A Few Fun Purchases

For the last few months, it seemed like everything we bought was a pipe, a pump, a valve, a fitting, a zip tie, an elbow, a P trap, a bracket, a staple, or some other little thing needed in huge quantities that would be painstakingly put in a nook or cranny only reached by climbing up a ladder into the rafters. Then we purchased our kitchen cabinets which, as shopping goes, was a LOT more appealing to me. Now we’re onto some other fun details. Like this grill:

It may seem a little early to get a grill for our covered patio off the kitchen and dining area, especially since it’s currently filled with snow and looks like this:

But that snow will melt eventually (hopefully before July, because that's when the last of the snow finally disappeared from this spot last summer), and the grill will allow us to do more cooking while we’re working. No more heating up burritos on our fireplace. Curt found this almost-new commercial infrared grill on craigslist for a steal ($300 rather than $900) and it was already modified to hook up to a natural gas line like we have. It should be a lot easier to work with than our tiny hibachi that has a lid without a handle. That has served its purpose for warming food when needed, but the more time we spend up there the more we will eat. And we have some long weekends ahead of us. I predict a lot of cheeseburgers in our future. You can even convert the sideburner to a griddle.

Curt also bought these speakers which he can install since the wires have already been run. These arrived the other day and they are bigger than our heads. We’ve been listening to a contractor’s little boombox since last July and mountain radio leaves a lot to be desired. On one station, we can listen to classic rock. The other station is pop. Journey or Katy Perry. Grateful Dead or Lady Gaga. The Who or Selena Gomez. Gag me. I’m sick of both, and looking forward to using our iPods/iPhones with these newly installed speakers. Our “work site” should be much less messy soon, and more iPod dock-friendly, with sawdust being a distant memory. Drywall dust is another story.

We also bought three of these outdoor lights to hang over the front door, the door of our bedroom that leads out to the deck and also over our house numbers over the garage. Thanks to some Amazon giftcards from all of my parents for my birthday (which I think were meant for eBooks for my Kindle, but I’ve kept myself occupied with free library eBooks so far), we only spent about $100 on all three lights. We went with black to play up the big black brackets holding up the posts for the deck’s roof.

And this wasn't a purchase, but Curt built a gate for the deck off our front door and bedroom door. He built one for our townhouse deck too and it allows the pups to hang out and not run away, which one of them (Greta) would just LOVE to do. He'll probably hang it tomorrow when he's at the house for the insulation inspection.

The drywallers start next Wednesday!

Business and Pleasure

After a long break from sleepovers in our frigid, empty house, we’re headed up this weekend to try it again. The weather looks cold, in the 30s and maybe even a little snowy. There is a winter weather warning, but who knows, it could end up only being a dusting. Don’t want to get my hopes up. It will be a good test for our brand new, fully completed insulation! Though heat won’t be running through our PEX system underneath the floors, we will be able to use both fireplaces on the main floor, which should be much more effective with insulation. We have a few tasks to do, namely basking in the warmth of our thicker walls, but we’re also going to take advantage of some late season snow (generally a sure thing in Colorado as April tends to be one of the snowiest months, unfortunately right as all the ski resorts close) and free afternoon concerts slopeside in Breck – Toots and the Maytals on Saturday and Rusted Root on Sunday. We saw Toots a few years ago at Red Rocks with Bonnie Raitt, and attempted to see Rusted Root on our first 4th of July weekend in Colorado in 2008 at Copper Mountain, but the show got canceled at the last minute – as we were sitting in our car in the parking lot eating our picnic lunch and scrounging for more clothing layers to put on as the temp dropped from 70 to 40 – due to hail, thunder and lightning. Meanwhile it was over 100 degrees in Denver that day… 

It’s sad that our second weekend on our boards may also be our last of the season. Also sad that the mountain is currently only 61% open (down from 63% yesterday, boo) and one of the four peaks is already closed. Breck is extending their season by two weekends this year to celebrate their 50th anniversary, so we may get another day or two in if we’re lucky. Otherwise we’re crossing our fingers that the 2012-2013 season blows this one out of the water (especially since we bought next season’s ski passes this week for a cool $509 apiece), and also a little appreciative that we didn’t have to fight ski traffic too much this year, nor did we have to fight ourselves and our desire to board, since conditions were pretty snowless and disappointing. As a result, we stayed on schedule as much as we could, and for that I’m thankful.

We’re also hauling up some equipment in the truck that will be used next week to get our water system started up, including a 200-gallon storage tank. Since water is coming out of our unfrozen well, we can get everything up and running soon. That means (I hope) a functioning sink, a flushing toilet and best of all heat. Maybe April will now be the last month of the portapotty.

The Albatrusses

Curt thought this truss issue might be the death of us, but we passed our inspections last Thursday and now he can breathe a sigh of relief. After losing a month on our schedule, having to pay a structural engineer to examine the trusses and then doing some reinforcements to them per his recommendations, the inspector didn’t even go upstairs to look at them! The nerve! It turns out that our friendly inspector Don is friends with the structural engineer, who also happens to live near us. So he just took the engineer’s word for it, I guess. Too bad we couldn’t have done that a month ago. We also passed the re-inspection of the fireplaces after Curt redid some piping, and we also passed the mechanical inspection. We can now officially run the fireplace in our bedroom AND the big brand new one in our living room.

But most importantly, that means our insulation started on Monday! First step was spray foam. We subcontracted this out but prepped for this step by clearing everything away from the exterior walls. We also put in rolls of metallic bubble wrap in the ceiling of our garages last weekend to improve heat retention there. We had a guy helping us that day - Sam, who has done a bunch of odd jobs when he's not working at a ski shop in Breck - and he stapled through our PEX twice. It was painful to hear the air hissing out of our precious plumbing after working with the PEX for what now seems like months to get our system to hold air. Luckily Curt repaired it quickly, but more patches equals more chances of problems in the future. We’d already jackhammered through the PEX in the basement bathroom, and cut out a few spots that were crimped, so it’s not perfect by any means.

Curt and Martin also finished the last of the soffits around all the basement plumbing so the drywallers can work around it.

Last Thursday, Curt also poured another layer of concrete in our master bathroom shower. There is a layer of water shield under that, plus another layer of concrete underneath to give enough slope for drainage. Now it’s ready to be tiled! We’ve been scoping out tile and have quite a bit to purchase – for our entryway, pantry, wine room, mudroom, all five bathrooms floors, four tub walls, a shower surround and two fireplace surrounds – so we haven’t picked anything out yet. I used water from our well to fill jugs to mix the concrete and it was exciting to have water come out at all, though the water was orange from rust because we haven’t really used it yet. 

I was hoping to connect a hose to it to wash our deck so it could be restained, but the hose was frozen. We only stained half the deck last fall before running out of stain, and you can see the line where it ended.

The last piece of good news we received last week was that our electrical permits that we thought would expire in July actually follow the schedule of our other permits that don’t expire until December. I wish that meant Curt would relax a bit, but it’s not likely. We are anticipating about a week to get insulated, followed by an inspection (ideally both would be completed this week), probably two weeks for drywall, followed by an inspection for that, and then we are done with inspections until those required for certificate of occupancy and final completion. Once drywall is completed, we have someone lined up to get our plumbing and pipes running which will take three days to a week. We bought our boiler which now sits in the boiler room. We even have a pedestal sink and toilet sitting in the basement just waiting to be connected in our basement bathroom. All four tubs are in place, just waiting. Our master tub has actually been cemented in. We just bought the faucet for this tub too. I've always wanted a faucet with the H and the C on the handles.

In May, we will start putting mortar and backerboard all throughout the main floor and loft. Then we can start putting in our kitchen cabinets. And lay our pine beetle kill wood floors. And paint the walls!

The Threat of Summer

With the delay due to the missing truss paperwork issue resulting in wasting the entire month of March, we’re starting to leave the threat of the cold, harsh winter and instead about to deal with the different but equal threat of the long, hot, fun summer approaching. While spring and summer make work more bearable (at least due to the more comfortable temperatures - as it's been in the 50s and 60s for weeks already in Breck and solid 70s and 80s in Denver), there is a new challenge of fighting the calendar of fun events that is already filling up. For example, June. Probably my favorite and busiest month of the entire summer. There are already things popping up for each weekend that month: first, a concert at Red Rocks plus the chili and beer festival in Aspen, then my favorite brewery’s anniversary party, then an outdoor musical festival (luckily we already have tickets to this so we can’t skip it!), then my newest favorite brewery’s very first anniversary party (on the date of our fifth wedding anniversary to boot – a double whammy of fun - or maybe a triple whammy since it's close enough to ride our cruisers there). June is also a big birthday month for friends in Denver. Even our pup Penny celebrates her birthday in June :)

The following week is the 4th of July with lots of free concerts plus a big yoga festival in the mountains that weekend. The weekend after that, another brewery celebrates their anniversary and the town Breckenridge throws their summer beer festival. And so on. These are the weekend events that make living in Colorado so wonderful – my favorite things in the whole world! Sunshine, festivals, fairs, farmer’s markets, delicious food, live music, riding our bikes everywhere, supporting my neighborhoods as well as local businesses like food trucks and craft breweries…the absolute best time of year, after ski season. Let’s not forget camping! With the unseasonably warm weather we’ve had the last few weeks, it’s hard not to get excited for (and distracted by) summer activities. 

Though we’d hoped (I’d hoped) to be reasonably done with a somewhat liveable house in the timeframe of our anniversary on June 30th and the 4th of July, I know we have to be realistic about this new, very unexpected delay and when our weekends will actually no longer be occupied with projects and work on the house. It will not be in June, and it may not be in July either. Needless to say, this year we’re going to have to miss some, and probably many, of these events which breaks my heart. But this pressure is on because we have permits that expire in July. Expensive, annoying permits that neither of us want to pay thousands of extra dollars to renew. While these are small sacrifices the pay in the grand scheme of things, and I know I will have many more summers to enjoy here, I can’t help but be a little bummed about it.

On the bright side, we will be up at our house Thursday for a re-inspection and hopefully they let us move forward to insulation and drywall. We paid one of our neighbors, a structural engineer, to analyze the trusses and verify that they are solid, with a few braces and modifications that were finished last Saturday. It was a definite surprise to be asked for the truss paperwork since the trusses were a part of the structure we originally bought, not something we built ourselves. It was even more surprising that the company who made the trusses would not help us out, and said they did not have any of those files, even though they are still in business and the trusses were put in less than five years ago. It was also surprising that Summit County held us up due to this missing paperwork, after we breezed through our inspection otherwise. So we've lost a whole month, and now are looking at paying double what we expected for drywall rather than doing it ourselves because we need to make up some of the lost time. Painful but hopefully the last big hit to our budget.