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!