Freaking out!

I’m stealing away for a few minutes to post, which is increasingly difficult.  Insanity has set in, we are really close now…  I think we are looking at about 4 more weeks and we should be starting to make our transition.  Can you believe it?  We are so excited we could burst.  But our excitement is tempered by some things that are required to get to the end.  We have some issues with the sidewalk now and the city sewers and storm drains that are going to drain our budget even further.  This is all part of the sidewalk we are required to do based on the scale of the remodel we are doing.  Basically extortion from the city, but whatever.  It’s getting a little more complicated, but we have to stay focused on getting to the end.  Lots still to be done and we are in crunch time.

But here are a few photos to give you an idea of how things are coming along.  Things have progressed even further than these photos reflect, but challenging to keep up.  I will take some additional photos this week and post them so you can see how much more progress we have made.

Kitchen cabinets in.  This is pre granite installation.  Photos with granite in this post too.

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Living room fireplace and built ins to the sides.  Look at those windows!!!  The entire area above the fireplace will be stacked stone going in next week.

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Quartz counter tops went in this week and they are awesome!!!  Loving how the kitchen is turning out.  While we were there looking some things over we got to see them installing all this and had to make critical decisions on where exactly to place our sink faucet.  Took us 20 minutes to decide.  We think we like it better when they just decide and don’t involve us.  Too stressful  – lol.

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Master bathroom floor and vanity.

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Floor and shower stall with our river rock shower floor.

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Main floor bath.  White glossy subway tile that I thought I would hate but our designer told me to trust him.  It looks amazing.  This is pre accent tile, which also looks amazing.

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Wine bar area on the lower level.  This will have a granite counter top cut around the barrel.  Barrel obtained from our friend Morgan of Two Vintners.  Little trading going on there…

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A few samples of our window coverings.  Doing roller shades in most and a massive paneled draw shade on the big slider in the living room.  Wanted to put a motor on it so it could open and close automatically, but it is too big to do that and has to be on a cord.  bummer, but I will be working my muscles on that one.  Turns out Bill has a very good eye for this stuff, some of these are his choices!

Gym:

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Lower level family room

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Karen Studio (of course)

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Main House

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Master bedroom

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Here’s how the schedule looks for our remaining weeks.  Painting this week, floors and 2nd round of tile installation next week, then electrical, plumbing and AV stuff.  Then we have to sprinkle in our own stuff like closet installation, window covering installation and landscaping, which should be mid november, and then we can start slowly moving.  Hooray!

 

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More later, gotta run…

 

 

Don’t blink

Don’t blink on this house construction, ’cause you’ll miss most everything.  We keep blinking…

House was bustling with activity yesterday after a quiet friday/saturday.  Cabinets delivered:

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Lotta boxes and they are well protected until they get to them, but you cannot move around in the house!  I am wondering what the tall one in the back is.  The fact that I don’t know is scary.  I know we ordered something like that, but cancelled it for the kitchen, so I’m hoping it’s the laundry room piece.  Took a peek in the boxes and pretended they were wrong to send the foreman into a panic.  I’m so mean, but I just can’t help myself.  We did have a good laugh.

Young crew busy at work putting the trim on.  They will also be doing the cabinets, and rumor has it they will be totally done in 7 days.  So they have most of the door trim done, which means they have installed the interior doors.  Happy with our choice here.  We have 6 panel traditional doors in our current house, and I’m glad to move into a less dust collecting door!

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Doors will be painted brown to mimic the floors, these are only primed right now.  I’m not sure why they hung them before they were painted.  I’m assuming they will take them back down to paint and the trim guys just wanted to get them set and level in the doorways while doing the trim.

And most exciting of all if the finishes have been delivered.  Got to see all of our choices in person and larger samples.  So far so good!

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Bubble for the laundry room and river rock for the master shower.  Made a last minute change on the river rock, and so glad we did!

With the demolition of the garage complete, we were just waiting for them to haul away the last of the debris, and that has been done now.  They also removed the chicken coop and other creepy out building that was on the back lot.  I assume they did this now as it is more cost effective, because the last priority we have is to put any money into the back lot right now considering how tight we are on budget.

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The idea about subdividing the back lot is still alive, and the designer and builder are doing what they need to do with the city to get initial approvals and ok to move forward with the subdivision.  Remember, we still need the neighbor to give us some land.  We are treading lightly as we’re not quite ready to dive into that right now.  We need to get this house finished and then we can focus on that piece.  There are, however, a few things we can do now to get the ball rolling without investing any money, so we are doing those things and will see if the plan works for us.  More to come on that I’m sure.

Now we are in to final decisions on plumbing fixtures and lots of other “little” things, but this is when you really start to tear out your hair.  We are pretty worn down at this point and now find ourselves saying “whatever” quite a lot.  Glad this is getting close.

Hopefully more updates after the next blinking.

 

0 to 60 in…

Been a little over three weeks since I last posted, and in that time we have gone from (relative) 0 to 60 in no time.  Moving so fast I can barely keep up with the decision making and pressure to make choices let alone being able to set aside time to blog.  Not to mention that by the time I take photos and get around to blogging, the photos are old news, so often you are a couple steps behind!  But I want to keep you all updated and assume you still love hearing all about it as much as we like to share, so I am doing my best to keep posting!  And I will stop complaining now…

Last left you with insulation, and that was short lived as the drywall went up in no time, and we have ourselves a real house.  Unbelievable.  I took a few videos as I thought they would be better than photos, but they are too large to be uploaded onto this site, so no luck.  I went back and took some photos which don’t give you a good idea of the space, but here they are anyway.

 

This is actually post painting, and I have a blurb about our paint selection in a bit.  The paint turned out a lot lighter than we expected.  It’s supposed to be a bit gray-blue, and it is, but very subtle.  We are certainly not afraid of color, but did not want to go too dark for the entire house, so erred on the side of caution.  Maybe too much, and now we have to decide if we want to change it up to a bit darker shade for the final coat which comes much later, or just do a few accent walls to add color.  Bill has left this up to me (insert maniacal laugh here).  He said I did such a good job on our current home that he is fine with me choosing on this one.  If I translate that, I think it comes down to “I don’t care”, so this one is on me.  Should be fun (I think).

First few are the “great room” – living, kitchen, dining combo…

 

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Master bedroom

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Hall and Karen’s office

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I’ll share the videos from last week in email and on FB so you can see the “before” and here you can see the “after” with the first coat of paint!  We were not 100% prepared on a paint color, so that was a bit of a last minute scramble for such a big decision, but we hammered it out and chose one.  Here is a deep dive into our decision making process.  haha

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Just slap a few samples on the wall at sunset when the light is the worst and choose!  We did not go for the dark one (which was supposed to be MUCH lighter) in case you are wondering.

So the paint is today (thursday the 1st), then trim goes on (seriously? — so fast), then cabinets delivered on Monday with installation to start next week.  Then finish work on electrical (lights, switches) and plumbing as well as the other finishes like tile and appliances and then floors are last.  Then they do ANOTHER coat of paint to cover up any scuffs and bumps from all the other work, and we have ourselves a livable house.  Not sure what will happen on the outside, but that will fall into place after the interior is done I imagine.  The next 4 weeks are going to be crunch time.  This week Bill and I have had so many meetings and tasks to complete, we are just exhausted.  Lots of “shopping” which consists more of “searching” for the right item and telling the builder what we want.  Bathroom fixtures, pendant lights, toilets (elongated bowl or round, hmmmm?), bathtub faucets, and sinks just name a few, and that doesn’t count the stuff we are doing outside the construction budget like window coverings, closets and AV installations.  It’s all coming at once and while we are having fun and trying to enjoy it, we do have full time jobs (not a lot of hours put in the week – yikes), lots of traveling, and then (me) with all the MagnaMemos activities, I’m starting to lose track of what I’m doing.  Day by day, right?  Breathe.

We are also overwhelmed at how far over budget we are, but that should really not be a surprise to us as anyone we have ever known that has done this has said the same.  From the jubilation of selling our house, back to the task of juggling finances to actually make this work.  Ugh!  That is another sorted tale…

So can’t wait to show you all the finishes when they are in place.  We have made some beautiful selections most of which I have shared with you, but even I cannot picture what they will all look like in place, so we will see it come to fruition together.  So exciting!

Other things to note:  The garage from the old house came down this week and that was very exciting.  If you remember, they had left it up so they could work out of it and use it for storage, and it was VERY close to the new house.  It came time to take it down as it was getting too crowded.  Was going to be a precarious task as if it fell the wrong way, it would hit the new house.  I knew the day it was happening, so I went over to see, and was a bit late as it was already a pile of rubble.  Only one scuff on the new house and everything fell the right way.  Really changes the feel of the property and opens us up fully to the neighbor.  We’ll have to consider a fence, perhaps!  We also disrupted a hornets nest or something in some kindling that the neighbor had leaning on the garage, so that was exciting to say the least.  Our site forman took to the task of eliminating them.  It was a multitude of very angry creatures.  And you all know how much I love bees.

I am having a lot of trouble with the photos posting “right side up”.  Seems they view differently on handheld devices versus viewing them on a computer screen and I can’t figure out why.  I apologize if they are not the right way…

 

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Big battle:

 

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A couple of doors went in as well and the siding went on.  You can see in the lower right some paint samples for the outside of the house.  The yellow color is just the siding color.  Will be painted of course.  Couple photos here.

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Bill is traveling for the next two weeks, and I have a long trip week after next, so it will be interesting for us to see things when we get back.  Hate being gone like that, but we have to work to support this monstrosity now I guess, so better not lose sight of that!  LOL…

I hope you enjoy the photos, and should be posting more soon as things get delivered.