Week 30 and 31

The company that hosts this site had problems with one of their servers at the beginning of Week Thirty. Consequently, 1525westwilletta.com was down for several days. You probably got a "DNS error" message if you tried to pull up the site. They moved the site to a new server, but I had a new username and password, as well as a new user interface. It took a day or two to get that sorted out. The net result is that I wasn't able to publish for almost an entire week.

The result is, I'm combining two weeks. Sue me. Just try and prove damages. And anyway, I got busy with other things (which I also couldn't publish) and didn't have a chance to get to this page.

The project is winding down. We're focusing on the details, now. Gone are the days when I'd show up in the morning and nothing was there, then by afternoon we had stud walls. Not a lot of big changes any more. It's all finish work, now--detailed stuff. These two weeks were primarily flooring and tile.

 Here are a few shots of the flooring in the kitchen, Brittany's room, and Justin's room.

The floor guy's head practically exploded when he saw the kitchen floor. He and Mark put a level on it and noticed that the floor rose and fell two inches from one side of the room to the other. There was a two-inch hump in the floor where the old wood floor hooked up to the concrete area of the kitchen floor. The only way to lay wood on it was to cover the old floor with oriented strand board, OSB. The floor guy also said the dining room floor should be the same as the kitchen. It broke my heart to cover the fine old wood floor, but he was right, as this picture shows.
We got the wood flooring from Lumber Liquidators. I had originally wanted to go with Pergo, just because I thought actual wood floors would be expensive, but this was cheaper than Pergo.
The other room upstairs. More on that, later.
Before the tile guys could start working on the floor, we needed to select a bathroom cabinet. We got this one at Lowe's.
This is the tile in the Master Bath, awaiting grout. The guys doing this are twins, born in June. What do you think the name of their company is? If you guessed "Gemini Tile," you're absolutely correct!
For the upstairs bath, I asked them to place the color features randomly. I didn't want the super uniform look that you usually see. Leisa's complaint was that there "wasn't enough color." She felt they spaced them out too far, and put one under where a rug will go. 

Since the bathroom and laundry room are right next to each other, we used the same tile and random pattern in both rooms.

The other decision we had to make was choosing carpet for the master bedroom. Here Leisa evaluates some samples we got from Home Depot.

After deciding on a carpet, we found out that it was all special order and would be three weeks for installation. That's no good, as we'll have been moved in by then. Mark suggested we talk to Chris at Carpet land. We did, and found a really nice Berber carpet with a herringbone pattern. It was in stock, cheaper that what we chose from Home Depot, and could be installed in a day or two.
No week would be complete without Leisa worrying about something. This week it was the cabinets. The cabinets span about ten or eleven feet. The molding at the top is only a ten foot length. Therefore, we're going to have a joint. The dentil molding is applied to the crown molding and will also have a seam.

On the left is where two pieces of dentil molding come together. The pattern doesn't match. But what really irks Leisa is the joint in the crown molding, shown on the right. It doesn't quite match. She'll have a discussion with someone about this!

The guys from CoolFront were back and installed vent covers and thermostats.

I met Chris at Home Depot and we chose bath fixtures: sinks, toilets, seats, etc. It's all stacked in the living room, awaiting deployment.

Saving the Best For Last!
Our bookcase has been installed in the sitting room, downstairs.
Wait! What's that? The bookcase is opening up and someone's behind it.

"And I would've gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids."

 

It's Leisa. And it's not a bookcase--it's a Hidden Door.

This is the whole reason Leisa wanted to remodel the house, is so that she could have one of these bad boys installed. It's a Hidden Door. That's the wine cellar behind the door.

Looks like a bookcase, but in reality, it's everyone's ultimate Scooby Doo fantasy. How many episodes of Scooby Doo involved a hidden door like this one opening up and some evildoer leaning out to drag Velma or Scooby away? The earliest I've ever voluntarily gotten out of bed on a Saturday was when I was a little kid, to watch Scooby Doo on KOOL-TV, Channel 10, on our big black and white TV that tuned channels 2 through 13.

Fast forward thirty-five years. I have my own hidden door, and will be stapling a satellite dish to the back of the house that will pull in 500 channels--one of which will probably still be showing the same episodes of Scooby Doo I watched when I was eight. Cool!

And if you're not a Scooby fan, there's always the Hardy Boys

We've seen the House on the Cliff, now here's the Secret Panel. This guy's going to elude Frank and Joe by exiting through a hidden door. (Sorry for the teeny image. That's what I get when I swipe from other sites. I can probably locate my copy and scan the cover, but that would be work, and if I wanted work, I'd get a job as a Regional Manager.)

The Justin Report

Justin threatened me over the Justin Report. "Man, you better take that off of there. It's ruining my reputation. If you don't take it off, I'm going to get a hacker and hack your web page to take it off."

Hi, Justin, I'm still here. And so is the Justin Report.

As previously stated, the rules have been set: 25 hours of school per week. Justin did about 18 or so hours this week. We counted the first week, with its two hours of attendance, as strike one. Strike two came in the form of a little cigar left on the planter outside the front door. Since there was some school attendance during Week 30, we counted that as a ball, and the same with Week 31. (Although in talking to Brandon following Week 31, it seems that Justin didn't do the 12 or 15 hours he told us he did. He apparently only went to school one day that week.)

It all went to heck, though, in Week 32.

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