Thursday, July 31, 2008

Getting there!

We now have a sink in the bathroom, complete with taps and everything. Apparently as of today the bedroom is all painted, except for the walls still needing drywall touchups, so there's just that and the glass blocks to go into that room. I think the TV room is completely done. The outside of the house is going to be painted tomorrow.

The lino people still have to come back -- they didn't put lino under the stairs as Brooke requested, and one patch is poorly done.

I told the builder yesterday that we're moving in this weekend, and several days ago Brooke gave him a prioritized list of what's left to be done (high/medium/low) and it sounds like all of the high priority things are done. We'll probably go over tonight to check.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Carpet at last!

WE HAVE CARPET! Oh, sorry, I got a little excited there.

The end is in sight. There is a lot of finishing that still needs to be done, lots of paint retouching and a few screwups need fixing. (Like the light switch in the middle of the hall, instead of at the end of the hall.) But almost all of the major stuff is in place now. The only major thing missing is the bathroom sink.

We have a lovely railing in the stairwell. (Needs to be painted still.) And the door to the TV room is really pretty.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Carpet explanation

Brooke phoned the carpet supplier today to find out what's going on and it turns out the carpet was held up at customs, so it is legitimately taking much longer than usual to arrive. It arrived in Victoria this morning and they're going to try to free up someone today to install it, and if not today then tomorrow for sure.

No idea why the builder hasn't used this week to finish the painting, though.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Lack of progress

Brooke went by the house tonight and he said it didn't look like anything has been done except installing the toilet. Certainly no carpet has been installed, and that was supposed to have been done Monday & Tuesday. (Well, actually last Friday. And before that, July 15. And before that, July 9th.) Getting a bit frustrated here...

Monday, July 21, 2008

Getting closer

Quite a lot has been done in the past week. Not quite ENOUGH as it was supposed to be move-inable on Friday (with carpet installed) but that didn't happen so we're still not back in the house. However, the end is in sight, I think.

The laminate and linoleum flooring are installed downstairs, mostly. There is one section of the laminate that looks odd (right in the doorway to the TV room) so they're going to fix the joints on that, and the lino didn't get put into the storage space under the stairs. For some reason we have a heck of a lot of left over lino, so apparently they thought they were going to be replacing some of the existing stuff, and then didn't, so that's quite a waste of lino and money. The baseboards are in place, but the quarter-round edging isn't, so there are gaps between the flooring and the baseboard at the moment. The paint needs retouching now, too, because they spray-painted the baseboards after installing them, and over-sprayed onto the walls, which had previously been finished. Hopefully in fixing the walls, they don't over-spray back onto the baseboards, or we'll be back and forth forever!

Upstairs, the tile in the bathroom is done and it looks great. The toilet has been purchased but not yet installed, so it's still in the box in the bathroom. We haven't fully selected a cabinet yet -- we know what sort of thing we want, but haven't found/ordered it. What we want is pretty basic -- just standard cabinets with a either a drawer above cupboards, or a stack of drawers on one side (or in the middle) and a cupboard on the other (or both) side(s). We already know which counter top we want.

In the bedroom, the underlay for the carpet is in place, and it sounds like the carpet guy is coming tomorrow (Tuesday) to install the actual carpet.

Most of the light fixtures have been installed. I had offered to tell the builder which ones belonged where back when we first bought them, but he wasn't ready to know that yet... so when he was ready, he didn't ask and a couple got put into the wrong spots. We were there tonight and put up some post-it notes to say which ones need changing.

We did notice a couple of odd things tonight. One is that the light switch for the hallway downstairs is in the middle of the hall, rather than at the end where you'd normally find it! There's another switch at the far end of the hall, so it's not like it needed to be there so you could get to it from either end. We're going to ask for that to be moved, but it might be a bit of a job since the wall is already completed. *Sigh* The other thing that Brooke just noticed is there is a bit of wall that was supposed to be removed (it even shows it as being removed on the original plans) but it's still there. I hadn't noticed it before, but now that he's pointed it out, I agree it does look rather odd. We're going to check the photos we took earlier to see if there's a beam there, which might be why it was left in.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Bedroom paint colour

I meant to upload a picture of the bedroom's paint colour yesterday, not the living room.... so here it is now. You can see the lighter colour in the hallway and the darker colour in the bedroom itself.

I was talking to Sean today and he said the plumber installed the bathtub taps oddly. The on and off positions were reversed, so it was turned on when they are in the position shown in the previous post. So he's going to have the plumber come back and fix that!

Saturday, July 12, 2008

First coat of paint and bathroom progress

We've now been locked out of the house TWICE. We went by on Friday on our way to a friend's house and couldn't get in so just left it as the builder had said they'd be working through the weekend. We went over today and no one was there, so Brooke broke in again, this time using a convenient ladder and an upstairs window. We've asked for a key to the other lock so it doesn't happen again!

The entire new section has all been primed and the first coat of paint applied. The shower drain pan is in place (cement, not tiled yet) and the taps are on the tub. Jody will be tiling the bathroom floor tomorrow -- it's a good thing we were still there when he came by today as the message that we wanted 8x10 tiles on the wall didn't sink in to the builder's brain and he was going to have Jody do the entire bathroom in 12x12 tiles (which were just supposed to be on the floor).

Thursday, July 3, 2008

And mud!

Tonight when we went to the house we found that the drywall has all been taped & mudded. Not yet sanded though, as it's still wet, so I guess they just did that today. We know it's wet because Brooke ended up with it all over him... the workers locked us out of the house and he had to go in a window. Good to know how easy it is to get in that window, though, so we'll have to be sure to keep it locked once we're living there again!

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

More drywall!

There is now drywall upstairs and down!