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Thursday, October 29, 2009

who wants to take a bath?


The master bathroom tub has finally been set in place. I'm pretty excited about it. For those who are curious, we went with the five-foot Kohler Archer tub, with 'air massage' as opposed to whirlpool jets. (And for the even more curious, Lowe's prices are actually pretty significantly lower than the listed prices from Kohler - worth looking into, plus they offer delivery, and the delivery guys carried it all the way upstairs.) The only thing now missing is the faucet for it, which will actually go in after the tile is set on the tub deck (so that it can be installed neatly through the tiles, instead of trying to cut them to fit around it and having lots of ugly grout lines).

We are going to have to find a tile person soon.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

connection

I just finally got hold of the drywaller - I was right, his message service isn't actually delivering my messages. He said he called me, too, and never got any voicemail or anything, so there's some sort of phone line mixup going on. Whatever. I have a new number for him, and I'm keeping it close. In the meantime, he told me that he can't insulate the house -- his insulation sub has retired from the business, and he hasn't gotten a new one yet. So now before I can get him to come in and drywall, I've got to find an insulator. Don is going to say we should just do it ourselves. I really, really don't want to touch it. Time to call for quotes!

Saturday, October 24, 2009

of course

Something has finally gone wrong. I cannot for the life of me get in touch with the drywaller. I talked to him on Tuesday, and he promised me a callback the following morning with a quote to add insulation to our existing drywall quote. No call, so I called and left a message later that day. Still haven't heard back. I am fairly sure that their phone line goes directly to a voicemail service that he picks up pretty regularly - but I know for a fact that their messages were screwed up a couple of months ago, and I'm wondering if it's happened again. I don't have another number for him, unfortunately.

It's very disappointing - we were hoping to schedule the drywallers/insulators to start on November 2nd, and we're completely on track to be ready for them. But if I can't get hold of him, that's pushing the start date further and further back, because they usually run their schedules about two weeks out.

In any case, the electricians are done with the rough-in, although we need to ask them what we're supposed to do with a couple of things -- there's no box for either the master bathroom tub or the data cable terminus in the office. The plumber's coming on Wednesday to set the tub and fix the sink rough-ins in the master bath. Don ordered several rolls of speaker wire last night, and his sister's boyfriend will come over and wire us up for sound as soon as it comes in. After that, drywall, if I can get hold of the guy!

The real problem with this drywall issue is that I am having my gallbladder taken out on November 12th. If they were able to start on the 2nd, that would give them a good week plus to finish before my surgery, which should be fine. Pushing it back much further may mean we have to delay quite a bit - having drywallers around while you're recovering from surgery is not so practical. All things considered, though, I'd rather reschedule the drywall than the surgery. We'll see how it goes.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

lists

Things the electricians are installing in our house:
-Outlets
-Recessed lights
-Ceiling fans
-One chandelier
-Bathroom fans
-Cable wiring
-Telephone wiring
-CAT5 wiring

Things Don and I have argued about placement of:
-Outlets
-Recessed lights
-Ceiling fans
-One chandelier
-Bathroom fans
-Cable wiring
-Telephone wiring
-CAT5 wiring

Arguments won by me:
-Ceiling fans

Arguments won by Don:
-CAT5 wiring
-Bathroom fans

Arguments won by the electrician:
-Outlets
-Recessed lighting
-One chandelier
-Telephone wiring
-Cable wiring

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

yet another picture of don swinging a hammer

Over the weekend we got the last few bits of preparation out of the way for the incoming flurry of contractors. We worked on cleaning up and condensing our stuff, since it's going to get moved around a lot. We took five huge bags of clothing and some other stuff to Goodwill, and cleaned out everything we could from the basement. We condensed my craft and business supplies down to two tables instead of three, and cleaned off our desks. All very exciting.

We also added two inches to the header in between the dining room and the living room:


Don wanted the header to be exactly the same size as the one separating the dining room from the kitchen, so he hopped up on the scaffolding and added a 2x4 to the bottom of it, which did the job. He also built a small wall in the guest bathroom, something we decided to to in the hopes of making the room feel a little less slanted - it cuts off the very back of the room, where the eave slants down almost to the floor, and makes the room feel bigger.

The electricians are here today, making lots of noise and getting lots done. The plumber is coming by a week from today to do the final rough-ins in the master bathroom. I'm trying to get in touch with the drywall guy - once the electricians and plumber are done, believe it or not he's the next step! Hard to believe we might have actual walls soon. I'm waiting for something to go wrong.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

wiring coming soon

Yesterday we signed a contract and handed over a check. The electrician is starting next week!

Thursday, October 08, 2009

electricity

Today I emailed an electrician and accepted his quote for doing all of our electrical work. I got quotes from several of them last week, and though we're not thrilled about spending yet another large chunk of money, we've agreed that having somebody come in to do the electrical work is the best idea. They'll be able to get the work done MUCH faster than Don would, and they include a very great deal of work in their proposal that would take Don even longer than just the rewiring. Not to mention they, uh, know what they're doing.

The electrician we eventually went with gently pointed out that the way that Don ran the temporary lights was "the way they did it fifty years ago." Makes sense, given that Don learned from his dad, who learned from HIS dad, who was an electrician - fifty years ago. Sigh. So our new electrician will get it done both quickly and correctly, and we'll be able to move forward.

Speaking of moving forward, check out the vanity we're going to buy for the master bathroom one of these days. Snazzy, no? We may hold off on buying it and just have our drywallers drywall everything but the bathrooms. It'll be annoying but we can afford it. We still have to find a contractor to do various bathroom things like pouring the shower floor and tiling. I'm beginning to feel like calling contractors is my full time job.

Monday, October 05, 2009

pocket doors

Pocket doors. They're awesome. Most of you have seen them, somewhere, sometime; they're doors that slide into the wall rather than swinging out into the room. They save a lot of space. What you may not have seen is the framing that's involved in installing a pocket door. When we first decided to put them in, we knew nothing about how to install them or frame for them. After a great deal of research, we discovered that they are SO EASY. All you have to do is leave a blank hole in your wall that's double (or so) the width of your doorway. Then you buy a kit -- we bought ours from the best in the business, Johnson Hardware. In fact, we bought five of them. The kit comes in a giant long box, and contains a header, studs, and all of the hardware to install them, plus of course the track for the door itself. You provide the door.

So. You've got your gap in the framed wall. You hammer in a nail at each end, at a prescribed height. Then you just hook the header onto the nails, rotate it into place, make sure it's level, and bang the nails the rest of the way in, adding a few more for good measure. Bang, header in place. The studs are, essentially, half-studs; they're metal-clad 1x3s. They slip into a metal bracket, which spaces them the right width apart on the floor. You attach the tops of the studs to the header, nail the bracket into your floor, and bam. You've got a pocket door frame.

Once the kit's installed, it's best if you can put in a little bit of framing above the header, just for the sake of structural stability. It's not too hard to bang in a few header studs. Overall, installing pocket doors is crazy easy. We've put them at the entrances to the master bathroom, master closet, and guest bathroom upstairs. We also decided to put in a double set of pocket doors downstairs, between the dining room and the office/library, where we had originally planned on leaving a large opening instead. We like the idea of being able to close off the office a bit - and the deciding factor was when we realized that we could use the antique doors we found in the attic as the double sliding doors. They're solid wood, with dozens of squares of antique beveled glass set in them. I'm looking forward to refinishing them and hanging them; they're the perfect entrance to a library.

In the picture below, you can see the double pocket doorframe we installed downstairs. It's not much more complicated than installing a single frame -- all you have to do is slice off a bit of one of the headers and hook it into the other one with a special bracket, sold separately. Then it's the same procedure.


It may be a little hard to distinguish everything, what with the giant construction mess and scaffolding behind the doorframe. Sorry, not much I can do about it. I'm looking forward to getting rid of it as much as you are!

The drywallers will cover up the studs, of course, and leave the wide doorway open. When it warms up a little, I'll strip the doors and refinish them, and we'll hang them up and be done. The upstairs doorways, incidentally, are also getting antique doors -- we saved all of the original doors from the house and will be stripping, refinishing, and re-hanging them. The master bathroom and master closet may get replicas instead of the originals (or maybe we'll be able to find something at an architectural salvage shop), as they are new openings that weren't in the original house. For the time being, though, we're just going to be living without doors. Not a huge hardship, given what we've lived without so far!

Got any questions about installing pocket doors? Leave them in the comments, we'll try to answer! With the obligatory disclaimer, of course, that we're not experts and you probably shouldn't really take our advice on anything, but whatever.