Our house is looking so different! I don’t even recognize it. All of the sudden, our wood floors are in. Everywhere! The only spots left to do are both flights of stairs and two closets off our master bathroom. Curt finished our bedroom two weekends ago and finished the living room on Saturday and the dining room, hallways and upstairs office/loft area Sunday. I can’t believe he finished it all (with the help of Sam, our last laborer standing, and a little bit from me). The pine beetle kill still needs to be sanded and oiled which will probably happen in the next week or two once we figure out where to rent a sander.
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| I had lots of fun using a staple gun on this tar paper - took out some tension by smashing the floor over and over! |
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We're going to put PBK paneling on the outside of that peninsula underneath the bowling alley countertop
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While they were doing flooring, I put up some more rocks on the front of the house until I was stopped by a crazy rain storm. I’m never going to finish these dang rocks! And now the patio is ready for rocks too… I guess I have my hands full this coming weekend. Putting up rocks. Yay.
On Sunday, I spent about 8 hours dry sanding our concrete countertops with a tiny block and three different grits of diamond paper. It was about as fun and fast as it sounds (not very). Imagine sanding a sidewalk with a chalkboard eraser all day. But it actually seemed to be more effective than the wet sander we used a few weeks ago. In retrospect, maybe we will skip that step because it took an entire day also, and sprayed a fine mist of wet concrete all over our cabinets, walls, outlets, light switches, floors and us. But I made enough progress with the sanding to finally be able to roll our countertops with the first coat of protective sealant. It didn’t look so great as I rolled it on, and I was thankful Curt wasn’t there to watch how blotchy it looked. He told me later that he knew it would look like that as it was being applied because he watched a video on it. Wish I had known that, it might have prevented some stress! I will apply another coat this weekend and we should be good to go. Luckily the sealer darkened the countertops a bit because they were lighter than Curt wanted, even after adding a little bit of charcoal stain to our mix. We’ll see what it all looks like when dried.
The three remaining showers were tiled, meaning all four are done and ready for their faucets. I wish I had taken a picture of our massive master shower fully finished now that it's totally covered in travertine because it looks like a big orange cave. We still need to do a little bit of sanding and cleanup work on the concrete countertops in our bathroom before we put our faucets in, but we did hang lights over our sinks and tub so we’re getting closer to finishing that room.
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| Pretty penny tile Curt bought at the Habitat for Humanity Restore |
For the most part, we’re down to hanging doors (two are already at the house for us to hang and decide if we like them before we order the rest), painting and putting in trim, staining the wood window/door trim, putting carpet in the two upstairs bedrooms, tiling the kitchen and entry and putting our appliances in their places. We’ve picked a date for our final inspection – Friday, August 24th - because that’s also the day the pro cycling challenge will cruise over Hoosier Pass by our house. And we want to watch it! If we pass that inspection, we will officially get our certificate of occupancy. Curt is in a huge hurry to get to that point because it means we can take a small loan from our finished house’s equity (most recently appraised in February at about 50% completion for almost $500k) and pay his family back for the money we borrowed a year ago to complete our project. It would've taken us another year or more to finish the house if we didn't borrow that money, which was very generous of them to lend. The small mortgage we will have after we take out that loan combined with our current mortgage will still be cheaper than the mortgage on our last house here in Denver, which is great because that was our goal.
Just a few weekends left! WHAT?
I cannot wait....
ReplyDeleteI love that image of sanding the sidewalk with a a chalkboard eraser!
ReplyDeleteI still can't get over all the tiling you guys had to do. We've done a fair amount of tiling, but never all at once like that, so I wouldn't be surprised if you're having nightmares about it all. Or, more likely, you're just so cool and jaded that it's NBD. :-)