Nothing Happens At Ten

Just for grins, we rendered an image of the computerized house model again, this time from a vantage point that is outside of the house. In the model, we have colored the siding and shutters the same colors that we chose for the actual house.

The top picture is the model, and the bottom picture is a photograph of the real house from the same vantage point.

Pretty cool.

From hardscape to hardwood.

Most of the hardwood floors went in yesterday. We are having traditional oak floors put in. They are made of strips of oak that are tongue-and-grooved and stapled to the floor with 2″ staples. Here is one of the flooring guys lining up the wood in the dining area, next to the sun room.

That is a lot of sticks of oak! It is very loud with the stapler going off, so we didn’t stick around…. but here is the same floor after they were done with it.

Looking at it from the kitchen, it looks like the photo below.

Below is a photo looking from the sun room into the living room (the kitchen is on the left):

The detailing around the hearth is really nice.

Here is a closeup.

Next week they finish putting in the oak and sand it. Once the floor is sanded, the kitchen cabinets should start to show up.

“Hardscape” is what they call it now. “Landscaping” involves putting in the plants and trees and grass and all that. When they are putting in patios and walkways, they call it “hardscaping”. That is what they were doing at the end of last week. They began with the usual mud hole in the back.

They used their little Bobcat®* to dig the hole and then put the gravel and stone dust into it.

On top of the stone they put a layer of sand, and then they put the pavers on top of the sand. Here are the pavers.

The blocks in the photo are the rectangular pavers. They are 4″ wide and 6″ long and about 2″ deep. They also used some square pavers that are 4″ on each side. By using both square and rectangular pavers  they could mix them up into interesting patterns. Like this:

After a while, you have a patio.

I built one of those in that same place about 15 years ago. It took me two months to get it done. These guys were done in a day. I think it was the right decision to hire them instead of trying to do it myself.

Here is an aerial view of the patio so you can see the pattern of the blocks better.

Woah! I think I just lost lunch! I took that photo leaning out of a bedroom window. I won’t do that again.

While they were creating the patio in the back, they were also moving some natural hardscape out front. Remember way back when they were excavating, and they saved some of the boulders that came out of the hole? Well, they moved some of those boulders into their final resting place with the claw.

And here is the result:

Who needs a retaining wall? And… if you look up at the picture above this one you can see some red lines drawn on the ground. That is where our front walkway is going to go…. right down to this granite step:

which will go right next to the boulders. That step is a chunk of granite that is five feet long! That will look really nifty next to the natural boulders.

*I am not selling Bobcats. I am only…. wait a minute, do I really have to write a disclaimer for every brand name mentioned on this blog? I don’t think so. Never mind.

The Devil is in the details. That is what they say. In our case, I think that it is a bit of the Imp instead. Our builders are always leaving us with little surprises of details that they have done. For example, take a look at this.

That nicely done bit of decoration is in the downstairs bathroom baseboard molding, and it surrounds the water supply pipe for the toilet. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this before. Once they get some paint on it, that will finish up real nice. It is an interesting little detail, don’t you think?

I am trying to figure out a polite way to point out this interesting detail to our guests when we entertain. Perhaps it would be wise to just let them discover it on their own.

The tile that you see in the photo above is the same tile that is now in the mud room.

That is a wicked cool floor. And speaking of floors, there was an issue with the tile in the upstairs bathrooms.

We are putting down fine, imported Italian tile. (Woot). That is because fine, imported Italian is what the tile store sells, not because of any special need for that kind of tile. Unfortunately, we got the news yesterday that the tile we chose for the upstairs bathrooms is out of stock and back ordered. It is, in fact, on a boat on its way from Italy right now, as we speak. The issue is that nobody seems to know where the boat is. I am puzzled how we can lose a whole boat full of fine, imported Italian tile, but apparently we have done that. Oops.

So, our options were:

• Wait an indeterminate amount of time until somebody finds the boat and rescues our tile.
• Start over and go choose a different tile that is currently in stock.
• Switch over to the same tile, but in a larger size, 18″ to be exact.

If you have never seen an 18″ tile, you are in for a surprise. They are huge! Our builder picked up a few and laid them out on the floor so we could see what they look like. We decided that we really like that particular tile, and approved the larger size, and here is what it looks like all glued down.

Waddaya think? Not bad for a compromise. (Are you kidding? We love that tile!) There is no grout in any of the tile yet, so the lines between the tiles stand out a bit. They will not be as obvious after the grout is in.

Other details we found today include the trim around the windows and the baseboard molding in the bedroom.

Here is another interesting detail in the basement.

Yikes! That will make you dizzy!

That is the fuel gauge on our oil tank in the basement. To be fair to our builders, this thing is a carryover from that other house. Our guys just put it back into the tank. It was not their design.

Our builders saw this indicator and thought that we were about to run out of oil….. because…. why?… just because the needle is pointing at “empty“? What kind of assumption is that? Fortunately, I can read this gauge, and was able to quell their fears.

This demented gauge is installed sideways. I guess that was done to get enough pull on the string (it works with a float on a string – high tech) to go the whole depth of the tank, which is extra deep because the tank is sitting on its end. Anyway, since I am familiar with this gauge from that other house, I was able to interpret this reading for the guys and state unequivocally that the tank is still about 80% full. You see, “Full” on this gauge is at about half way between 1/4 and 1/2 and “Empty” is at the paint mark on the left  side made by hand by somebody, and in fact when the tank is really empty, the pointer goes quite a bit past the paint mark, which I know because one Winter the needle went all the way down to the “Empty” paint mark and far beyond, and when they topped it off (after my own panic attack) we still had about 50 gallons of oil in the tank.

So, “Empty” is really indicated more closely around the label marked … uh… “Full”. You see how that goes?

The fact that this all makes sense to me demonstrates that permanent mental damage was done to me by living all those years in that other house.

Some of the floors are in. The tiles have been glued down in the plant room. The floor isn’t dry or grouted yet, but the tiles are down. Take a look.

Here is the other side of the room.

Gorgeous floor! You gotta love that floor!

Meanwhile, the oak floors have been delivered. There is a pile of oak in the den.

There is more oak upstairs in one of the bedrooms.

That is a lot of boards! (I have heard that somewhere before)

Some of the doors are in too.

The door on the left goes from the mud room down into the garage. The door on the right goes from the mud room up into the garage attic. Sooooo, since we are standing in the mud room (figured that out, did ya?) if we turn around and look the other way…. we see….

The lower cabinets have been installed in the laundry room. The upper cabinets are still in their boxes. These cabinets are just plain white, with doors made of MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard) and particle board cases, but they are certainly fine enough for the laundry. And they are about 10,000 times better than the cabinets we had in the kitchen of that other house.

Some of the tiles have been installed in here as well.

Looks nice.

They have started to install the trim. The slider in the sun room has trim around it.

Yikes! The walls really are not pink. I don’t know how to do a proper White Balance yet.

You can just barely see on the left that some of the baseboard molding has been put in as well. Here is a closer view.

The nail holes will be filled before they paint.

They are installing the trim in the sun room first because tomorrow the tile floor gets installed. The tiles have been delivered.

By mid week I should be able to show you the sun room with the floor in it. We have been told that by then we will be able to sit in our sun room in a nearly finished state…… well… the sun room will be nearly finished in one sense…. we might be nearly finished in another.

Oh, and outside, the driveway has arrived.

It is part of the driveway anyway. The asphalt goes on top of this stuff.

No, not like the poem…. these are the bathroom vanities. They have been installed in the bathrooms. Only one of them has a top so far, but the vanities are in place. Here is the small one in the downstairs half bath.

Below is the medium sized vanity for the shared, full bath upstairs.

And last, but not least, is the large vanity for the Master bathroom.

The handles for the drawers and doors have not been installed yet. I will post more photos after the vanities have their handles, tops, bowls, and faucets.

These are really nice pieces of furniture. The fronts and drawer sides are solid wood. The rest of the case is veneered plywood. No particle board in any of it. All the drawers have the Blumotion slow drawer closing mechanism*. You can read about that system on their web page:

Blu Motion Web Page

To close the drawers, you just smack ’em with your hip and they close themselves! Really!

“It’s all good”.

*DISCLAIMER! I am always writing these silly disclaimers! But here goes (again). I am not selling Blumotion. We have paid for all this stuff, and we didn’t even want it when we started out because we thought that it would be too expensive for such a frivolous feature, and we have been opening and closing drawers for sixt…… um….. a lot of years and we didn’t need any automatic drawer closing junk to handle our drawers for us then, so why would we need it now, and in fact our drawers in that other house were made with wooden runners on wooden rails, and they were so worn down that we had to kick ’em in with a knee or they wouldn’t budge…… but then……. the Blumotion comes standard on all the Cabico cabinet drawers….. so it wasn’t our decision to get it, actually….  and we can smack ’em with a hip… and they just close!…… c’mon… that’s gotta be worth something just for the entertainment value.

I can’t wait to smack the kitchen drawers.

We have lights in the house. Check out the front porch light.

That looks pretty friendly and welcoming. The lantern by the back door is working too.

You can’t really see the lantern, but that is the fault of the photographer. Here is a photo of the electric panel that makes the lights work.

We have more stuff in it every day.

While the lights were on, I took a look at one of the vanities for the bathroom.

This is really nice stuff. It is all hardwood and plywood. There is no particle board in these. They have dovetailed drawers.

That is nice, tight work.

The interior doors are in too.There are a lot of doors in that room.

One last thing to show you before I sign off. The floor in the plant room is going to be gorgeous. Here are some of the tiles laid out on the floor by the slider.

I think we are really going to like this room.