Today’s big event is that the material for interior trim carpentry got delivered. This is all the millwork: baseboards, door and window casing, interior doors, cove molding, railings, and stock to make shelves in the closets. Lots of wood stacked neatly in the garage on a rack. We decded to use paint-grade moldings, so these are finger-jointed poplar. The closet shelves are particle board and will get painted too.
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Also on Monday, the roofers installed the shingles on the back porch roof. It’s not a huge step forward, but it had been delayed for quite a while.
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We picked out some beautiful flooring–white oak in alternating 3-inch and 5-inch widths. This will be installed in the kitchen, dining room, “music room” and entry foyer. We selected a dark walnut stain which looked really great in the showroom. But Monday the material was delivered and we got our first real look at the stuff, and I’m really impressed with how nice this looks. Standard hardwood floor material is 2-1/4 inch width, so this 3-5 pattern is a real custom look.
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We spent a good chunk of Sunday with a wheelbarrow collecting trash and putting it into our burn pit. We worked about three hours and got the site pretty well policed–only about another hour’s worth of cleanup work remains to do before we can say the site is free of debris and ready for final grade. What precipitated this is one fo the subs dumping out our (full, of course) trash barrel, causing papers and trash to blow everywhere.
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The main thing that got done was that the drywall crew sprayed a texture onto my ceilings, my garage walls, and inside my closets. this is a “knockdown” ceiling texture, so the height of it is very shallow, maybe 1/16 inch or so. It’s a bit larger and more random of a pattern than I’ve seen before, with a fair bit of open space in it, but I like it just fine. It will add a good deal of visual interest to the ceilings wihtout drawing attention to itself, and it won’t be a maintenance headache like a “popcorn” ceiling texture.
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With the pasture mowed, the pond full of water, the sun shining, and most of the chores taken care of, we had a great fall day to spend out goofing off. Our pond was dug just before we bought the property last March, so we knew there were no fish living in it. With our pond only being about 1/3 of an acre, I am pretty pessimistic about getting a proper balance established with any bass. I read a number of pamphlets about it and talked to my dad, and ultimately decided that the cheap solution was the best. So I packed up the kids and we headed to Minnesota Avenue bait shop and got us some four-inch goldfish for $4.50 a dozen.
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I’ve held off mowing my pasture, not by choice, but because of a problem with the hydraulic lift on my 1950 Ford 8N tractor. But, I got some good advice on the phone from the mechanic at Smith equipment where I bought the thing. So this weekend I ripped it open and fixed it myself. This was the first time I skinned my knuckles working on my tractor, so I had a bit of pride in the accomplishment. But more importantly, I thought that some of you fellow Ford 8N owners may benefit from the walkthrough on how I fixed this.
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I could really bore you to tears with drywall pictures. But I’ll refrain. Instead I’ll just hit the high notes and tell you that we decided on a bullnose corner bead in a lot of places that will give a really interesting finish to the corners. We saw this for the first time in the model that builder Chad showed us, and we were pretty impressed. The cabinet maker uses a very similar treatment on the outside corners of the cabinets, so it ties in and looks really cool; that’s what sold it to me.
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The house is maybe 60% skinned with drywall now. We got the basement stairway skinned, which was kind of a bonus since builder Chad set us up not to expect that.
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At last, the problems are corrected that prevented us from hanging drywall, mainly the holes in the roof. Today the first sheets of drywall got applied, breaking the somewhat lengthy pause in the progress.
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