Complete! Kinda!

 With a week til move-in (sshhh, don’t tell the City of Boulder) it was game-on! In went the front door – primed and almost ready to be painted “red delicious”. The mailbox was up, the numbers and the pendant lighting are all functional. I was already getting mail as of the 25th!

The tiler was back and the floor was going in to the mud room and each of the bathrooms.

Windows and trim painted white. Walls getting their first taste of Pale Oak.

The carpet upstairs and the french doors to the living room… still waiting on those.

The rest of the doors are drying. The guys have them standing up in the living room upstairs. Genius way to store a bunch of wet doors, if I do say so.

And here come those French doors!  Still with the plastic film on the glass, but painted. 

I got my first glimpse of the marble floor tile and it’s a good match for the now “existing” wall tile. Oh, thank goodness!

The next steps include  hexagon tile in the shower base (quite the skill involved!) grout, counter tops, seat top in the shower, soaking tub installation, shower glass and then… fixtures. All those faucets I have been hoarding at Longmont and a car load of towel holders and such.  Yes, we have come a long way, but with so little time left, it’s hard to believe it will mostly be done in by early September.

The master bedroom is ground zero for the master bath tile station. Every party needs their own space to work, create and achieve.

The electricians were back and light fixtures began appearing. All those stored boxes finally opened and my online choices now apparent. In a way a breathtaking experience, but mostly lots of anxiety as I finally make peace with selections made online, in the middle of the night sometimes. It doesnt help they are attached to decent sized invoices and until now, never seen with the colors and finishes of the rest of the house. ‘Tis true what they say… You gotta have faith (or drink plenty of wine).

Those of you who remember my kitchen prior to this remodel will maybe also remember the hand blown blue and green wave glass pendants that hung over the island. They are still in storage. The downside of raising the ceiling is that those pendants were just too high for the room now. While I could have replaced with like-type new pendants, I instead stuck with my modern farmhouse black and glass theme. These are seeded glass to provide a little continuity to the pendant now hanging outside the front door and the bathroom vanity fixtures, yet to come. 

See all the boxes on the island under the pendants?  Door handles! For whatever reason, it took me 4-5 trips to home depot and 2 shipments from Amazon to get door handles that were just right! OMG, I have never been more frustrated with myself than after successive trips resulting in the wrong handles or not enough of them. How hard is it to count doors??!! In my defense, put some thought into the types of locks and handles you have in your own place and you’ll be surprised at the complexity. Front door and garage door to house lock with keys – they have deadbolts too. Office doors have keys but not deadbolts. Bathroom doors have push locks from the inside, but not keys. Closet doors have handles that latch, but not locks. French doors have dummy handles and just push, rather than latch. The lock sets ranged from $30 – $130 and the handles without locks from $20-30. Oh yeah and when you order 4 dummy handles, that is what you get. They are not like other handles that come with bits for both sides of the door, they only come with one side… so you have to order another 4 if you want handles both sides of two sets of French doors! Live and learn. And thank goodness I accidentally paid for Amazon Prime a month or two back because I have used two-day shipping to death this month!

The pendant over the stairwell was chosen for the glass ball detail. Once the dining room chandelier is hung, you’ll see why.   I also have something to hand in the master bath in this vein.

One week to go…. Its now August 30th and the Longmont house becomes home to tenants on the 1st of September, so Mark and I are hustling to get most of our stuff put into the two car garage there. We have the use of it for the first week of Sept, courtesy of the awesome tenants but the bits and bobs we will need between now and September 7th, when the real move happens, are being shoveled into our cars. Uh-huh, that does include a blow up mattress, linens, clothes, gadgets, office stuff (for me) and pet accouterments.

And because I had nothing better to do (NOT!) I decided the best thing to do for the yellow patio furniture before moving it to the new house, was to paint it the same color as the new house. After all, if we have no table and chairs inside the house for the next little while, we should have a nice looking outdoor table on which to drink coffee (and more wine).

The countertops arrived and the fixtures were installed in the bathrooms, including mirrors. I guess I stopped taking pictures at some point that week too…  It was a brutal one for sure and in between two closings and a double move, camping at a partially finished house and the physical challenge of always being either driving or moving heavy items, I hit a wall and from time to time, found myself sitting on the stairs unable to focus my eyes or make conversation or commit to one more decision! I needed to just be home, in a real bed, to cook my own food and yes, to be able to find things… the little things that make life easier, like car keys, dog’s brush, snacks.

August 30th was also the day they unveiled the soaking tub (post grout of the master bath) and set about installing it. Dear God, these things are a pain to install! There is a flex-pipe connecting the plug hole to the drain underneath that must not be squashed etc as the tub is set in place.  You only find out it has a leak once bath water is run as a test…. and you see it oozing through the ceiling in the kitchen, damaging the work done by the master plasterer last month.  

I know what you are thinking… Disaster, right?!  Read the next post to understand why in the end, everything is relative and watching a leak appear in the kitchen ceiling didn’t even raise my anxiety a single minute!

Picking up the Pace

 At this time, you’ll already be guessing (if you read the last post) that an end of August move in is but a pipe dream and that despite the onsite guys working like madmen to get so many things accomplished every single day, the universe has it’s own plan. Ken was super gentle about trying to reset my expectations and it probably stressed him out to hear me say, we’ll be there September 1st!

Picking up where I left off; the carpet saga continued. The next phone call I got from sweet Brian at the flooring department in The Home Depot was one of the most frustrating to date. Both he and I began to admit the level of control we have over these things is about close to ZERO. The carpet mill informed him on Monday morning that the carpet had come out of production on Saturday and would ship that same Monday afternoon, thereby putting it in Boulder Friday the 1st of Sept. When Brian called them back Monday afternoon to confirm the shipping, he was informed that the carpet was not out of production after all! Seriously?  Yes!!! While this was not Brian’s fault, he was on the other end of the phone when I lost it. I asked him when it would be out of production and he informed me that nobody knew.  I called bullshit! Either the mill is producing my carpet and someone who works there is aware of this, or it’s not, and that is also good info to have and I expected Brian to get a hold of the person who had some/any info that was helpful in this regard and get back to me. He agreed to call me the following day @ 10 am.

I sat at the dining room table in Longmont, surrounded by half packed boxes, no comfort food and an increasingly attractive bottle of wine and had a little meltdown. I’ll admit that after working every day since February, physically exhausting myself with packing, financially stretching myself with a new house, mentally draining myself with decision making and emotionally losing it with a guy who sells flooring, I was about ready to curl up in fetal position and retreat inside my head until further notice! 

Mark came home shortly afterward and somehow managed to get past my wall of negativity and convince me to investigate alternative carpets at our friendly Longmont Carpet One. Off we went… Me with no expectations of finding success, slumped over in the passenger seat of his Jeep, a scrap of the Home Depot carpet in my tired fingers, almost resenting his “solution oriented approach” to my bad mood. What did I do to deserve this guy?! He has the patience of a saint.

Carpet One was awesome. They took us out the back to the warehouse area, pulled out samples of the stuff they had in stock and when one appeared that was close enough to the HD order, we committed to it and booked their carpet installers too.  John-Paul climbed the ladder to the top shelf and put a large hot pink HOLD sign on my giant roll of carpet. Installation was scheduled for Sept 5th and 6th and I texted Ken the good news. (He then took on the task of cancelling our HD order for me.)

Back at the house, this was happening in the second week of August:

Paint!

The trim was painted white and the walls were primed. Aaron installed a beautiful hand rail and pickets on the stairs. The guys were now turning their time towards working on painting doors and some exterior clean up, while the house had to be closed up.

Exterior lights looked good. They used my old flagstone hearth as the new step for the storage unit. Great idea! I’m all about recycling, reusing and gifting as much as possible during this Martin Acres new construction project.

I know what you’re thinking. Things are back on track!  Kinda. Until I fell on the stairs at the Longmont house and did some damage. The ankle was as right as rain in a couple of days but it would be 3 weeks before the toe (fairly sure it was broken) would not need to be taped to relieve pain. Not that I really had time anyway, but this sealed the fate of the feet that already needed a pedi. Oh dear.  🙁 

Some days you just have to “suck it up, Buttercup” and carry on. So I did. 

Next on the list was selling the hot tub at Longmont. The new tenants were not hot tub people and I didn’t relish the thought of seeing some sort of soupy mess in it at the end of a year lease. It found a buyer within hours and I’m happy to say its new family are going to love it like it deserves to be loved.

Racing to the Finish Line!

 We are on the home stretch...

At the end of July I began the unenviable task of packing up the current digs in Longmont. There was 2000 square feet of Mark’s and my stuff, 18 months of boxes still unpacked from our last move(s), accumulated “stuff” before and during the last 18 months and the general disassembling of the Longmont life of two single people who recently combined households. I swear, people thought I was crazy for beginning to pack, purge and clean, so far out from the projected move date of August 25th. But I knew better. When the final week is upon you and work is crazy, the house is chaos and EVERYTHING needs to be cleaned and organized, it’s too late to begin.  And honestly, it’s too stressful on any couple if we all care to admit it. Who wants to be cleaning the blinds at 3am on moving day? Not me. 

Around this time, I secured a lease for the Terry Street house too and my new tenants, hot off their cross country move from Brooklyn, had possession starting 12pm on the 1st of September. Striking a balance between the security of having rental income and a real, fixed timeline for getting out, come hell or high water, is tricky. My anxiety levels were at about a 7/10 and set to rise.

Meanwhile back at 285 Martin Drive there was an astounding checklist scheduled for the following month. Really… Astounding!

In the first week of August alone the wood floor was laid and got the first couple of coats of water-based finish, the bathrooms were half tiled and trim was installed around the windows and door frames. Pocket doors appeared as if out of nowhere.

The bathroom vanities arrived and were installed… Then covered to protect them. So this was the last time I saw them for quite some time.

At this time, the kitchen pantry and upper cabinets were resurrected from the hangar and returned to 285 Martin Drive. I was excited and anxious to see how the kitchen had survived it’s travel, storage, weather factors (when the roof was open) and being boxed in place for so long. I still had some waiting to do as the island remained sequestered and the appliances had not made the trek back yet.

Subway tile was in and awaiting grout. Where is the floor tile?  Hmm… still coming. You see, I had chosen to take the same tile as used in the kitchen for the guest bathrooms and the mudroom. The problem being, the tile in the kitchen was circa 2010. While I was not sure if the tile was still in production, I was sure that it was no longer carried by the local tile store. Ken was up for the task though and patiently had his tile gal scour the country for the exact same as the kitchen floor was dressed in. It took a week, but he located enough to complete the job! All that remained was shipping… which seems easy enough, but really isn’t!

At the same time as this was going on, the tiler discovered that the Carrera marble tile I chose for the bathroom was fraught with complications too. You see, the subway marble on the walls was a different thickness to the hexagon I chose for the floor. Again, not a problem if they never have to go side-by-side. But they did. I wanted a border of subway tile around the hexagon on the floor and with the hexagon being thinner, it was never going to happen. You cannot build up tiny tile underneath because it will surely never be laid without some unevenness and becomes pretty noticeable.

I found a tile supplier in NJ that met my needs and quickly ordered subway tile and hexagon tile that was all 3/8″ thick. Perfect right?  Yep, except for a couple of minor details. 1. With the subway tile already on the walls, we had to pray that that the new stuff was a good match to it. 2. Shipping tile across the country is apparently a royal pain… And now Ken and I had matching tile shipping woes. The transport company swore it would be here in 5 business days, but it was almost 2 weeks later that it actually arrived. That stretch of road between Ohio and Denver is where the tracking stopped and someone must have been hand carrying it! Ugghhh… Why promise if you can’t deliver? Why send a tracking number if you don’t send it via a vehicle that utilizes tracking? (Uh huh, the customer support rep that I talked to, literally told me that the tracking had stopped in Ohio because it was transferred to a truck that didnt do tracking! Useful?!)

The tile I ordered, arrived about the same time as Ken’s floor tile, after the tiler had to move on to another job temporarily. A little delay to our timeline ensued. It was not to be the first or the worst.

Remember when my upper living room was a taco station for the drywallers?  Now it was a work station for trim and about to undergo another functional transition shortly, too.

Everyday 285 Martin Drive was a hive of activity. More electrical – I now had outlets. More HVAC – the duct work was complete. More everything! I spent many of my days going back and forth to Home Depot and the like, to choose carpet and bathroom counter tops and onsite, a thousand little decisions were frying my already fragile brain. If this wasn’t dementia prevention in the use-it-or-lose-it extreme, I don’t know what is.

Mark and I spent a Saturday morning choosing carpet at The Home Depot. The staff were friendly and it was time well spent, taking our painted drywall piece with us as well as little bits of tile and a scrap of cabinet, in order to be really sure the color we got looked good and the carpet felt nice underfoot. At decision time, we were advised to first call ahead to HD and confirm the carpet was in stock. It was apparently on sale because they had ordered miles of it… but we were told that was no guarantee. Go figure.

I called and got the ok that it was in stock and placed the order. Later that week being informed that “in stock” generally meant they had it at the mill, but not actually in Boulder. Ok…  I also found out that when HD gets something shipped to the store, it only arrives on a Friday. The carpet needed to be shipped from goodness knows where by Monday afternoon in order to make it to Boulder by Friday afternoon, or expect it to be another week before it can be picked up. Annoying but doable. It might have made it the 18th, the the 25th was looking more likely.

The next week, after being told it didn’t ship because actually it wasn’t in stock and was still in production at the mill, it was more annoying. And we had definitely missed the carpet installers window. Drat! Now it was looking like the end of August before my carpet could be picked up at HD, assuming no further delays.

Stay tuned for the outcome of this little saga. We are getting ahead of ourselves now.  Just know that the french doors were joining the carpet and tile in competing for the title of “most accomplished at delaying move in”.

 Footnote: Months after writing this... reading it for the first time since stopping to take a breath, I found OODLES of mistakes. A testament to the brain-fried state that I was in as tasks, deadlines, orders and decisions sucked the last of my sanity and wherewithal.

Week 21: Where has the time gone?

Time flies!

It has been busy, no lie. Between the constant progress at our Boulder Home 285 Martin Drive project, the busy real estate selling season and the “change over week” madness that comes with property management at the end of every July, I’ve dropped the ball on updating you. So bear with me…. there will be a lot of pictures in this post!

Since we last chatted, they finished the wood floor removal and installed new plywood subfloor on top of the old subfloor with lots of screws and glue – essentially curing it of those 60 year old squeaks that, at best, were my burglar alarm.  Three inch wide red oak was installed on top of that throughout the main level, up the stairs and along the hallway on the second floor. 

On the outside, they finished the roof. The black metal porch roof and little roofs over the upstairs windows.  True to the modern farmhouse look and I love it.

Two minutes before the first thunderstorm in a month, the gutters were completed!  (And tested well.)

The garage door is on the way, but in the meantime, we needed a placeholder, so it could be framed in, trimmed out and the garage door opener installed. Check it out!  LOL.  Gotta love the fake wood detail that is painted to look 3D.  I can only imagine what is going through the neighbors minds right now. 🙂  It’s temporary!  Despite what it looks like, I haven’t run out of money (yet).

Then it was time for the tile guy to arrive…  He has 3 bathrooms, the mud room and ‘pet peeve’ of mine to work on.  Ok, since you asked, let me tell you what has been bothering me for 7 years since the kitchen was renovated; One tile was installed with a square cut out of the end of it in the kitchen, close to the base of the island. It took me a couple of weeks to discover it after the workmen had left, but once I saw it, it could never be unseen. The truth is that someone cut the tile wrong. Maybe they had a plan or something… but it clearly went awry and rather than replace that tile, they must have just hoped I’d never notice and saved themselves some effort. Perhaps I could understand if there hadn’t been plenty of extra tiles left over that could have be used to replace this “oops” – but there were!

The master bathroom shower has it’s pan in place and ready to tile. The hold up? I chose a hexagon marble for the floor and subway marble for the walls. After a bit of deliberation (weeks!!!) I also opted to have a border with subway tile put around the hexagon floor. Here is where the issues began. Home Depot sells both these products but the hexagons are like 1/8″ thinner than the subway tile… meaning my boarder would be slightly raised – noticeably so! Since you cannot build up the floor under the hexagons without high risk of setting them unevenly (and it would be visible), the search began for subway tile that was a tad thinner. No joy. A spot of unsolicited advice for the tile folks; Try selling coordinating tile that is the same thickness rather than using millimeters for one, inches for another and not even giving it a decent go at getting those similar enough to use together. <sigh>  

Back I went to the website I found in June that sells all their coordinating tile in 3/8″ thickness. Hallelujah! I expect delivery from New Jersey next Friday.  Thank you www.marblesavings.com 

Aaron worked on trimming around the windows and installing baseboard inside last week. And the load bearing post was disguised as stair-rail beginnings… Which I’m very impressed with.

Earlier this week Ken and I went on my favorite kind of shopping spree – the free kind! Well… truth be told, I own all the stuff already and it came from 285 Martin Drive in March. Trust me, it was never free, but at this stage in the journey, going and picking out existing things from storage to re-use in the house is a beautiful thing.  I hit the storage hangar bright and early with my role of plastic wrap and set about getting the list of things we needed, ready to go. 

The list included:

• Finish kits for the solar tubes
• Pantry and kitchen cabinets
• Range hood 
• Spare tile

And while I was there, I wrapped the washer, dryer and refrigerator in preparation for their trip home in the coming weeks. There is a growing list of things that will not be able to be reused so if you know someone looking for a jetted tub, pedestal sink, single vanity with curved wood front, gas fireplace insert (designed for existing chimney), 6 panel doors in frames or vanity lighting, please reach out and I can take pics for you.

Naturally, it’s cabinet installation time. I was kinda thrilled to see the kitchen coming back together and just as excited to see the makings of vanities in the bathrooms too. 🙂

What’s on the agenda for next week?

Some tiling? Wood floor finishing? Garage door installation and paint? The rest of the trim work inside? More bathroom cabinet progress? I’m not sure. There is no shortage of projects and we are <1 month from moving in, so one thing is for certain; there are no idle hands around here! All I know is that I’m supposed to have picked paint and carpet by next week… And my brain is exhausted.

On the bright side, I found house numbers at Home Depot last night  🙂