Breezeway 14: ugh wiring and unrelated stuff

So when I said two posts ago that the Nest thermostat wasn't hooked up yet, turned out that it was, but that the wire was broken. Sigh. So now they have to rerun the electrical which means yet another step back. Off went the thermostat, off went the french door trim (I guess that's where they run the wire?), off went some drywall (I'm just guessing but that's sure what it looks like on the left below the light switches). And now of course there are white patches and crooked busted up door trim (we told them we want new trim now) and more waiting. There's also a super weird problem causing the new motion-sensor light outside to flicker when the inside lights are on (unrelated to ambient light caused by the lights being on).

This project started off strong but now I'm sick of it. The good news is that the floor people came back to re-polyurethane and that looks much better now. But we have reset the clock on furniture and rug while the floors cure.

So with all that annoyance is going on, I thought I'd finally get around to changing the subject. You see while all this are breezeway work has been happening, we've also been busy on other things. One thing that we had to deal with was some very persistent rust on the overflow drain vent in the new tub from our 2012 bathroom remodel. We don't even take baths in this tub, so the overflow was rarely exposed to any significant moisture besides what you'd expect from showering.

At first glance on the internet, this seemed like it could be a critical issue caused by a leaky rotten gasket on the outside of the tub, but fortunately the back was in good shape.

Either way, from my reading of random handyman websites, we had to act fast or the whole tub could rot through.

Fortunately, the contractors honored their 5 year warranty - to my surprise! They came out to take al look and explained that it wasn't actually the tub rusting but a piece of metal hardware fixed to the tub. Either way they agreed it was a material flaw and that they would fix it. Fast forward 3 weeks to July and the new part arrived. It looked like a pretty significant repair, so we're grateful that professionals took care of it.

Now we have rust-free hardware and no more pesky rust stain dripping its way down the tub.

Breezeway 13: waiting and decorating

We hit a bit of a lull on the final "punch list" completion and so the new room has been lingering in a state of almost-doneness. So we have started to plan our decor. One setback - we got picky over some of the bubbles and imperfections on the floor during the polyurethane application, so they are coming back tomorrow to sand lightly and re-coat. This means another week before we can put down any furniture at all and 30 days until we can put down the rug, which just arrived after being backordered for a few weeks and taking up space in another room while the floors are in a suspended state of perpetual curing.

But at least I can tell you our plan.

Step one - cover the windows. After ordering several samples from blinds.com for roller shades (they make so many colors!) and looking at the choices in a variety of lights and at night, we settled on a lightly patterned one that did a decent job of filtering the light and put in an order. We're not planning to put up curtains or cover the french doors at all, so the room is going to be bright, making light filtering shades a better choice than any kind of room darkeners.

Next to the sofa. After having an empty room for about a week and having the toddler enjoy the empty space, we debated whether or not the one we'd chosen (but not yet purchased) would take up too much floor space. We laid out and agreed that it would take up a significant chunk but that there would still be enough room for play.

So once we figure out how to get it home (seriously, this thing is currently only in the store wrapped together as 3 boxes on a palate totaling 250 lbs), we plan to add a Frighten to our collection of funny-sounding Ikea products.

After avoiding it for years, we finally are going to buy upholstered Ikea stuff. It's cheap (and with destructive young children that seems like a good idea) and has room to spread out and has a cool pull-out sleeper. We don't intend to use this as a guest room (see note above on how bright it will be) but having the flexibility of pulling out the sofa to sprawl out on was irresistible. Plus honestly I have always wanted a chaise lounge. No idea why. 

Onwards to the rug - as you might have guessed from the paint color and the gray sofa,  we are sticking to the same color scheme as the living room - gray, teal, and red - to help us blend the two spaces. We fell in love with this rug from CB2 (it's slightly more on the green end of teal than the living room, but we think it will work) and simply couldn't decide for a while if we wanted the 5x8 or the 8x10. Now that the drywall and trim is up, we measured it out and decided on the smaller size (why get expensive beautiful wood floors only to cover them with a rug that would pretty much go wall to wall).

(Our room will not look nearly as nice as either Ikea's or CB2's photos, but whatever.)

We have an ambitious plan for possibly assembling built-in style cabinets underneath the windows and shelving beside them, sort of like we have in the living room surrounding the television, but in white. There are some complications there, notably that Ikea kitchen cabinets are no longer made in the same thin depth that they used to, so they will not fit behind the door to the garage. So we are exploring custom cabinets or doing some Ikea hacks to shrink them. More on that later though. First - get the floor finished and put in the basics.

Breezeway 12: heating

Thursday ended with this - blankets and pads all over the new floor and a partially installed baseboard heater. Also the lovely smell of some kind of epoxy.

I was a little confused at why it wasn't all finished in a day - after all, they'd laid the pipes under the flooring and it seemed like it should be relatively quick.

Then I went down to the basement and saw this:

Our heating guy had set up his own table and laid out lots and lots of parts and tools. I guess this was a more complicated job than I thought.

Then on Friday - I saw more to indicate that yes, this project must be making our heating system a it more complex:

It isn't totally finished yet, because not everything is connected. We have a thermostat, though it isn't turning on yet. We decided on another Nest simply because we have another one already and can get them to talk to each other and sync up.

The baseboard at least is all finished, which will also allow us to start measuring to decide if we want to install cabinets between the heater and the windows.

Work has slowed otherwise, and our final punch list isn't moving along too quickly, at least in a visible way (for example, the electrician had to come tweak stuff over two days, but that doesn't make for interesting pictures). Still, the room is pretty much livable and we have started planning decor. A rug is on the way (well, technically backordered) but we can't put it down for a few more weeks anyway according to guidelines we read on polyurethaned floors.

Breezeway 11: the new new floor

Pardon the long silence - we've been reveling in our new floor but also suffering through the long staining and finishing process. Bottom line: we have a LEVEL FLOOR!

Here's the line between the living room and new room:

Our old floors are so uneven that they had to do a lot of work to fill it, build it up, and then sand it even:

This is the line between the dining room and kitchen. You might remember this identical view with the first floor here. In fact, why don't I just repost that key picture below the current one, so you can see the amazing difference.

There was an interesting moment where they cut a wire while carving through the subfloor. That was fun. They had to pull out the cabinet and call in an emergency electrician to fix everything. 

On days 1 and 2 of the new floor, our dining room was out of commission because of all the sawdust and tarps, so we had a picnic in the new room:

Then on days 3 through 5, we mostly had to stay off the floor completely (we could tread lightly in socks to get things out of the fridge, but that was it). We only just opened up the room to the cats this morning (after giving them pedicures so that they couldn't do much damage when they inevitably skidded on the ultra slippery floors).

We didn't manage to get pictures on day 3 when they stained it, and day 4 when they did the first 2 of 3 layers of poly, so here it is, in all its shiny, freshly polyurethaned glory this weekend:

For comparison, we do have a test strip. So the top of this picture is the new kitchen floor, the bottom is the existing dining room, and the single slat shows the unstained wood on the bottom and the stain without polyurethane on top. Our builder says the color will age and yellow a bit over the next few months and get even closer to our old color. And funny enough, the match is even closer at the living room line. I guess the dining room area is a bit more worn out.

So what's left on this project? Some stuff isn't finished because of subcontractor scheduling delays (a little more electrical work and the base board heater this week, for example, and the Pella door people unable to show up until mid-August) and some stuff is "finished" but needs tweaking. This week we are giving that list to our builder as the final "fix this before we finish paying you." We have lots of tape around to show what we want fixed, but I think we are in the home stretch.