#31 - Before and After and After and After That

One year ago today, we were working on the house.
Today, we are STILL working on the house!

How naïve I was when we began.  I thought we'd be finished by Christmas (2017)!  How many of you pointed and laughed but just let me continue in my ignorant bliss, all the while knowing that it wouldn't go that quickly? It's fine because much like all the other things in life, until you've lived it you don't believe the people that tell you about it.

So, I wouldn't have believed you anyway. 

"Nah!  I'm sure we'll be finished by Christmas!  I mean, really, the framing was finished in early September and that basically means we're done," I would have said confidentially.  (I DID SAY that!)  And you would have just smiled and nodded and let me believe myself while knowing, in the back of your mind, that it was going to take much, much, much longer.  We did have one friend who told us the hard truth. Back in January (WHICH SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY!) made a guess that we wouldn't be finished for another YEAR and I was incredulous!  I laughed and snapped at him told him to bite his tongue, there's absolutely no way it could take another year.  Sorry Ed.  Naïve, I tell you, totally naïve.  I believe you now.

FRAMING IS JUST THE BEGINNING!! I thought framing was almost the end. I know better now.

So, what have we been up to?  And where do we go from here.

Here are a bunch of pictures, mostly in chronological order.  I'll caption each one with important information.

Our current master bedroom, this is a before photo I took back in April 2017 right before we started ripping into things.  Behind the armoire is where a doorway to our NEW master bedroom is now! The window is gone.  The louvered doors are where our current master bathroom resides. 

Imagine the louvered doors turned into a regular one-door doorway with a regular door on hinges.  Imagine a full wall extending from between the armoire and window straight ahead across the room.  The part with the hallway will be a hallway (duh) and the remainder of the bedroom will become a bedroom.  Redundant!  But different than what it is now!

The current master bathroom in April 2017.  This will have a regular door, like I mentioned above (because louvered doors on a bathroom ARE THE STUPIDEST THING EVER ANYWAY AND I'VE ALWAYS BEEN DIGRUNTLED ABOUT THEM!) and become a hall bath for the girls.  (AND I AM ALREADY THANKING JESUS THAT WE'LL HAVE MORE BATHROOM SPACE.  The kids' current bathroom is Smm--alllllll.)

 

A couple weekends ago, while the girls and I were not home, the menfolk cut the hole in the wall that goes behind the armoire.  The shot is from the addition master bedroom into the current master (the big black is the back of the armoire).

TADA!

Now onto the outside:


Where we were in the winter!

Beginning of Spring! Preparing to hang siding

We had to paint the back of the bottom courses of siding in order to protect it from splashing water, weather, etc. 

View from the street in Spring 2018

There it is!  The first courses of siding on the back of the house.  I believe at this point the siding was already up on the side around the left corner.)  I got the lucky job of painting all of the siding.  The color there is primed, not painted.  Painting is one of my very few skill sets in construction, so I have slowly been plodding along, rolling on 3 coats of paint with a four inch roller.  While Matt does ALL THE OTHER THINGS on the addition and cleans hairballs out of drains in our old house.  He's my hero for doing all of the other stuff. (And cleaning out hairballs.)

 I'll paint any day of the week if it gets me out of gross drain unclogging.  Except, I told our General Contractor (that's Matt in case you didn't know) that he could not even ask me to do 4 coats.  I would refuse.  Fair warning.  Let's just say one of us is very particular in a good way about how things should be (it all turns out so pretty!).  And the other one of us is okay with good enough.  Miss Good Enough and Mr. Particular don't always see eye-to-eye on the details.  But, thankfully, he never asked me to roll a 4th coat of paint so I didn't have to be put into the position to stand my ground and refuse.  Crisis averted.

And then we got gutters!  Praise the Lord!  Just in time for a bunch of rain.  We hired this job out.  The beauty of hiring other people is that I left for swim practice at 8:00 in the morning with all of the kids.  By the time I returned home at 10:15 it was d-o-n-e!  Paying people to do stuff is FUN.

I kinda think the dormer looks like The Flying Nun.  Try to unsee it now. The bottom is primer color. The top is actual color.

Okay, this was the treacherous part.  The picture doesn't do justice to how high he is up there.  Somehow, I managed to NOT get a picture of this because I was busy spotting him. But Matt had to climb that ladder with a 16' long piece of heavy fascia board teetering from side to side. (the fascia board completes the white box of the trim.  In this photo you can see the vents.  That's the wide piece of white.  The vertical piece is the fascia board.  Matt had to get that up there on his own without dying and it was kind of stressful.) 

We had all three ladders in use.  Right below the ladder, in line with the bottom of his shorts, you see a little wooden jig there.  He built and attached that to be an arm. When he climbed to the very very peak of the roof with the fascia board in hand (Imagine a tightrope walker with their really long pole), he slowly rested the end of it on the jig while he nailed the top of it to the peak.  I tried to take a video, but accidentally pressed stop instead of record because I was anxious that he was going to fall of the ladder.  Also, in an attempt to save him by grabbing our other homemade wooden ladder (pictured below matt--this photo was after I almost broke my neck) from the tree behind me, I dropped said ladder on my head and almost broke my neck.  This was a dangerous day. Our kids were probably inside minding their own business while their parents were outside being risky.  But he got the fascia board nailed up by being slow and steady.  His motto is slow is smooth, smooth is fast.  So there ya go.  I kept painting (see my paint tray and ladder in the foreground?)

Siding is all installed!  We used cedar shake vinyl on the gables to match what we already had on our current house.

The house of lotsa gables.

You can see the tiny tiny part above the AC where I could not reach with my tiny tiny roller.  No matter how high I stood on my ladder, I couldn't make it.  So Matt managed that for me.  That was coat #1--I think the day before father's day.  I just completed coat #3 a few days ago.  The time we have available to work on the house this summer has been in very choppy increments!

Matt holding the vinyl siding (NO MAINTENECE AND FAST INSTALLATION!) that will go on the gable end up to the painted siding (paint around every 15 years  At least our house will be paid off next time I have to paint this!).  It's a match!

I took this photo about 1 hour ago!  The siding installation is complete everywhere except . . .

here.  The front peak is in waiting right now. (this is from the spring, and it still looks about the same.)  Matt has been flipping and flopping between indoor tile work in the bathroom and outdoor work depending on the weather.  On rainy days he works inside (unless its TOO Rainy.  If it's too rainy, he doesn't like to use the tile saw because then he ends up schlepping all kinds of muck in and out from the tile saw to the master bathroom.  On REALLY rainy days, which are few and far between, he takes a break.)  Right now, literally as I type this, he's pushing hard to get the master bathroom tiled now that the outside is mostly finished.  We are VERY close to being able to get occupancy from the county.  And the bank has informed us that when we have occupancy from the county + when we're 95% finished, they will give us our final draw on our loan!  Which means!  MONEY!  We like money.)

Which brings me to the master bath.  I've shared pictures of this room already from when it was farther along, but here are some cute ones of our helper helping to repair the vanity we purchased.  It had a hole in the back and just needed some reinforcement before installation.

Progress

The backsplash tile choice from the backsplash/sink saga

I don't remember if I shared this already.  On the floor tile, we wanted a medium grey but it dried almost white.  So we overcompensated on the backsplash tile grout and ended up with what we thought would be too dark!  But, thankfully it dried a little lighter.  You can see the areas here, the difference between wet and dry is very obvious!

I was most surprised by the difference in color of the tile.  This is the exact same tile!  One is not installed, the other has the grey grout around it.  CRAZY!

Master shower with moisture-whatever-purple-drywall-for-showers-and-bathrooms

Master shower with Schluter Systems Kerdi Waterproof membrane.  And Matt laid a shower floor out of concrete.  We purchased the niche pieces from amazon--they're also part of the Kerdi line of  shower materials.

And here it is!  Almost finished.  The tile samples in the niches are various options I picked up from Lowes and Home Depot.  NONE of those is the winner, although, they were STRONG contenders!!  (The top 2 were in the final 3!).  I'm not holding out on you, I just don't have a good shot of the final final.  But, it's a grey arabesque lantern because WAAAAY back in the beginning of this project, I really wanted a arabesque lantern tile on the floor.  I wanted a giant 12-14 inch format, but they are only readily available AND budget friendly in a 6" or less format.  So, I'm going back to my roots, it wasn't my plan, but I ended up choosing a shiny grey lantern tile for the niches. 

The main shower tile is from Lowe's.  I loved the movement in the pattern.  And it has white (too keep it bright), grey (so it's not so stark and sterile), charcoal (to add some depth) and a scant amount of brown (to tie in the wooden vanity and mirror!).  I'm a pretty quick decision maker, and I've mentioned before that I love pretty but I love practical, and I usually have Mr. Practical over my right shoulder and Mr. Pretty over my left shoulder and they both whisper sweet nothings in my ear.  I wanted to find a stylish, classic, pretty tile at a pretty darn cheap price.  When I decided upon this tile, it fit the bill.  But, I actually only looked about 3-4 of them at Lowes.  I had NO IDEA there were tiles in the boxes that were so white.  On the first day Matt was tiling, I wasn't home for whatever reason and I came back and was a little bit nervous nelly over the variation of the tiles.  The ones I saw in the store had a very mild pattern.  I wasn't expecting the variation.  I probably wouldn't have selected this particular pattern because I would've have thought it was too busy for my taste.  BUT it turns out I LOVE LOVE LOVE it! 

The floor tiles are small squares just like the small squares we have in our current master bathroom (which Matt gutted and renovated about 4 years ago.) 

And here is the is the upstairs bathroom.  The lighting for photos is rarely any good.  It's so much prettier in person!  But, this is 100% complete! Praise God from whom all blessing flow (get it?  I actually have that statement hanging in our current hall bathroom and I've yet to have anyone comment on the little play on words.  Maybe I'm the only one who gets a chuckle out of it. )  Trash can, toilet paper, artwork (by non other than Miss E when she was about 10.), the works. It's rocking and rolling, running water, flushing toilet!  We aren't supposed to use it yet because we haven't gotten official occupancy of our new house.  But you can infer what you will by the toilet paper, trash can and handsoap.  Those are pretty strong clues for you, Sherlock.

And this is the tile graveyard.  A friend from Matt's work has loaned us the tile saw for the past many moons, and we're thankful.  Matt will most likely be able to return it after maybe 1-2 more sessions of tiling!  It'll be fun to clear that out!  And then you know what happens next?!  Wood floors!

Here's where we started over a year ago.  But, I wouldn't change a thing. It's going to be all the sweeter when we get to move it.  In our culture of instant gratification, I'm (usually, mostly) thankful for the lesson in waiting.  I wouldn't call this tribulation...but the God tells us in Romans that tribulation brings perseverance, and perseverance, proven character, and proven character, hope!  And hope is a good thing!  I'm hopeful that this'll be done sooner than later, yo. ;-)