So Much To Say

For all of you that have been asking, I am sorry it has taken us so long to get the blog updated with the current house progress. It has not been for a lack of things to say.... Sadly, it HAS been due to a lack of a home internet connection! After two great months living the life of luxury at Casa Segre/Chen (thanks guys!), we moved back into the house about a month ago, (or a week after our last post). I think it will be about 2 more weeks before we get our internet connection back, but I will try my best to do more updates before then....

So much has been happening with the house work, I barely know where to start. Here is the recap on the last month. It basically covers all of July:

This is where we last left off. The house was a mess, but ready for paint!

This is the view into the kitchen.

Leif is helping Dan put jamb extensions around the front door.



And the painting begins! ....and after more than a month, we are still painting! This is one of those jobs that sounds so easy and painless to do before you begin, but once you get into it you realize that doing it right really does take a lot of time and effort. There is all the preping of surfaces and edges and protecting and clean up and needing to be careful around edges that goes along with it too. It's not just about putting the roller on the wall....

The good new is that we are using Olympic brand paint (from Lowe's), and it is all VOC free, so it doesn't stink while we are living there and doing the work. It is even GreenSeal Certified so we know it's not polluting the air inside our home. It goes on really well also, especially the primer.

Here is our finished stucco surface from the front. The stucco work finished up about a week after we moved in. The fascia boards still need to be painted though.

Here is the crew installing the stucco. It is a hand-troweled, smooth finish.

Here is the finished wall in the back of house.

This is a close-up of the finish. The photo was taken just after it was installed, so it has cracked a little since then, but overall the cracking has been very minimal, which is unusual for a smooth finish. We think this is partly because the contractor allowed the base coat to cure for longer than usual before applying the top coat and because of the way we detailed the edge of the windows with casing beads.

Now back to the inside work, we finished painting the kitchen first so that we could get the cabinets in as soon as possible. Jason, Bernard and Francesca (and Lilah!) came over to help. Thanks guys!

Francesca got our laundry room cleaned up and put the final coat of paint on the walls so that we could get our machines reinstalled.



The next day, Leif and I put the new floor in and were able to get them hooked up right away. The flooring is red rubber tiles that was donated to us by Jason's dad!

Back to the cabinets, here's Jason and Bernard putting our Ikea cabinet boxes together. We decided to go with an inexpensive cabinet box, but put our own nice doors on them so that they look custom. Everyone tells us that the Ikea boxes are great, if you glue the edges as you put them together.

We also discovered two other good tricks for working with the Ikea cabinets. One is to not use the legs that they come with, but build your own base instead. This way, they are very stable and you can level the base instead of the cabinets. The second is that you shouldn't be afraid of customizing the boxes as you need to. Above, Leif is cutting holes through the base of our cooktop base cabinet so our gas line and downdraft vent can get through.

Here, Leif is cutting the corresponding hole for the downdraft vent through the cabinet base. He is getting really good with that little saw!

Lunch Break!!

The trusty nail-gun gets some good use too. This is the base for the tall pantry cabinets.

Teamwork! The guys are putting this wall cabinet onto a rail support channel.

And here comes the fridge...

Does it fit?

Just perfectly.....although we do wish we had been able to get the kitchen door to swing out instead of in (an ordering snafu!).

At the end of the day, here's the outline of our kitchen. I'm standing where the cooktop will be.

Here's another view of the kitchen. In the foreground are all of our appliances, waiting in their boxes for installation.

Finally, for now, here are a few photos of the carpet we are putting down in the bedrooms. It is a modular tile system from FLOR. FLOR is a great, very sustainable company, and they have treated us REALLY well. See them here: www.flor.com.

We picked two different product lines and are going to combine them in a checkerboard pattern. They are called Toy Poodle, in Cece Chalk, and Next In Line, in Sage Grey. Above, Leif is laying them out, starting from the middle of the room, and testing different ways that the pattern can go together.

This is how they go together. They don't get glued or stapled to the ground, and they don't go over a carpet pad. They are stuck to each other by special, sticky 'dots' and floated over the old floor.

Here's a close up shot of the 'dots'. The sticky side is face up, and you put one at each corner of each carpet tile.

Here's the finished product! And we did the whole thing in one evening after work. :)

Leif checks out the door hardware while enjoying the new carpet.

Next post, we build a deck!