Tile, Trim and Priming

Todd has been working hard to finish all the trim around the doors and windows. He has done a great job with it. All the seams are tight and he makes sure that there are no funny slivers of wall -- he put thought into how he trimmed out each door and window. From the pictures above you can see that the trim has several pieces so that it looks like original craftsman trim. Today I started work on the trim in the old part of the house, in spite of Matt's disbelief that I would be the one doing it. I got to break out my birthday nail gun for the first time -- it was awesome! My goal is to get all the big pieces of trim on before painting, since I don't want to paint and then switch out the trim. I don't mind doing the smaller pieces (the crown and the bead at the bottom) later -- right now I just want to get a good start on it.




As you can see in the pictures above, the roofing crew came back and finished the tile roofs over the front porch and the back porch. They look really good. The roofers also had to fix some tile on the side porch, since the stucco guys broke a bunch of tile when they were up on the roof putting stucco on the parapet. The outside of the house is really starting to come together. It should be painted in the next few weeks, so it will start to look really finished!



I also worked really hard this week priming the outside of the casita. It took me 3 and 1/2 days to prime the entire outside. There were two challenges: first, the porch has all sorts of little fiddly places to paint, and second, the stucco is really rough, and even with a really thick roller cover it was hard to get good coverage without leaning into the roller. That is fine when you are painting eye height and below, but it is hard to put enough pressure on the roller when painting above your head. I spent a lot of time climbing up and down the ladder to get the primer high up the wall. Hopefully the paint will go on more easily.

We are definitely heading into the home stretch -- the painters are coming next week and the tile guys and floor guys are on tap. We'll keep the pictures coming!

Subcontinents, Stucco, and Blackberries

Todd finished installing all of the kitchen cabinets. The banquette looks great, as you can see in the picture above. All we need to do is slide in the awesome table that the cabinet guys made and we will have a great place for breakfast and lunch. In the picture below, you can see that the subcontinent is in place -- bigger than an island but smaller than a continent. Once it has its top it is going to be great. I can't wait to fill the big flat space it offers with lots of piles of stuff -- just kidding, Dad! Todd did have one complaint, however -- we have lots of wood tops on the cabinets, which meant he had to scribe all of them to meet the walls. He did a really good job, though, and they all look fabulous.



The stucco has been completed as well. We had to pay more when we redid the roof to have the parapets covered in stucco instead of metal, but it was worth every penny. The stucco guys did a great job when putting on the final coat, and it looks just like it did before, with the nice, rounded parapets. You can see how nice it looks in the picture below:



The front porch looks great now that it has been covered in stucco. The tile that we added to the front of the porch bring in a traditional look -- we always regretted that our house seemed to be the bargain version of the bungalow without the tiles above the windows that many of the other houses like ours have. We fixed that by putting some tiles above the top of the porch. You can see them in the picture below.



They have installed the doors, as you can see in the picture below, and are working on the trim. The doors look good and Todd is doing a great job on the trim. I don't have any pictures of the trim, but will put them in the next blog. The one problem so far is that the laundry room doors were terrible! They are the cheap louvered bifold doors that slide on a cheap track. We are going to have to replace them with doors that look like the regular ones and open out instead of bifold ones. So far it is one of the few missteps that we have made, but we need to correct it because you can see the laundry closet doors from just about every room in the house.



Our blackberries are finally getting ripe! You can see how beautiful they look in the picture below. It was worth fighting for them when we did the trenching -- they are pretty much the only plant left in the backyard that we really care about!

Surprise for Molly

Molly has been at camp all week so we decided to paint her new room to surprise her when she comes home tomorrow. It makes sense to do it now anyway, because it is easier to paint the walls without all the trim in the way. We got two coats on the ceiling and the walls today. Jake did the first coat on the walls while Emily and I were at softball practice and then the three of us did the second coat when we got back. The pictures show Emily and Jake painting. Molly chose a very pretty color of yellow -- the color of the walls in the picture of Jake is more accurate than the color in the picture of Emily. Emily's picture is affected by the red plastic on the drop light that turns the walls kind of orange.

Part Way Through Cabinet Installation

Todd, with a little help from Matt, has been working over the last two days to install the cabinets. He did the kitchen first, starting with the window wall and then doing the wall with the stove. He did the lower cabinets first and then did the upper ones. He said it is much easier to do it that way. Then he moved on to the bookcases and cabinets against the back wall of the family room. Today he did the cabinet for the A/V components and the two side cabinets that act as window seats. He also did my desk and the bathroom vanity. The tough cabinets are yet to come -- tomorrow Todd needs to do the island and the banquette. I hope he feels better -- he has been fighting a terrible cold the entire week.

The picture below shows the wall that will have the TV on it. The two side cabinets have two big drawers each and will double as seating. The middle cabinet was built to Jake's very specific requirements, and has pull-out shelves, kerfs in the shelves and the toe kick for ventilation, and all sorts of other features so that it can hold all the A/V equipment (which we don't have yet.)


This picture is my office nook. The cabinets above are a little extra deep to allow me to put all my big binders and everything away. With a little diligence, hopefully there will only be one or two piles on the desk, instead of the whole thing covered with paper!


The bathroom vanity is in a similar vein to all of the other cabinets:


These next two pictures show the kitchen. The top picture is a close up of the window wall cabinets. You can see the hole for the dishwasher. The sink will be to the left of the dishwasher, with a recycling bin next to that. The long, low cabinet in front of the installed cabinets is one of the seats for the banquette -- all the tops came separately. In the bottom picture you can see our two upper cabinets against the wall that the kitchen shares with the dining room. The big cabinet blocking the view of the bottom cabinets is one side of the island -- it is the side that will face the sink.



Finally, the picture up at the top is the table for the banquette. It is beautiful! The top is 1 1/2 inch solid alder. They delivered it the day after the rest of the cabinets. There are still too many cabinets in the family room to take a good picture of the bookshelves, especially since the refrigerator is sitting right in front of them. I'll include a picture when I show the island and the banquette.

Lots of Deliveries

We got the cabinets delivered today, along with the new doors and all the trim. The cabinets look beautiful. I was so excited to see them. Matt and Todd are going to start installing them tomorrow, so I will try to post again soon to show them installed. In these pictures, you can see the new kitchen/family room filled with all the cabinets and Emily in the middle. I was also excited to see all the trim. Pretty soon it is going to start to look finished!

Jake is home from work this week, so we are doing lots of finish work. Right now we are painting all the trim in the casita to get it ready for final. Painting trim is exceptionally slow and boring, as I'm sure my mom agrees, but it really makes the place look nice. We have a few other projects that we would like to finish up as well.