End of September Update — Doug & Travis Are Going Places!

The builder has mostly been focused on carpentry and tile prep activities in September.. During the same time, we’ve been trying to get some things done ahead of moving in so that we’re not buried in projects.

Cabinets

We came back from the lake after Labor Day to find a lot of cabinets installed in kitchen, dining room and living room (as well as all the utility room cabinets on site waiting for tile before they can be installed). This would have all be great news if everything was correct. The carpenter did a good job of getting good dimensions for all the cabinets related to appliances. Unfortunately, beyond that, he took a lot of liberties on size and much of it didn’t work for us. In the kitchen, he ended up having to modify 8 or 9 cabinets and move the whole island. Luckily he was able to do this quite quickly - about a week. Everything in living room was fine. He had to adjust several of the dining room cabinets also. Now that he’s made all those changes, we think they look great, although we don’t have doors/drawer fronts yet - so final verdict is pending. We had provided dimensions for everything so it’s frustrating that he didn’t pay attention to those and had to do rework (sure it was frustrating for him too).

Kitchen is mostly walnut cabinets with an island that is painted with some walnut shelves on one corner. Builder had his guys do the painting this week and it all looks good.

Meanwhile - the quartz folks have started work and currently have a countertop installed in the dining room. We expect the rest of the kitchen countertops today or tomorrow. Overall we’ll be using 4 jumbo slabs between kitchen/dining room countertops, bathroom vanities, utility room, shower niches, garage utility sink and bathroom window sills.

Kitchen. There will be additional cabinets in the white space on the back wall but they can’t go in until countertop is installed as they sit on the counter.

One funny thing is that the space on back wall facing the island is where the fridge will go. We both walked in, saw it, and were confident it wasn’t big enough to hold a fridge. We measured and all is good. We figured out that when cabinets are 9’ tall, everything in them seems a bit small.

Cabinets in dining room. The uppers will have doors on the two end cabinets and shelfs in the middle. Bottoms will have doors and a wine fridge on right cabinet.

Living room cabinets. The ones on the bottom will all have doors.

Closeup of one of the quartz slabs we’re using. This will be on all the vanities and countertops except for the island. From a distance it looks mostly white but close up there is a lot of subtle veining.

Large Patio Ceiling

The guys got the pine installed on the larger patio ceiling this month. We spent a bit of time trying to decide on stain colors - which is mostly just an annoying experience. We figured out that the color is so dependent on the wood it’s going on, you just have to try it on a specific sample. We ended up going with red mahogany and think it turned out great. We still need to install the 4 lights (very quick task) and a ceiling fan.

Patio ceiling after stain. We also have a couple of patio heaters that will hang from the ceiling.

Tile

Just UGH!

Tile is driving us crazy. We thought tile had been ordered more than a month ago and would be getting installed in early September. Turns out there was communication issues within the builder’s folks and it didn’t get ordered until early last week. It’s coming from 4 or 5 different locations so timing was quite uncertain. As it turns out, they did OK on delivery and as of this morning, all of it is at the house except for the floor tile for powder room and utility room (expected by Tuesday). Installation of tile in guest bathroom started today. Travis has had a few melt-downs over the tile delays

How we spend our time

While all the above is happening, we’ve been doing a bunch of things at the house. This is all stuff that we didn’t include in builder scope. We worked on a bunch of these items this month and have been really busy!

Closets

We had asked the builder to not install anything in closets except for the two linen closets. We planned on ordering closet systems from EasyClosets. We had experience with them from Doug’s house and at the lake. Basically, you use their website to design your own closets (or you can have them do it), and they manufacture and then ship to you. You install it yourself (they also can arrange to get it installed in many places).

Given we knew how it all worked, we were able to have builder install bracing so installation was simple (we didn’t have to worry about finding studs).

We had 70 boxes in our shipment that were delivered to our driveway. We spent one morning checking it all against what we expected and getting it moved to appropriate rooms (luckily with help from two of the builder’s guys). After that, we just went from closet to closet installing. We had a few damaged drawer boxes (5), some missing clothes rods (5), and two damaged risers, but they send replacements pretty quickly. We decided we had too many drawers, as they’re the most time consuming part of the install.

We had two closets that were all wall mounted (primary bedroom and gym) and two that were floor mounted as we wanted deeper shelves on those (guest and office). Only real problem we had is that we ended up with a wall outlet in the office that was right where the shelf at the top of the drawers sat. We ended up having to trim off the toe-kick section to get the shelf below the outlet. It worked out fine but was briefly a bit stressful.

Gym closet. This will mostly be used for storing suitcases and travel stuff.

Guest Bedroom Closet (without doors). We set this up so folks can just set suitcases on the knee high shelf. There are also two small clothes rods on the left that aren’t visible in the photo.

Office Closet (without sliding closet doors). This one still needs a bit of trim work done by builders.

Garage Cabinets/Countertop

If you’ve been reading, you know that last month we installed some cabinets in the garage.

This month, we added a tall storage cabinet behind the door going into the utility room. That was also Ikea cabinets and went quite quickly.

After that, we started work on the countertop for the larger set of garage cabinets. We had the builder same some of the hardwood floors they took out of the house during demo and for quite some time have had a pile of it in our storage unit. One of the uses we planned for it was to make countertops in the garage and workshop. This month we started the first section of that.

The section we were working on was about 8.5’ long. We pulled a selection of boards from storage and brought them back to the workshop to work with. Luckily about 90% of all the nails/cleats had been removed so we didn’t have to deal with too much of that. Unfortunately, they spent quite a bit of time outside in the elements but for the most part that didn’t seem to do too much damage.

We made our final selections and basically build a floor on a long piece of plywood. This part went reasonably quick - lots of sawing, glueing and nailing with a brad nailer.

After that, we did three or four rounds of sanding, followed by stain, tung oil, and finally 3-4 layers of wax.

Turns out a countertop made out of plywood and 3/4 thick oak flooring is heavy and unwieldy. That said, we did get it in and think it turned out really good. All in all we probably spent about a week on it (not full time).

Some of the 60+ year old wood cleats we removed

Plywood with first couple of runs of flooring. The far end is longer than it needs to be and will be trimmed off to final length when we're done with installing the floor boards.

All the flooring secured (including front trim edge). No sanding has happened at this point.

Final sanding. We added wood filler for some of the gaps after the first couple of sanding so at this point we're taking off any excess.

Travis buffing off wax (after several coats of tung oil).

Now all we need to finish is some trim around the bottom of the cabinets. Travis did some testing of various options there. Unfortunately, while cutting some small pieces of wood, one of them went flying and broke one of our workshop roll-up door windows. He was really annoyed with himself, but on the plus side, it’s a 20x36” window rather than an 8’ tall patio door that was directly behind him.

Our broken window. Crazy thing is that it took about 10 minutes for it to finish breaking. All of the cracks just sort of filled in over time and you could hear each piece cracking. It's only the outer layer that cracked.

Accent Lighting

We have a number of places that we plan to have some LED light strips for accent lighting. We’ll use them for under counter lights over countertops as well as under each of the vanities. We also will have lighting in the living room entertainment center. We’d done work selecting which lights to use as well as controllers and power supplies. We’d also had quite a bit of stuff pre-wired so that we could control with smart switches in some cases.

First we installed the LED lights in the garage over our new counter-top. Those were straight-forward as we’d planned for an outlet in the upper cabinets. Unfortunately, we figured out as we were doing the lights that we had neglected to tie that outlet to the light switch at the door (we wanted the undercounter lights to come on with the ceiling lights). We looked at various ways to solve this but Travis found some Shelly mini wifi based relays. You can wire one into the junction box with the light switch and another into the box with the outlet. With some simple-ish configuration, you can have the first mini relay (connected to the switch) to trigger the 2nd one (outlet) to turn on power to the outlet when the switch is turned on.

Travis wiring the mini-relay into the switch box. The outlet box was far easier as there wasn't nearly as much going on in that box and it was easy to stuff it all in there.

We also decided to install the LED lights under the vanities since right now we could turn them on their sides since they’ve not been installed yet (refer back to tile delays). So far we’ve gotten the guest vanity and powder room vanity completed. The primary bath vanity is 10 1/2’ long and is composed of 3 pieces so will be a bit more work.

Guest bathroom vanity with lights installed. Imagine we won't have them set that bright - they'll mostly be for night-lights/accent.

For the vanities and under-cabinet lights, there will need to be a power supply and a controller in the vanity/cabinet to power/control the LEDs. Travis thought about and decided we needed some way to make all that a bit tidier. He got Doug to cut out boards on his laser cuter with slots for velcro strips as well as screw holes to secure the controller as well as to attach the French cleat that we’ll use to hand the board on the wall of the cabinet. Not necessarily pretty but gets everything confined to a small space at back of cabinet.

Example of one of the boards Doug cut out to hold power supply and controller

Unfortunately, we had originally thought we wouldn’t do the LED lights under the powder room vanity. We changed our mind. As such, we did not include an outlet for the inside of the vanity and had to install one. Luckily, there was an outlet directly on the other side of the powder room wall in the office. We were able to quickly (about 30 minutes) cut through and install a new outlet in the powder room.

Travis mid-way through cutting out the outlet hole. No picture of the finished product - but we assume you've seen outlets before (it looks a LOT like the one higher on the wall.

Major Milestone

One final thing we accomplished this month is moving the internet into the house. You may remember after demolition that Travis built out a box to hang on the fence that would hold our cable modem and router. This allowed us to have security cameras onsite so we could keep track of what’s happening there. Shockingly, that worked perfectly through very cold and very hot temperatures. Now that we have closets installed, we had a place to put the cable modem and router inside the house and were able to retire the outside box (as well as turn off the temporary electric service which was only being used to power the internet stuff at this point. The box even survived our derecho storm (where the fence it’s attached to blew over) and Hurricane Beryl.