of the tub I took from the laundry room, through the wall.
Here's the bedroom with the curved window bump-up. The arch hasn't been sheeted yet but just having the ceiling closed really helps give an idea of how the finished room will feel.
Also, the dormer windows were installed yesterday. They'd been keeping the spaces open because they provided nice easy access to the roof, but with the weather turning rainy and the drywall going in, it didn't make sense to leave them open any longer.

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!

Clawfeet

This weekend we got a chance to use Ross's sandblasting chamber to clean the rust off the clawfeet for the tub. It was amazing. In about an hour, they went from this:

To this:
Thanks are due to Ross, for letting us use his nifty machine, and to Cary for actually running the noisy bugger while I sat and chatted with Ross and Keron over a beer in the garden. :)

Electrical wiring continues at the house, but it turns out to be a really boring thing to take pictures of, even by my house-obsessed standards. Once they get the fuse box and all the switchplates and fixture backs in, I promise I'll put up some pictures.

More window framing went up yesterday, and should continue today. Utility connection lines for the cable, phone and propane are scheduled to go into the ditch today.

Whoops, that's not going to fit.

Today we encountered our first problem with the plans. (I understand this sort of thing is very common.) The bedroom on the north/front side of the house has a kind of fancy custom window, shaped like this:Well, what I didn't notice before is that the window is too tall with that little half-circle on top. Mark noticed it when he was reviewing the framing and trussing plans. We can't lower it because it's already sitting right above the porch roof in front. The ceiling inside is 8 ft. high and has a dormer (on the east side) which starts just a few feet from the north wall, so we can't raise the whole thing. We've already ordered the window, it's on it's way here. There's nowhere else on the house that this window would fit. Drat!

So, the solution I've decided on, after discussion with Mark, is to have a bump-up in the ceiling behind that window, so it'll let in the light and then the ceiling will drop back down to the normal level. This requires some changes to a couple of the trusses for the roof, but shouldn't be too much of a hassle. It'll be a little funky but I think it'll work out fine. And it'll add a little bit of character, which new houses often lack. Wouldn't want that! :)