UPDATE on the progress on the Home

HI!

We might be jumping the gun just a bit, but we took the rug we just bought and laid it out in the great room ..... just to see how it looks.

The rug is 10' x 14', so you can get a pretty good idea of the size of that portion of the room.

In the background you see the carved "art" door - it's been installed and we're looking for lock sets that have an extension long enough to reach through the 2-1/4" door thickness. Next steps for the art door is a light sanding, then staining on the inside - a nice brown - and staining on the outside - a southwestern teal blue.

In other areas, the kitchen cabinetry is going in. Here's the main set of cabinets; all that's missing are the two glass front upper cabinets that are on either side of the three smaller windows and an upper cabinet to the right of the range arch. The upper cabinets on either side of the three windows will have a set of open shelves connecting the cabinets below the level of the windows.

Chris has been doing most of the cabinet installations. In addition to the kitchen cabinets, he's installed the upper cabinet and the sink base in the laundry room, the maple counter top in the upstairs powder room, the barn doors on the pantry and the laundry room, and he has hung the art door and the front main entry door.

Cory and Chris have made a good team. Cory's specialty - and the only thing he does - is putting in spiral stairways. He's quite a craftsman, spending quite a few hours with a mallet and chisel carving out the form of the handrails. He and Joel took the handrail system that I've described before and formed them to follow the downward spiral of the stairs.






I've posted pictures of the view from the party deck before, and they haven't changed - yet. It's past the start of Autumn now, so the trees are beginning to turn and a week ago we actually had a light snow in Roxborough Park. September 13th seems a little early in the year to have snow! The party deck material is all in and solid, the stairs to the roof are complete, and it's beautiful standing up there just looking around. The only thing left on the party deck is to install the fire pit. It's a 48" diameter pit and we'll paint the lower portion of the fire pit, and add an upper ledge to the top so that people can sit near it with their feet up or sit their with backs to the warming fire.

As for the outside, the driveway has been poured, the walls around the house are up and have at least the scratch (under) coat on it. In most places, the stucco guys have completed the top (colored) coat.

This week the downspouts went on; hopefully they'll help with the erosion issues we have right now. The next step is finishing the sandstone covering for the back patio areas, and final grading and re-seeding outside the walls. If we get that down soon enough, maybe some of the winter grass will sprout and help keep moisture in the soil.

We're starting to put together a "punch" list - a list of items that we'll want corrected as we get closer to move-in time. As an example, the stucco guys framed three large East wall windows all the way around, and left three small windows right next to them unframed. That combination looks funny, so we'll ask them to add the frame around the small windows too.

Today we sent notification to Moover's Inc. for them to schedule shipping our household goods stored in Antioch, CA to our new home. That's a pretty strong indication that we'll soon be in the home! Wish Steve the Builder good luck as he and the sub-contractors move through the last few weeks of construction!!