In which we whine, just a little.

We've had this fantasy that the addition would be done by mid-November, and everyone's going gangbusters, but it's hard to imagine it all coming together by then. Still to go:

1. The bathroom. The vanity needs to be installed, complete with its countertop. Same goes for the window, the baseboard heating, the shower & tub fixtures, the tiling above the tub, and the toilet. (And the towel rods, but we haven't even picked 'em out yet. The vanity needs to go in first because it's going to hog some of the real estate here - we don't know yet if we can fit the long towel rods we want.)

On the bright side, the sink and sink faucet arrived today, which means that we're almost ready to call the stonework guy to come take measurements for the countertop. I say "almost" because the vanity can't be smack up against the wall on its left side - the baseboard heating will take up about three inches. Since we don't want to be looking at a three inch column of nothingness above the baseboard, we need a piece of trim to cover the gap. But ideally, the trim would match the vanity...so it needs to be ordered. The countertop itself will just need to be three inches longer, no worries there. But the stonework guy will want that vanity exactly in place before he comes out.

To tide us all over, here's the sink faucet we picked out. Just imagine it in a brushed instead of polished finish. This is actually a kitchen faucet, to accommodate Kevin's Big Manly Hands.
2. The baseboard heating needs to be installed in the addition. It works splendidly, by the way, in the existing house. But let us not forget that we still need to have a run of it installed in the current office ("the batcave"), which we haven't done yet simply because there is no room to manoeuver in there to move the furniture around.

3. Gary the solar dude (not to be confused with Gary the Deck Guy) needs to come back, make sure everything's working fine, and add the timer thingy that prevents the boiler from rudely stepping in when the solar panels are trying to do their thing. Then he signs off on the whole thing, and submits the paperwork for the tax credit. Oh, the solar panels are working beautifully as well. For days now, we've had the boiler turned to "eco", which means it only kicks in if there's a "drastic" temperature drop. I've done a kinky thing: I've showered with a meat thermometer (don't tell my mother) in order to determine how hot I actually like the water. (Survey says: about 108 degrees.) I've learned that it's common for the females of the household to like the water hotter. Apparently, guys are endowed with this thing called "circulation" in their extremities that means they don't need their water to be much more than what I would consider "tepid". Huh. At any rate, we've been getting our hot water exclusively from solar for a couple of weeks now. Rock and roll!

4. Oh yeah, the heat exchanger needs to be installed. Totally forgot about that.

5. Back to more carpentry-oriented stuff: The doors need to be hung and fitted with doorknobs. As mentioned yesterday, we picked out the doorknobs, finally. For the bedroom, we want a dutch door, so that we can get the light/view from the windows in the stairwell, but prevent certain cats, who shall go nameless but whose initials are "Charlie", from molesting us early in the morning. (No, he won't leap over a dutch door.) We found out some weeks ago that dutch doors will run you a cool $800 or so. Solution? Cut a normal door in half. So that still needs to happen.

Once again, imagine this in a brushed nickel kind of finish, instead of this bronze look, and also, we're going with the pain-in-the-neck square backing instead of that round one. (Sorry, the online catalog isn't the most sophistimicated.)

6. Rest of the flooring: I think all that's left here is the top landing.

Here's the downstairs closet, newly-floored in pine.

And here's the first landing, in maple.

7. Baseboards.

8. Wee bits of trim need to go up between the windows themselves, both in the addition, and in the bump out.

9. Stairs: the skirts - also known as stringers - are in on either side now. Next up: treads and risers.

We're using both kinds of skirts here. I forget their names. There's the plain vanilla one, as shown at left. And the toothy one that shows the treads (rather than hiding them), as shown at right. Oh, there's also the banister to go in. The banister will be kinda cool, actually - it will consist of steel posts and wire cables. We're going with a similar look for the deck. I've never met a balustrade I didn't want to destroy, is why. All that fussy lathe work. Blech.

10. Shelving under the windowsills. And, the standards and brackets for the stairwell. What, you say, are standards and brackets? I didn't know either. The standards are the vertical strips of metal that you screw into the studs, that are punched with little slots. The brackets fit into the slots at the desired heights. The shelves sit on the brackets. And, some sort of rod/shelf configuration for the closet.

11. The electrician needs to come and install all the light fixtures and whatnot. We still need to pick out a couple of things - the overhead light in the bathroom, and something for the hallway outside the bedroom. Other than that, we should be all set. I just picked up the ceiling fan and the pendants for the bump out today, and the gooseneck fixtures for the stairwell should be here any minute now.

12. Transitions: first, between the living room floor and the concrete floor of the bump out. And second, between the current house, and the addition. Also, staining the concrete a dark gray. While we're here, let's also mention that the handle on the door of the slider came in in the Wrong Color, Heaven Forfend, and that needs to be corrected before the demons of Poor Taste come for my soul.

Here we are, contemplating the transition from the living room floor, and the bump out. The crap paneling on the left is just that - it's a piece of old panel that's just protecting existing living room floor. The two boards in the middle are maple flooring of the sort on the first floor of the addition. It's just lying there looking pretty in this picture. And that's the concrete floor on the right.

As for the transition between the living room and the addition: what we've got here is a bunch of joint compound buckets filled with water - they are acting like clamps, weighing down the edge of the current living room floor. Jonathan was explaining this to Kevin earlier and I missed it, so I'm not sure what the story is. Something involving carpenter's adhesive. I believe a strip of maple will go up next to it. I may as well mention now that the addition is a few inches lower than the living room, so there is a step down here.

13. Insulating a couple of places: there is currently a hole chopped into the ceiling of the walk in closet, in case anyone ever needs to get up into the attic space above the bedroom. That needs to be closeable. There's a doorway between the walk-in closet and the attic above the existing house; I'm pretty sure there's some kind of wrap up work needed there - maybe some insulation, and a handle? And the trapdoor into the crawlspace needs to be hinged and I believe also reinforced - it's a little bouncy right now. Boing, boing.

14. Enlarging the opening between the current basement, and the crawlspace.

The guys had barely left this afternoon when we barged in, camera in hand, to see how things looked. We discovered that their awesome camp chairs for their breaks were upstairs, so we took the opportunity to enjoy the view and whine to each other about how much we want to be able to move in. Charlie came along.