Tile and Brick

I had to run out to the house site today to drop off some bull-nose tile for the master bathroom. While I was there, I had the opportunity to snap a few photos of the tile and the brick!

Here is a shot of the tile that will go on the floors and in the master shower.

The picture doesn't do it justice, but here is how it will look when we put decorative, smaller tile in the shower. We will do two sets of rows.

This is looking into the house past the laundry room and then kitchen. Again, the photo does not do the tile justice!

And now, the brick!  This is the walk-out basement. I love how old the brick looks...as though it's been there for years. 

This is the back corner of the house looking along the back.

Can't wait to update again with more pictures!  Hopefully the master shower will be finished and the paint as well.  Also, I believe once this brick is finished, they will begin working on the deck. That's super exciting - it wraps around three sides of the house!

A lot of catching up

This one might be long! It's been about two weeks since I've posted and a LOT has gone on! It's hard to know where to begin!

First off, we FINALLY have water!! That's probably the single most exciting thing to date. We have been waiting for a significant amount of time for our pump. We dug the well almost a year ago and we just now got our pump. The pump is outside the house because we want to run water to the barn as well. Of course that means the job isn't actually FINISHED yet...but we can turn the spigot and FRESH water runs out a hose.  That's huge.  

Eventually, a pump house (with a heater) will be built, but for now, we have a small blue pump out front!

There has also been a great deal of progress INSIDE the house. The drywall is complete and our doors are in.  This is a picture of the front hall closet (french doors). We will also have french doors (matching these) on our office. We had thought they'd be glass doors, but knowing how our office often looks, Tim and I are happy to know they will be solid!

I'm not really sure which door this is, but it shows what a single door looks like!

Here is a pic of the front door.

We recently had to choose tile for our house. We went to a tile outlet center and lucked out on a pallet sale.  We needed about 620 sq ft and we found 672 sq ft on sale for $550! We bought it. Then we chose some floor tile for the shower.  I thought I had a photo of what we chose for flooring in the kitchen and baths, but I don't really.  This is going on the floor of our shower.  We will also use some as a decorative border to break up the solid tile we have for the walls.

The only flooring/shower wall tile I have is this sliver to show against the shower floor. It is grey. The tiles are 12"x 24" and i think they'll be really neat.

We also chose some brick for the outside.  We are using Hardie Siding on the house, but we also need brick for the walk-out basement. This is the brick we chose (ignore my lovely foot there)!

Inside the house, Tim had a lovely surprise for me. We have spindles on our stairs and, despite the fact that I loved these little wrought iron basket spindles, I thought we were going with wood, When I went out the other day, Tim had surprised me by having the contractor get the iron ones!

In other news, we did have a great googly-moogly moment on Friday.  We were to meet our contractor at the site so we could discuss paint and tile. The tile subcontractor was there as well; in fact, the tile guys were there before anyone else was.  Because they're efficient guys, they got started on their work.  As you may recall, we are having radiant floor heat in the bathrooms, laundry room, basement, garage, and kitchen.  Instead of traditional electric radiant floor heat like this

we have hydronic radiant floor heat, which looks more like this.

So...when the contractor came and we started chatting, he heard a screw gun and went running up the stairs only to see the tile guys had already installed the cement backer board flooring in both upstairs bathrooms. They used standard 1.5" screws...and a lot of them.  We could not even begin to estimate the number of times our pex (that orange tubing) had been punctured.

While both the contractor and I were willing to allow for the miracle that not one screw had punctured the pex, Tim was not so willing to accept that!  Saturday afternoon, our contractor did a pressure test with air. He removed each screw one at a time (and then replaced it) to find any and all punctures/leaks. Much to our relief, there were only four punctures in the pex.  They have since been repaired, and we hope all is well. I will be beyond upset if there is a massive water leak in my house when we get the system up and running!  As of today, the contractor put 65psi of air through the system and it held pressure for well over an hour, so we think it is good.

This week, the paint, tile, and brick is getting done. Looking forward to posting more updates!

More progress

I know - another 'double post' day...but that last post needed to be on its own!

This post is about progress and stuff from today.  We begin with a new photo. I shot this to show the metal roof and the front door. The lighting is a bit off because I had to overexpose the photo in order to see our front door. We love it! Admittedly, it would have looked even better had we put a transom window above it, but since we did not do that throughout the rest of the house, it would have been odd.

This is just a photo that shows the roof a little better in terms of color. You can also almost see the results of the dirt work and tiling we did on Friday.  

This is the view out our front door! Of course, that post won't be there, nor will the pile of gravel, but you get the idea.  There will be a well-house, but we will decorate around it with shrubbery, so it won't be an eyesore.

This is the view out our back door. Again, the sawmill does not live there! There will be a garden and maybe chickens over there!

So...the sawmill was out because we had some work to do.  A friend of Tim's gave him some cedar. We milled it today. It is absolutely beautiful. The fun thing about milling cedar is how pretty it is. The weird thing is how much you feel like a gerbil because of the smell!  We have decided we are most likely going to use this cedar in our kitchen/great-room. We will nail it up diagonally on a half-wall under the bar.  I have a feeling it's going to look amazing!

We are hoping the well people come out Tuesday like they said they would so we finally have running water. We dug the well some time ago but never put the pump on it, so we cannot access the water. Huge pain when you're out there and need to go potty and you have to carry rainwater in buckets to flush!  It will also be nice to have really clean water to wash hands, instead of using rain water, baby wipes and germ-x!

Dig deep!

Despite the fact that we have a great contractor, we don't necessarily have great sub-contractors. One such not-so-great subcontractors is the dirt guy.  One funny thing about the dirt guy is that the contractor's wife calls him a landscaper.  I think of him more as an excavator guy.  To me, landscaping and excavating are two very different things; this is the guy who dug the footers for our house and was supposed to lay tile around the foundation and back-fill the dirt.  Again, this would be an excavator.

Enough about semantics.  

A problem with the dirt guy is that, despite the fact that he's good at what he does and he's reasonable with his prices, he is unreliable as in he does not return calls, nor does he necessarily show up when he says he will. To me, this is a huge problem. To the contractor, it's a hiccup he's willing to tolerate. (We are quite different in that regard.)

We had been waiting for the dirt guy to come lay the tile, gravel, and back-fill the dirt around the house so we can move on. We could not start the porch without the dirt work being completed.  It seems the dirt guy had said (multiple times) that he'd be there to finish the work.

He neither appeared nor returned phone calls.  Tim was getting aggravated and texted the contractor that "[he'd] do it [himself]. LOL." The contractor replied something along the lines of "I know you said 'LOL,' but you do have the equipment, right?!" The answer was 'not exactly' but, ultimately, a plan was hatched wherein Tim was going to do the drainage, gravel and back-fill.

Much to his chagrin, our son was recruited to assist with this endeavor. It had rained multiple times while we were waiting for the dirt guy, so what should have been a quick easy job was now significantly more difficult. There was a good amount of digging and cleaning to be done...all by hand...before laying the perforated pipe and gravel. My job was to pick up garbage. As anyone who has ever had a house built knows, subcontractors throw their garbage EVERYWHERE...even when there is a perfectly good dumpster right nearby. I've never seen so many dip cans in my life! I picked up bottles, wrappers, lids, and even a sock (??!!).

After cleaning, Tim and Connor dug out the trenches and put down the tile. While we were working, our contractor had two loads of gravel delivered. We dumped and spread the gravel two-feet deep all along the front and back of the house.

I should mention here that it was amazingly HOT last Friday. I believe the temperature got up to 97 and the heat index was well above 100. Tim and Connor got out to the job site at 6:30 am to beat the heat. I joined them around 8:30.

Finally, around 12:30, the job was finished. Connor was exhausted, as was I. We left. Tim continued to work. He met up with the central vacuum installer as well as the contractor, who came out to check on how well we did the job.

Crisis Averted!

Today was an exciting day at Happily Ever After.  Today WINDOWS were installed!  I'm telling you...this house is SO stinking cute, I can't stand it.  Seriously - I love it.  And it's a good thing, since we plan to spend forever here!

That being said, we had a minor crisis of sorts arise yesterday.  While we were meeting with our contractor to sort out some stuff, the roof guy came to look over everything.  He then gave our contractor his price for our roof.  We decided long ago that we wanted a metal roof.  There is something about a farm house that screams "METAL ROOF BELONGS HERE!" so that was our plan.  We (and our contractor) were shocked to learn the labor for the metal roof was going to be a good $200/square more than a traditional roof.  

(Please note that I know I did not write "square foot" or whatever because it's not a square foot...it's called a "square" and I think it's 10x10, but I'm not even sure of that.  My OCD is in overdrive that it simply says "$200/square" without a unit, but apparently, that's the way it works!)

Anyway, at that price, our roof was going to run us a good $8000 - $10,000 over what was budgeted for a roof.  Now some of you may say that's not too bad, and in the general scheme of things, that may be true, but all I could think of is other things to spend that money on.  And, truth be told, if I'm going to go $10,000 OVER budget, it is NOT going to be on the roof.  I just can't justify that.  Besides, we have a metal barn. If we want to hear the rain on a metal roof that badly, we can go stand in the barn!

Tim and I had resigned ourselves to the fact that this was just a huge compromise we were going to have to make.  No metal roof.  We had come to terms with it.

Then, today, Tim received a text from our contractor that a second bid came in at only $1000 over our roof budget.  We can swing the $1000, especially since the framing labor came in $922 under budget!  Woohoo!  Metal roof it is!

Walls!

Things are really moving along at Happily Ever After.  It's kind of crazy - and super exciting.  The crew delivered our lumber on Monday and began framing the house on Tuesday.  They have gotten so much done this week; I expect framing to be completed by the end of next week.  Again - CRAZY!

Here are some pix of the progress.

Looking into garage

Looking into basement

 Front corner will be our office

Front of garage

Looking straight at house

Back of house (bay window in kitchen) 

Garage again

Back of house - second story

 Front of house - second story

Looking at garage from barn

Can't wait to go back out there this weekend and walk THROUGH the house! 

More choices and decisions!

My friend Nichole warned me about choices coming at us quickly, and we are, for the most part, prepared for that.  What she did NOT prepare me for was how *many* choices there are, and how much I might not like any of the choices with which we're presented!

Monday afternoon we met with our builder again.  Have I mentioned how much we like our builder?!  Anyway, we went to discuss some changes we'd made (that we decided to 'unchange') and check on some things.  All went well, but we were told it was time to pick out our bathroom fixtures. So...off we went, yesterday afternoon, to Ferguson to make some decisions.

As we waited for our sales associate, Tim and I wandered around the showroom.  We learned two things: (1) everything is overpriced and (2) there wasn't much we liked.  When our saleswoman (who was extraordinarily nice) came to us, she was able to dismiss our apprehension.  She showed us some "normal" tub surrounds that we chose for the kids' bathroom and the other full bath. We discussed our master shower and she had some great advice for us on that.  Then, she pulled some faucets out that weren't on the showroom floor. We decided to go with this for our bathroom faucets. 

The only thing we knew walking into the appointment was that we wanted the oil-rub finish on everything. Our saleswoman was great and pointed out some neat stuff.

For the kitchen, though, I was being a pain.  There was literally nothing in the store I liked.  I knew what I didn't want, but that seemed to be all they had.  Finally, we decided on something much like this photo (except this isn't quite the right finish).  

I couldn't find pix of the shower head we chose, but we went with an H20Kinetic system.  We also chose the more efficient toilets.  We are on a well, so we want to be as conservative as possible with our water usage. A friend of Tim's has an H20Kinetic shower in his house and loves it.

Next up will be appliances and lighting fixtures.