Windows and Waiting

Well, we did indeed get our windows, so at least those came on schedule. Though that probably means the door and transom windows will arrive "on schedule" in mid-June. 

This week will be a stressful one while we go through inspections and learn whether or not we can proceed. We passed "water" last week and have electrical, plumbing, and framing this week. Framing requires that the unit be sealed, which, as you can imagine, requires a door and not a hole, covered with Tyvek...though it's possible that someone will have pity on us and divide that particular inspection into two parts that will allow us to proceed with a boarded up opening instead of an actual door.

Which is bad because we have a garage and basement full of the things we've been ordering that need to go INTO the house (sink, vanity, medicine cabinets, closet units) that we very much want out of our living space. Though I have to admit that besides the boxes, this addition has, as planned, had very little impact on our ability to live in our house. Besides through the crawl space, it really is just a thing that takes up a lot of room in our yard.

And so while we wait to learn the fate of our project, a few small details. We ordered our tile, which was what we decided on here with one exception. We'd already swapped out larger floor tiles for smaller ones in the shower thanks to your advice about smaller tiles being less slippery (thanks to grout lines). Our contractor and architect went one step further and advised that we stick to unglazed tile, to give it even more friction. So we opted for the penny tiles here, in Sapphire:

(If you can't read the miniscule writing, it's the very middle tile, second row up from the bottom.) We liked the hexes but they were backordered and we decided we did not want to risk it, so we stuck to the rounds in order to guarantee we could get them when we needed them. Which could be in a week or two or could be in June/July. SIGH.

The shower is looking a bit different, with some pretty intense waterproofing which we imagine is for the steam shower (because that needs even better sealing than an average shower).

Finally, we selected the Trex decking color from the three grays closest to our existing (very dingy) decking and similar to the stone on our patio:

We're going with the top one, called Pebble Grey (yes, they spell it the British way). We won't actually be getting the deck until among the last steps of this addition, but at least for once, it was an easy decision to make quickly--unlike our bathroom light fixtures, which we STILL haven't settled on after literally hours of searching.

Fingers crossed for good news this week!

A Pause

The pause in my posts is directly related to the fact that there simply has not been much to share. In late March, we had a slew of specialist contractors come to put in all the infrastructure that we need in the space. Plumbers came through and ran the pipes for our toilet...

...And sinks. Here's the shower room:

And the toilet room (which actually will need to be rerouted, since we failed to tell our contractor that we planned to have medicine cabinets, so the recessed box will have to go where the pipe currently is):

The HVAC team brought in our Mitsubishi Hyper-Heating mini-split (I don't know about you, but that brand makes me think of cars and not HVAC units--but apparently they make quite good systems!) and loaded it into the encapsulated crawl space. Then the next two days consisted of running the ductwork after consulting us about where we'd like everything to go. Since the HVAC unit is under the floors, most of our vents are low to the ground (except the return, which is up high since hot air rises and it usually sucks out hot air, though this is a year round system that also provides heat). In the bedroom, our vents are on the floor. In the bathroom(s), they are on the walls just above the floor. In our closet area, one will be coming out of the bottom of our built-in closets. One vent (into the toilet room):

Floor vents in the bedroom:

Return, in the hallway:

After a long walk-through to confirm where we wanted switches and plugs based on both the blueprint and last minute preferences (like how high we want the ones in the bathroom shelving units, etc.), the electrician ran the wiring to all the things. Here's the wall our bed will be on:

One aspect I hadn't realized as we committed to a heated towel rack, steam shower, AND radiant flooring is how many control units we will need on the wall. Here's the wall of the toilet room, looking through the hallway to a similar set up on the wall of the shower room.

The electrician also started getting things set up for our recessed lighting and a box for mounting a ceiling fan:

And got the wiring set up for our outdoor lighting:

They also installed a subpanel in the basement (picture later when it looks more like a real working electrical box and less like an empty box with some random dangling wires). 

The framers also came back to put the hardware in for our panel doors (the metal bits):

That, all together, took us to the end of March. I'm including a lot of detail now but honestly was planning to just gloss over all that stuff. So why haven't we had any updates in April. Because WINDOWS.

We're at a standstill until our windows arrive and they are supposed to be ready this coming week. I know this is a huge improvement over the multi-month waits during the pandemic, but I'm still impatient to get moving, since construction stopped 3 weeks ago while we just...wait. The next step is dry wall and that can't happen until windows (and an inspection, apparently). There's an additional complication--the patio door and transom windows above it won't be ready until June. Usually that's also required to pass this inspection. Our contractor is keeping his fingers crossed that we can get an "all but the doors" inspection to keep going with the construction. Because otherwise we're on hold until June. So...yeah, that's fun.

An update to our last post on metals - we took the safer route and returned to our preferred brushed nickel. After our contractor scared us away with a comment of "no one is asking for gold anymore" (something we don't think is true but was enough to spook us), we realizing we did not want to play into a fad. We know we like silvers and were struggling to match everything anyway, so brushed nickel it is. At least it will match the rest of the house.