Concrete and Deliveries

Thanks for all the anniversary wishes! 

And back to business....

On friday before we left for the city our concrete guys were working hard pouring the slab in the garage. When we got back on Sunday we had a shiny new pad:

This is a horrible picture. Is there such a thing as a good picture of a concrete slab? If there is this is not a good example. Whatever, you get the idea. I am sure you've seen a garage before. 

Now that we have the slab poured (we are now done with concrete!!!) we can move forward with a few things. We had all of our tile (except for the backsplash that was back ordered), our interior doors, interior hardware, and trim all delivered. 

All of our tile stacked up, waiting to be set. I had mentioned earlier that we were unable to schedule a tile setter that would work with our schedule so we are going to attempt this on our own. One of the local tile setters is going to give us a quick run down on what products to use and what exactly we need to do. It's a little daunting but I think we can handle it. 

Our doors and trim are waiting for our painter to come home from holidays to be painted. He can also finish up our first coat of paint! I am so excited to see it painted. Our house is so white right now, it's throwing me a little bit. I am worried that when it is finally painted the house is going to look so dark compared to the bright white it is right now. 

Once the doors and trim are painted and the tile is laid my brother in law and his crew are coming up to do the finishing work for us. He figures they can do all the laminate, the baseboards, door and window trim, custom shelving, and some wainscoting trim in 4 days. The husband and I are a bit leery of his timeline but I am excited to see all this work done. We are going to be so close to move in at that point! 

I am so glad that we are at the stage where each little thing looks like progress! 

Happy Happy Anniversary!

Today is our one year wedding anniversary! I can't believe that we got married one year ago today!

I have some advice for newlyweds, don't build a house together your first year of marriage. We've had people tell us that if we can make it through building a house together, you can make it through anything. I have no idea how true that is, in all honesty it hasn't been that bad. It's more the idea that we went from planning a wedding to planning/building a house pretty much back to back. Looking back over the last three years or so I feel like all we have done is plan. It's going to be so weird to go back to a normal life where we don't have anything major to plan. We'll have the time to do things we want instead of the things we have to do.

We decided to take the weekend off and go into the city. It was so nice to get away and not have to worry about work or working on the house. We went out for dinner to celebrate our anniversary but the rest of the time we spent shopping for stuff for the house. We ordered some new furniture and we hit up Ikea, Crate and Barrel, Homesense, and Home Depot.

The back seat may or may not be full too.

Yup, I get a car full of furniture and The Husband gets some work lights. That's how we roll around here. 

Paper, Pipes, and Cabinets

While my parents were up my dad helped The Husband put up some more building paper:

The whole front is pretty much done now. We're missing the part over the front door which will be really easy to do once the front step is built (on the schedule for next week). We need the fork lift operators to come so we can do the little peak over the garage. They did some more paper around the sides and back too but once you've seen one paper you've seen them all. Or something like that.

Our mechanical guy came and laid the in-floor heating pipe in the garage. We are all ready for slabs now!

And I saved the best for last.....

Cabinets!!! Our cabinet guy came and got started on the cabinet install. We have more done than that one wall but that's all I am showing you for now ( I am such a cabinet tease). The cabinet manufacturer didn't ship two of our cabinets so we have to wait for those to come in now. One cabinet was made the wrong size but our cabinet guy is amazing and he's going to fix it on site.

We love how they turned out. I can't wait for them to be all installed with the hardware on and the countertops in. It's going to be amazing. Or at least we think so.

I also finalized the appliance order yesterday (squee!!).

What's Going On

We've had quite a bit happening around here the last couple of days.

Let's start with the things that are finished:

1. The drywallers are DONE! Yay!
In the house at least, they still have three walls left in the garage to do but that can be finished whenever.

2. The whole house is primed:

The Family Room primed and the ceilings painted

3. The ceilings are painted.

4. The prep work for the garage slab is done:

5. Our lights are ordered!


Now for the things in progress:

1. The first coat of paint is started.

First coat of paint in the laundry room

2. My parents are down for a few days and they have been busy getting the yard cleaned up and planting some trees.

The pile of trees that were cleaned up from around the yard

A new baby tree

3. I am working on finalizing the order for our appliances.


And the things scheduled for the rest of the week:

1. The in-floor heating in the garage is set to be installed on Thursday.

2. Our cabinet guy is coming to install the cabinets on Thursday.

3. If our concrete guy can schedule the concrete for Friday they are going to come and pour our slabs.

4. The painter is coming back on Friday to keep working.


That's a lot of stuff going on!
Things are coming together, it's slowly starting to look like a real house now.

Hungry Hungry Caterpillars and Other Delays

This last week was a bit disappointing. We had a list of a few things that we wanted to accomplish on our own and were hoping to get the drywall mudding wrapped up and the drywallers out of the house.

The drywallers keep giving us different dates for when they'll be done. Each day they keep adding on a day to when they think they'll be done. It is so frustrating. We would rather they were honest with us so that we could schedule things accordingly. Our painter finally just showed up and told them that they had to be done by the 18th because that's when he was starting. Hopefully they stick to that or I'll be whipping out the paint brush because our painter is gone on holidays for two weeks after that.

The drywallers had originally told us that it would take them two weeks to do all the upper floors. By the time they are done it will be a month. I find this ridiculous. My BIL is building a house that is a bit more than half the size of ours and it took their drywallers one week to do their whole house.

Unfortunately we also have day jobs so we can't dedicate all of our time to working on the house. We are self employed so we have some flexibility as to when we can work on the house and when we need to work. Sometimes our clients have to come first though. This last week was pretty much spent getting caught up on work. We did get started on prepping the slab in the garage though:

We had a few other things that we wanted to get crossed off the list this week but it just didn't happen. We got the materials delivered so when we aren't so busy with work we'll be ready to get back to work on the house! 

The rest of the work on the house this week was worm control. They seem to be getting worse. They are getting close to being done their feeding stage (that and there's no leaves left for them to eat) so they are migrating towards the house and pretty much everywhere else. Our garage doors aren't on yet so they were started to climb the walls in there and on the ceiling. They are climbing all over our camper, in the hubcaps and on the tires of our vehicles, on us if we stand still too long. They are EVERYWHERE. So gross. 

Here is a before and after of the trees in our yard. The left picture was taken right when we first started to notice them. The one on the right was just taken today. 

It makes me so sad. I can't wait until the leaves all grow back and we can forget about these disgusting creatures. 

What's Been Happening

A little update on the worms. They are getting worse but I guess that's what happens. By next weekend the worst of it should be over and they should be close to being over. Good riddance. Because the worms are going to be gone soon The Husband and I have decided that we need to keep working on our schedule as originally planned. We were thinking about finishing all the exterior finishing but we just aren't ready yet and by the time we would be ready the worms are going to be done their thing anyways.  

So back to regular scheduled programming...

The drywallers have been working their butts off, seriously, they work seven days a week. All of the upper floors are almost mudded and the basement is completely boarded (or as much as we are getting them to do). They figure they will be done at the end of this week or early next week sometime with all of the drywall work in the house. 

Hopefully they stick to that and we can get our painter in next week or early the week after and then...CABINETS!! ( I am not excited about that at all). 

There isn't anything left for us to work on inside until the cabinets are installed so we are working outside. We have been doing some yard clean up and trying to keep the worms under control. We are about to get started on prepping the garage slab and then we will be done with concrete (no more rebar tying! yay!). 

In some other, more exciting news The Husband and I ordered our tile and it should be in on Friday! Here's a little peek at some of the tile we ordered:

We also ordered all of our interior doors, trim, and hardware. We will be ordering the laminate flooring and lighting soon!