Sneak Peek

While we were in Milwaukee over the Thanksgiving holiday, our hardwood floors were being put in our master bedroom. They are being immediately covered up to prevent damage from all the other work that has yet to be done, but I was able to get a photo of some of it half-done:

We have a new, larger hole in the wall where the window in the closet will be, but I wasn't able to get a picture of it worth posting.
We are still trying to find a perfect, not too costly, eco-friendly paint that has the colors we want. Nothing is simple...But we were able to purchase some furniture today for the master bedroom with a gift card we had - and a flat screen TV for the new family room!
We hope to see the windows in the master bedroom go in this week, and will post when that is done.

Exteriors

With nothing real exciting going on on the inside, I figured I'd post a couple of pictures of the views from the outside of the house. Here's the outside of the front of the house:

The front window is boarded up at the moment - it will be one of the future decorative windows with the leaded tape in the diamond pattern - 2 smaller square windows will flank this larger one, with the same pattern.
This a view of the back of the house, with the newly installed large window in the boys' room.

Below is a view of the north side of the house - you can see the skylights in the boys' room, then the one that is at the top of the stairs from the 1st floor.

I took a picture of the south side of the house, with the skylight in the bathroom, but it just doesn't show very well from that angle, so I'm leaving it out at this point.
We've had a bit of a set-back with the windows - the distributer sent our builder some windows with a white exterior instead of bronze. They are replacing them at no charge - but some of the windows with the white exterior were the ones we already had the leaded tape applied to, and we obviously can't send those back. I guess Chris hadn't opened them before dropping them off at the glass place, and so didn't notice. All is well, though. Apparently one can use special paint to be applied to the metal, so the ones in front will have that that treatment done. Another glitch to get through, as we didn't expect everything to go perfectly!
This week promises more mudding and taping of the drywall, and hopefully more windows to go in!

Grout It Out Loud

Things have picked up again on the remodeling front. Grout in the bathroom. Mudding in the bedrooms. Window in for the boys' room.

Above you can see the egress window in the boys room, and as a bonus, lying against the wall next to it is our finished leaded window for the front, with the diamond pattern - I was able to find someone to apply the leaded tape the way we wanted it, for a reasonable price. I think it'll look fantastic!

It's fun to go up every day and see the new progress. Check out the lovely "checkerboard" glass tiles in the shower, we're also going to be seeing them as a backsplash for the sink.



This last picture was taken before the grouting, but you can see the skylight in the bathroom - the extra light it adds will be great.
We're also seeing why they call it "mudding." It's messy. I have to say, though, the contractors have really made an effort NOT to bring the dust and mess from upstairs down into our current living area.
From the early decision to build a stairway outside to the second floor to now, they've really minimized the amount of "tracking through" the house, and we appreciate it. Of course, some mess can't be avoided, but it really has been less than I expected.

Above you can see the front reading room area with the built in bookshelves now finished with drywall. The mudding has begun, but will take a long time, due to all the weird angles and such.
In other news we picked out a bunk bed (on sale!) for the boys, and we're awaiting the paint samples to finalize that choice. Bunk bed is below. Are we asking for trouble with 2 climbing boys??? Time will tell.


Izzy

I can see tiles for miles

To our surprise, we now have tile on the bathroom floor and the shower floor! We weren't aware this was going to happen so soon, but we think it looks good! It hasn't been grouted (is that a word?) yet, and we actually have to pick out the color of the grout. Very exciting choice, I can tell you. Our glass tile for the accent border and the backsplash of the vanity top is here too that is what I'm most excited to see when it's done. Other than that, the drywall continues to be put up and it is almost done. Meanwhile, we've chosen all of our lighting fixtures, so we're glad to have that out of the way.
We did end up having to take back the mirrors we bought, but found a solution in $50 mirrors at Home Depot that are oval shaped, and thus fit better with the angled ceiling - though we still are going to have to have one lighting fixture above both of them instead of 2 separate ones. I'm sure it'll look fine. I'm trying to learn to be flexible...
One of the more irritating things is that we rarely get to see the place in daylight, now that it is barely light when we leave for work and dark when I return - which in turn makes it difficult to take pictures. These were all taken early this AM.
First, looking up the stairway into the main hallway and the skylight at the top of the stairs:



This the bathroom floor, and the shower floor. If I would have thought about it, I would have taken a picture of the skylight in the bathroom too. Too bad. Now it is too dark up there!

Below is a shot looking down the hallway to the door to the boys' room - the door will have to be cut at an angle due to the roof angle. You can kind of see the 2 openings to the built-in linen closets on the right side as you look down the hall - hidden by a huge piece of drywall.

Here you can see the wall of the pocket door to our closet. The wall will remain open above, to allow the light to come through from the window.

Tomorrow I'm going to meet with some stained glass artists to see about having them apply a leaded glass tape to our front windows in a diamond pattern in the front 'sitting room' area of our master bedroom (see architect's sketch below, with the window seat).

We are running into a bit of a problem here too. We thought we would be able to get someone to attach lead adhesive tape directly to the window, thus giving it the appearance of a divided light leaded window. Turns out that so far, we can only find a place that uses the leaded tape on a clear glass insert to place into the window, which just complicates things and increases the cost. I will figure it all out tomorrow. I hope.

A Room With A View

We haven't posted in a while because I was hoping the next pictures we posted would be of the finished drywall, but although most of the rigid insulation board is in, I guess the drywall is taking a long time, due to the odd angles, peaks, and valleys and such. The skylights in the boys' room have been installed, and it definitely brightens up the place! We are told that the skylights in the hallway and the bathroom will be done next week.


Here's the mostly finished drywall in the front "reading" room (pink board covering the front window),

and in the larger part of the master bedroom,

and looking through the main master bedroom into what will be the closet, with a pocket door, the frame of which has yet to be installed.


A lot of the work that has gone on lately has to do with the HVAC. In the back of this picture is the heating/cooling unit that will take up most of the knee wall space on that side.

Geez, I would hate to have to crawl around in there to service that thing. All of the silver tubing and ducts really make me think of the movie "Brazil". As long as it works, I guess I don't care what it looks like behind the walls.


The other area of progress has been the bathroom. The shower is coming along, with the cement board (or whatever, forgive me I don't know all that goes into making a shower) in place and we think the tiling will start in a week or so.


We've run into another stumbling block because of the steep pitch of the roof in the bathroom on the right side of the vanity - we may not have enough room for the 2 mirrors we've already ordered that go over each sink in the vanity. And we definitely won't have enough room for a separate light over each of those mirrors, as we had intended - we may have to go with one larger one over the top of both of them. The vanity and mirrors will come in on Monday, then Chris will do a mock up of where everything would go, and we'll see if we have to go a different route - maybe one larger mirror, or 2 slightly smaller oval mirrors. Lighting will depend on that situation too. I'm frustrated by this situation, as it seems like there should have been some foresight about the lack of wall space/height on someone's part (I'm not excusing myself from fault here), but it's just this kind of thing that makes the process exciting, yes?