Week Twenty Six

Construction began on our four month project on November 18th, 2002, exactly six months ago. There's light at the end of the tunnel. We're closing on Leisa's house July 15th, so we have to be done with the house before then. Just in time to move when the humidity is sky-high.

The week began with a cute little wedding. That wasn't photographed with the digital camera, so it'll take a bit longer to get pictures and get them up. Even as we were getting married, though, work continued on the house. We had many guided tours through the house for our out of town visitors. I'm sure the drywall guys and painters were pleased to see everybody leave and get out from underfoot.

We finished week twenty five by talking with Frank, the painter. We weren't certain what colors to select, and Frank was a great help in selecting colors. The house had some peeling paint, and Frank said that there was chalkiness under the old paint, and that the paint hadn't bonded to the house. The paint was just sitting on a layer of chalk. He frightened me by saying he was going to have to power wash the house for $500 to get the chalk off. He later decided that he had another way around it, and the extra went away.

	Mark began laying out for the pavers alongside the driveway strips.
	Here's the first line of pavers, in place. Mark suggested tumble flash pavers, a suggestion with which Leisa and I heartily concurred. I'm not sure if I have the words "Tumble" and "flash" in the correct order. I have so many things to remember these days. Tumbled means that the bricks look slightly worn, not brand new, and flash refers to the fact that there are several different colors.
	The patio is done in similar pavers. This looks soooo cool! You can see in the background that they've pre-painted the cross-pieces for the carport roof, as well as started painting the support posts for the patio cover and the carport. Frank and one of his guys were working on Saturday, painting the patio cover, and as it turned out, the patio, too. He had a compressor to spray the inside of the patio cover and the hose burst, spraying paint everywhere, including the brand new pavers. He was down on his hands and knees for a while, scrubbing it off with a wire brush. He did a good job and you can't even tell. (Although this is the picture before he did it, I didn't take one after, because, like I say, you can't tell.)
	Inside, the guys have started taping the walls. They also fixed this cracked plaster at the bottom of the kitchen window.
	Here's an action shot of one of the taping guys, hard at work. Check out the cool stilts. If I could find one, I'd put a picture up here of me at ten, wandering around our old John F. Long neighborhood on my stilts.

It only took them a day or two to tape this whole thing.
	Here's the living room, and the arch above the new door into the kitchen.
	The inside is now actually looking like a house, but the outside is where it's looking very cool. This guy was kind of confused on what colors were supposed to be where. Leisa asked him about it, but he insisted this was the way it was supposed to be. He was wrong.
	The arch above the windows was supposed to be the cranberry color, and it was eventually repainted correctly.


Frank thought the carport needed a bit more presence, so he ended up painting the fascia and support posts the same dark green as the trim. I don't have a picture of that, yet. We also talked with him about painting the inside of the house. I had been planning on doing this, but the enormity of the task was beginning to frighten Leisa. She was worried that I wouldn't get done on Mark's schedule. Don't tell her this, but she might have been right. We met with Frank Memorial Day weekend to select our colors for the inside of the house and discuss the paint scheme. He's also going to paint the front porch. The worn paint has worried Leisa for years. We also got a price of about $800 to demo the shed. We're trying to balance the personal satisfaction we'd get bashing the thing apart with a big prybar and sledgehammer, versus the ease of watching someone else do it. Someone else doing it is currently in the lead.	Here's Leisa, happy with the paint job, but still worried about the shed. And the window coverings. And the pool. And the patio set. And work and the 287 e-mail in her inbox. And furniture. And the fact that the alarm panel in the basement is right where the mirror's going to go.
Here's a quiz about Paint Colors. We've spent several days with paint charts, looking at all the bizarre names for paints. Which one is the fake paint name? (Don't cheat by going to the Dunn Edwards site.) Inside Passage Cliff's View Winter Wheat Cottage White Baked Potato Name E-mail address (Optional)
Leisa and I spent Memorial Sunday cleaning a bunch of junk out of the shed and tossing it in the dumpster. We gave up on that, though, and went over to Paddock Pools to look at their "sale" on patio furniture. "If that was a sale, I'm a Hottentot," to paraphrase Harry Truman. Paddock's "sale" price for a patio set was $1,800 and up. At Target it's about $300. Guess where we're going. We also stopped at 3 Day Blinds. The Constant Reader already knows how I feel about shopping, so I'm sure you know how this afternoon went. We also went to Bell Stone to approve our granite slab for the kitchen counter. $3,500. Yikes. The texture guys started working on the walls on Monday. I don't yet have any photos of that. I think I'm finally caught up!
Oh, the Justin Report Justin still hasn't found his cute little pipe. He's been making them out of foil. I wonder where his pipe could be... Click on the picture to look closer. I wonder where we should look next.

Oh, the Justin Report