Hello to my three faithful blog followers! It has been a while…ok more than a while…but we have been busy. We are moving along but not as quickly as we had hoped. The weather has been KILLING our schedule and the Holidays also took their toll on the project. As you can see the ice/snow still has not melted and the job site is a muddy wreck. We have a large trench through the backyard so we can bury the power line, cable and phone to our house. Last week we excavated around the entire house in order to waterproof the basement. Another one of those “since we are at it" things.
I have really started to get impatient and last week I told our very S L O W mason that I was a nice lady but I that I was about to lose it if they didn’t finish. Today he told me he doesn’t like working with “all these women” (his boss is also female). I wanted to tell him that I didn’t much enjoy working with him either but decided I needed him to show up tomorrow so I bit my tongue. Josh and I are enjoying working on this together but we have both hit the point where we are ready to be finished and in the house. Who am I kidding we have been at that point since the day we started but now we are much more vocal about it.
Today we started to tile the showers. We actually didn’t start the tile. We put down the second mud bed in the showers and put up the durarock on the walls around the tub in one of the bathrooms. Once we get some of the tile up, I will post some pictures. We are going with mostly all white tile in the guest bathrooms. I love white which will be obvious when you see the final pictures. In the master we are doing white marble tile. G&L was closing their tile department so we got a steal on 12”x12” white marble tiles. We are going to cut them in half and have 6”x12” brick joint on the walls and a mosaic on the floor. The tile is going to be time consuming but it is a place where we could save a good amount of money doing it ourselves and Josh assures me we can do it…that is still left to be seen.
The sheetrock was put up a couple of weeks ago and we FINALLY got temporary heat so they started the flooring yesterday. I don’t have any pictures of the inside sheetrock but I will take some and try to post them tomorrow. The floors are micro-beveled random width hickory. Josh and I both like the look of random width and loved the idea and look of hickory. We are going to stain them a dark brown.
This is a picture of our fireplace. I know the brick is hideous…we knew from the beginning that we were painting it so we went with cheapest brick we could find. We are going to do a thick mantel on top of the brick supports and a stained concrete hearth. The ceiling in here is going to be 6” pine painted and those doors are temporary doors Josh and I built to keep the heat from getting out. They will be reaplaced with two sets of french doors.
This is just a random picture of the inside of our front door and some stain samples I have been working on for the doors. The thin piece of wood stained dark is for the front door and the French doors that lead onto the porch. The large piece of wood with two colors on it is the maple that is going on the doors I posted about earlier between the butler’s pantry and the pantry/laundry room. We are still working on those to get the stain right.
On the outside, the brick is almost complete and they claim they are going to start mortar washing the brick on Sunday. I forgot to take a picture of the outside brick and the mortar wash samples but we picked an off white mortar which we think will look great with the dark windows. Here are a couple of pictures of the stone that is going on the walls in the front. It is called Alabama Blue Stone and we love how it is turning out.
Here are some pictures of the back porch. I have to give Josh all the credit on the back porch. He came up with the idea to do a metal roof that was exposed from the underside with cedar beams, columns, rafters etc. We are going to stain all of the cedar and I look forward to hearing the rain on that roof. The metal roof was cheaper than the original plan and we also love the look. They already mortar washed the chimney and set the chimney pots last week. In addition to the metal roof, Josh came up with the idea of stained concrete on the porch (another cost savings) with stained 1x8 boards making a cross pattern on the porch. The boards are missing and the concrete isn’t stained but you get the idea.
The fireplace on the back porch is one of our favorite things about the house. These pictures are terrible and the hearth isn’t in yet but I thought I would post them anyway. When the hearth is set, you will have 3 compartments to store the firewood below. This was an idea that we got from a visit to our friends house in Maine this summer. It looks great and solves the problem of where to store you firewood. It will be easier to see when they take down the scaffold.
Well that’s all I have for now! Love to hear your comments J (Rebekah that means you).
P.S. Obviously I can’t figure out how to get my pictures to rotate. I save them rotated but they upload wrong. Does anyone know how to fix this??
