more doors, more floors

The end keeps getting nearer, as a lot of detail work continues. We've assembled the preliminary contractor's punchlist of all the outstanding items, most of which should be completed next week, the rest of which we'll walk through with the contractor shortly after that. What's left after that point is our own work: assembling and placing a lot of furniture (most of which we bought at Ikea), and rearranging the two downstairs "bedrooms" (currently a bedroom and a study: the bedroom will become the study, the study will become Rose's "crafts" room). That should be finished by Christmas, if we can find time to put everything together.

Here are some photos: the stairs were sanded and refinished, and they look like this (still some trim to be applied along the tops of the pieces on the wall):



The door hardware has been installed on the two pocket doors: the single one on the bathroom door -



- and the set for the closet:

floors and doors

Work on the trim continues. Doors have been installed as well for the bathroom and closet.

Here are two shots: one looking into the bathroom and showing the door surround, the other from roughly the same position showing the pocket door half-closed:




Here's a shot from inside the closet, where flooring was finally installed, showing the flooring and also the double pocket doors:

it continues...

More trim has been installed, including the door frames (or most of the door frames) for the bathroom and closet doors, as well as the doors themselves (no hardware yet, though). The last bit of flooring (in the closet) has been installed.

No photographs, because between the position of heavy equipment standing in place because it's still being used and my inept photographic technique (or my lack of mountain-goat grace in clambering to odd positions precariously placed atop table saws or whatever), I have no usable photos.

flooring and trim

Except for the closet, all the flooring is in place - and I think they did a fine job aligning the flooring with the stair nosing I featured yesterday, in particular the herringbone pattern solving the corner problem. It would have looked awkward to have a series of short slats of wood along the ledge, running the same direction as the wood on the floor - but this solution strikes me as elegant, and it will look even better once the railings are in place, since the corner of the railing there will delineate the space a bit more clearly:



Here's a clearer shot of the base where the railings will be installed:



And here's a shot of the materials to be used for the baseboards, etc.:

at the top of the stairs

The stair nosing is installed.



This wood is the same wood that will be used for window trim and the baseboard; it will be stained to match as closely as possible the red oak flooring.

The rest of the day the crew installed nearly the remainder of the subflooring (you can see it in this photo) and the flooring in most of the rest of the area, but since it was then covered with protective cardboard to allow the crew to work without damaging the floor, no photo of it.

Two minor problems: there was a defect in a few boxes of the flooring which meant a higher-than-usual rate of unusable planks; the seller agreed to take back the defective flooring for credit on replacement. Fortunately, this won't really cause much delay despite two weeks' lead time, since the only areas left to floor will be the closet and maybe a bit of the narrow ledge next to the landing.

And we miscalculated the amount of tile needed (in a kind of forehead-slapping way...), so last night we picked up the remainder of what we needed (it was a small enough quantity that it was easier and cheaper for us to pick it up rather than have Erik or crew do so). Tile guys are scheduled in today.

floors and tiles and paint and things

Lots of work getting done the last couple of days. On the exterior: the back window's rough frame-out is nearly done:



Inside: the first coat of paint is on the walls and ceiling:



The tile installer has put down the gypsum-board underlayment. In this shot you can also see a swatch of the accent color that will fill this wall below the ledge at the very top of this image, as well as the alcove in the bedroom. The actual color has more red to it - it's hard to get accurate color given the reliance in this photo on late-afternoon natural light or flash, which tends to wash out darker colors). You can also barely make out the tile we'll be using in the bathroom (more visible at the larger size):



And the flooring has begun to be put in place:

inside and out

Inside: most of the subflooring has been installed. Here's a picture:



Outside: most of the exterior trim on the old dormer (with the new window) has been installed:



The only exterior that hasn't been initially finished is the rear of the house, which I imagine will get done sometime next week. Tomorrow (oops - later today) the drywallers return to sand and finish the drywall.

floored genius

We made our first major purchase today: some flooring. A little bit jumping the gun...but a local lumber liquidator had some very impressive sale prices on some very good merchandise, we went down to check it out, and we decided this was probably the best deal we were likely to get. So it'll be oak flooring, prefinished, in 3/8" thickness on backing - it comes in varying lengths (approximately 6' long) to give the impression of the variability of traditional wood flooring. The existing floor (which will be the subfloor for this) is some ratty old pine, which is unlikely to sand well, so we decided this option would give us a good quality look without having to rip out the pine and put in entirely new flooring. Had I been thinking, I would have brought the camera along and taken a shot of the sample...but all things in time: once it's installed, which won't be until near the end of the process of course, then I'll photograph it.