TAKING SHAPE

The contractor we hired to do all of the staining finished the windows and they look awesome. They use a wipe-on stain and then apply 3 coats of sprayed on lacquer over that. The finish is like a fine piece of furniture.

RICK THE STAINER

Tomorrow, all of the poplar for the interior trim as well as the wood doors will be delivered to his shop in Lewisburg. He should complete that work in a few days and get it back to me so that I can start working on installing doors and the trim. I really enjoy that kind of work and am anxious to get going.

The siding is about 2/3 done. A noticeable milestone was the completion of the siding and trim under under the front porch and around the front door. I added mahogany trim around the door and that will be stained the same color (TBD) as the door itself. Rick will take care of that when he comes back to the house for some other on-site work.

Barb and I have had meetings with the cabinet people as well as a flooring folks. The process of finalizing everything on the cabinets has been painful (for me anyway). It seems like we keep having meetings with little progress. We have settled on a design and color but it's all of the other little decisions that are making my head hurt.

This week the drywall finishers are coming back to do the garage. Since it was full of material when they were here before, I asked them to come back when we had all of that stuff cleared out. Once they are done, I will get the fluorescent lights installed and get my tools moved in so I can use the garage as my "shop" for the interior trim work.

Barb has been busy painting the exterior trim for the screened porch and also painting walls. It sure makes painting a breeze when you don't have to cut in around trim work.

That's about all for now.......

RAINY DAY JOB

Somehow I really blew the estimate on the tongue and groove pine we are using for the porch ceiling. So, over the weekend I bought the additional boards we needed and Barb stained and varnished them.

It rained most of the day today so the siding contractor was appreciative that we had the extra material ready so that he had work to do under cover.

FINISHING UP THE PORCH CEILING

TRACY AT HIS BEST

Tracy's crew consists of him and his 20 something boy, Jake. Jake does all the cutting and Tracy does all the measuring and nailing which means he spends most of his time on a ladder. I suggested that he is getting too old for that kind of work and should trade places with Jake.

Today he was telling me about the two times he has fallen and gotten hurt. There are other times he has fallen with no damage done. I am discovering that many of the carpenters and other tradespeople who spend a lot of time on roofs and ladders have fallen at some point in time.

Met a rep at the house to discuss the walls for the walk-in shower in the master bath. Although we had tile in our old house and it admittedly looks very nice, it can be a pain in the "arse" to keep clean. So, we are probably going to go with some type of panels on the walls like Swanstone, Corian or other similar manufactured product. They make some nice looking stuff and with sheets as large as 60" x 96" the joints are minimized. 

We have had one meeting with a store that sells and installs flooring. My head is starting to hurt from thinking about all the options available. Would like to get all but the carpeting installed before I install the interior doors. That will eliminate the flooring installer having to cut off the bottom of the door jambs to clear the flooring. In the end it results in a neater job.

Next on my list is to get started on a bench/cubby for one of the utility room closets. Rather than a conventional closet with a door, we are planning on something similar to this....

This will provide a place to sit down and remove shoes before entering the main living area.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

I have been reluctant to report on the progress of the siding as it is the one area of this project where I stubbed my toe. We should have had this done long ago but for reasons that I won't get into, we didn't get started until February 11. Part of the tardiness is my fault and part due to the contractor getting started about a month later than he originally expected.
Nevertheless, they are about on third done and the end result ( or should I say one third result) looks very nice. We chose to have the siding pre-painted so there is no experimenting with colors once it is installed. The nice part is that we don't need to figure out how to paint the exterior of a house in the winter.
Fortunately, the delay in getting started on the siding has not really impacted our schedule as we have been working on interior work all along.

As you can see from the photo above, the guys have set up under the screened porch as an area where they are measuring and cutting material. It gives them some protection from the weather during these days when the weather has not been so cooperative.

This week I will be ordering the interior doors and the trim. All of this will be delivered to the shop of a guy I have lined up to do the staining. Hopefully, he will soon start on staining the interior of the windows which of course will be done on site instead of in his shop.

We also will be ordering cabinets this week. We have been working on cabinet decisions for what seems like forever but we are confident they will look very nice.