May 4 – May 8
Monday: No workers today (scheduling issues). I’m not happy but was able to move things out of family room & kitchen, preparing for next week’s “demo day”. Family room is now empty.
Window subcontractor came to measure and ask bazillions of questions about such details as what sorts of window catches I wanted. I like being able to get answers to why I might prefer one vs. another (and when I ask if the one I like costs more, finding out that they’re the same price!).
Westhill’s customer service guy came for a walkthrough (he handles all the punch list and warranty items and hasn’t yet seen the house and work to date).
Tuesday: Cleaning out debris from last week’s demolition – pretty much filled a dump truck.
Moving the doorway in the hallway to mud room – step one: demolish the old doorway. The tile guy came for a couple of hours to add a little grout where some was missing and smooth off some grout on the tile surface where it shouldn’t be – you couldn’t see it, but the project manager found some areas where the tile was like sandpaper!
Wednesday: We have glass!! It’s so gorgeous, but we have to leave it be for 24 hours for the silicone to set up.
More trips between kitchen and mudroom to get ready for next week, and salvaging lots of Blum hinges so when one breaks I don’t have to buy replacements (reduce, reuse, recycle 🙂 )
Thursday: Site meeting to discuss budget for the remaining work (phase II). As with seemingly every construction project, we’re a bit over. So some nice-to-have items, like the oval window in the bonus room, will go, and the hallway above will be plain drywall (to avoid the expense of either fixing the old wainscoting or adding new to match the family room).
The important things – that let light into places that don’t have it – will stay. Skylights in the bonus room, openings in the family room wall and open handrails/balusters around the new back stairs will stay (the latter being a reasonably pricey item). The plugmold in various places in the kitchen will give way to regular sockets, and the pantry will have a regular light switch (but on the outside where you can find it) versus an automatic one.
I’m now at the point where I assume that if I like something a lot it’ll be very expensive 🙂
Wet room light fixture finally arrived (literally on a slow boat from China!). The fan cover is still missing (electrician thinks he installed it; project manager thinks he didn’t; I don’t think I’ve ever seen it).
A cleaner (from the remodeling company) cleaned the hall bathroom this morning, but honestly there was a lot of construction dust and silicone bits still there after he left, so  I wasn’t impressed. He did clean the toilet though 🙂
Friday: No work today – demolition starts Monday and I was moving things out of the kitchen and trying to set up and organize the temporary kitchen in the mudroom.
Brandon noticed that the tub faucet was leaking – no one’s used it yet as there’s no plug. The cleaner was the only person to have done anything with it. When the project manager came to check the leak out he noticed that when the tile guy had come to fix up a few areas of grout, he’d caulked the linear drain shut! So that got cleaned out – we can try the new shower out over the weekend…
Weekend: Fully move out of kitchen, master bathroom & downstairs half bath. Move into new bathroom and into the mudroom. The dining room is now an everything-that-needs-a-table room, and there will be a lot more walking into the garage now that’s our sole refrigerator