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!
