As you may have noticed, I've lost the ability to come up with even remotely clever titles for these blogs. My mental capacity for this stuff is just gone. I think it's a defense mechanism.
We've had still more frustrations over the past couple of weeks, including a ton of re-work from the electricians of stuff they either (1) did before we finished the walls but don't remember where they put wires, etc. - they currently can't find wires for the flood lights; or (2) didn't do but should have done before we finished the walls. We have changed nothing from an electrical standpoint since we did our initial walk-through. The electrician, however, has sent at least three different guys out, and apparently none of them has any idea what the others did or didn't do. We are also several thousand dollars overbudget on electrical work (shockingly - haha, I crack myself up), AND those are the guys who are going to have to replace $1,500 of carpet in my office. So Phillip will be speaking with their "head guy" to try to get us some relief here. I'm so tired for paying for stuff to be done multiple times, not to mention all the extra work I'm paying for to patch walls where they've cut all their holes trying to find wires.
Also, we had a lovely toilet sitting on our front porch for a couple of weeks:
Our powder room toilet apparently had a hole in the toilet bowl that was leaking onto the hardwood floors. Which is awesome. Thankfully, Luis found the leak and got the toilet out of there. Not so thankfully, it remained on our front porch for a long time while they waited on a replacement bowl to be delivered. Also, there were at least two nights when I arrived at the house to find water (presumably from said toilet) either on the floor or on the paper covering the floor (which just sits there dampening the floor). I get the first night, because apparently that was the day that the leak was found and the toilet was banished, but I don't know how the water got back on the floor the second night. I've stopped trying to figure it out. All I know is that I've spent way more time than I want to cleaning toilet water from a brand new toilet off of a brand new floor in a house that I DON'T EVEN LIVE IN.
In other awesome developments, as you can kind of see in the toilet pic above but can see better in the pic below (which also still contains a portion of toilet because WE CLASSY), my beautiful stamped concrete porches, which I loved and were a bright spot in this otherwise hellish process, ARE CRACKED ALL TO HELL. There are small cracks all over both the front and back porch, AND THIS HUGE CRACK LEADING STRAIGHT TO THE CENTER OF THE FRONT DOOR.
We are in discussions as to how to remedy this. The concrete contractor's response was, "Concrete cracks; I don't know what to say." As you can imagine, this was very disappointing to me, especially considering that we hired this guy because, when we met with him in his office, he said his company specifically got into "flat work" in addition to their poured wall work because someone had done a floor in their building that ended up all cracked and ugly and they said they could do it better. And the front porch on our old house (the back porch was actually a Trex deck on the old house) DID NOT CRACK. Also, the two non-stamped porches on this house DID NOT CRACK. Phillip tells me he's never seen cracks like this in a porch this size. He's blaming substandard raw materials (which doesn't make sense because the other two porches aren't cracked); Ben thinks someone dropped something (probably stone) on the porch to cause the crack; I don't really care what caused it; I just want it fixed. Skulls crack, too, Mr. Concrete Man, but they obviously look and function much better when they're not cracked, so let's come up with a solution that keeps my porches and your skull intact, mmmkay?
In brighter news, you may notice in the picture above (if you can avert your eyes from the huge porch crack) that Timo and his guys have stained my front door. I'm really happy with the stain color, and the door has tiger stripes.
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| Yep, still a toilet tank. In case you forgot it was there. |
In case you've never had the pleasure of doing it, it's really, really hard to match stain colors across several different kinds of wood. Our hardwood floors were pre-finished, but they're a white oak with a grayish-walnutty color. Our stair treads are...something that I can't remember, but a white wood; our beams (inside and outside) and the tongue-and-groove ceilings on the porches are pine (which is super yellow); and the porch posts are pressure-treated something (which takes on a green tinge). The door is mahogany, which is red AF. I wanted all of these things to match (and to match the concrete on the porches) reasonably well, so there has been a lot of stain sampling, mixing, more sampling, more mixing, etc. Had I known how difficult it would be to match the dang pre-finished hardwoods, I probably would've picked a different floor, because they have been the bane of my existence. Well, one of the banes. I was terrified to have the door stained because we'd pretty much be screwed if we picked the wrong color. And everyone knows I don't need to buy a THIRD front door. But I think it turned out great.
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| From the inside. It doesn't match exactly, but we knew that was completely impossible, and it blends well enough that I'm happy. |
Another thing that has turned out great is the master shower. It's quite a bit different (finish-wise; the shape is the same) from the one in the old house. My goal was to go completely cool in the master suite, whereas the master bath in the old house had some warmer tones thrown in.
Luis has continued to work on the grading around the house, and we actually just poured concrete for the sidewalk and the pad outside the garage (we won't concrete the whole driveway until we complete our shoreline stabilization project, which is going to require lots of big, heavy trucks coming down the driveway). I don't have pics of the concrete yet, but there's always next time. The grading looks good, though.
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| The front side is actually kind of looking like the house is done. The porch posts aren't stained yet, in case you're wondering. |
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| Then you get to the back side and realize the back porch area is still heavily under construction. |
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| Part of that construction apparently involves people drawing strange dresses on my trim pieces. |
I'm aggressively trying to nail down a Certificate of Occupancy date at this point. We have to get the plumbers back out to finish their stuff; the electricians still have to dig us out of their debacle and pass a final electrical inspection before we can get the "final final" inspection; and we have to get a final elevation certificate from our surveyor before the C/O will be issued (because of all that awesome floodplain stuff that was such a headache throughout the loan process). We've also still got some outstanding cabinet items, painting, and I'm sure a million other things I'm conveniently pushing from my mind right now, but I don't think any of those will keep us from getting the C/O.
Luis brought the cleaning crew in this week, and they've cleaned bathrooms, windows, and baseboards to this point. They will also be finishing up my dust-vacuuming duties, as I was vacuuming under the master bath vanity with my Shop-Vac over the weekend, and my brush attachment fell off inside an A/C vent that did not have a cover on it. So I'm out of commission until someone goes under the house and retrieves it out of the ductwork.
I'm thinking we're still another couple of weeks out, at least. I think we'll always be a couple of weeks out.
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