August 10-14
Monday: Backsplash for kitchen and downstairs half bath & ramp sink for master bathroom. A little nudge from the guy who runs Westhill apparently got the ramp sink to the head of the line. The slot drain is 1/8″ wider on one end, so they’ll have someone out tomorrow to do the Caesarstone equivalent of planing it to an even thickness.
The hardwood floor received a final sanding/buffing and coat of satin finish. I really love the very low sheen of this finish – much nicer than the high gloss (where it wasn’t scuffed and worn!) of what we had before.
We had to leave the house once they were ready to apply the sealer and spend a night at a hotel. The garage was accessible, so our lead carpenter and a helper re-installed the ceiling rack in the garage that was removed to accommodate the turned stairs. It went back in a different orientation (it needs to be anchored to studs which constrains placement) but it’s there.
The stainless still cover for the vertical part of the kitchen vent hood needs to be cut – there are apparently some irregular parts of the wall and ceiling that prevent it from sitting where it should. The shop that made the ramp sink drain pan will do the work.
Tuesday: Lead carpenter worked on the master bathroom closet – installing hanging rods and building the two full length hanging racks that will go either end of the closet.
HVAC came to turn on the gas cooktop and fireplace. After I turned the fireplace on, I noticed that I couldn’t see any of the amber glass “media” (aka glass chips) around the flames. Apparently the HVAC subcontractor forgot to order that, so it’s been ordered now but isn’t here yet. Perhaps that’s why the LED lights and fan aren’t hooked up either?
Jeffrey had a work event Tuesday evening, so I cooked myself dinner on the new cooktop – how lovely to have gas again after three months of the hotplate. Splashes and mess make a showpiece into a working appliance – but I did clean it and the whole thing is designed to be easy to clean. None of the edges, lips and places to catch crud that our old gas cooktop had.
The fireplace has a burn-in ritual that involves running it on high – first for 3 hours; cool and clean front glass, then run on high for 12 hours. The 12 hour session ran overnight as it’s just too hot to do that during the day at the moment. Oddly, having started the 12 hour stint around 9pm, somewhere between 6:30 and 6:45am Wednesday, the fire shut itself off. May be a safety shutoff – it restarted fine.
Glass template issues discussed and some preliminary measurements taken – backsplash behind stove, vanity mirrors in half bath and master bath, shower walls & door in master and full length mirror in master bathroom.
Issue 1: Door in the master shower. The shape of the pony walls in the master bathroom shower would leave a very slim fixed glass panel at the turn by the opening – too slim for a piece of tempered glass required to support the hinges (just like in the hall bathroom).
Leaving aside how it is that we’re just discussing this now (versus when the framing was done), the glass guy suggested two options. One is to use a pivot hinge door, but you then lose about 2 inches out of the doorway. Not sure my hips would like that :). It also means a larger channel up top and in the floor, something I’d like to avoid.
The other option is to place a single piece of glass straight on the pony wall and use the same type of door hinge as before. That means the glass will not be centered on the pony wall, but leave a Nike-swoosh-like shape on the outside. I think that will look fine (and if you didn’t know it was a solution to a problem, might even think was edgy and stylish design!).
Issue 2: Kitchen backsplash behind stove. I wanted something like this, out of frosted glass. The glass is glued to the wall, and you’d see the glue unless the back of the glass is painted or coated. I didn’t want plain white (the walls are pale gray and I think that’d look bad). They have 12 stock colors in a plastic-like paint substance that’s apparently very long lasting. You can get custom colors but that’s long lead times and much more expensive.
The template guy had a sample of their stock gray with him – a piece of glass for another customer. He brought it in and propped it against the wall by the cooktop. I like how that looked; we have a mixture of all sorts of grays throughout the kitchen and family room and it works visually.
Detailed measurements to be done on Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday: More work on master bathroom closet long hanging sections, but the Westhill customer service manager walked through the site with Greg preparing their list of all the outstanding things ready for a customer walkthrough later this month (which I think might be a bit premature, but we’ll see where things are when we return.
Project manager talked with the painting company about the cabinet doors in the family room – and they claim that the latex cabinet paint wasn’t allowed to cure for long enough before the doors/drawers were handled – don’t touch them for 14 days.
A check online showed me several paint manufacturers say 14 – 30 days for a full cure, so that’s reasonable, but when they resprayed the doors August 3rd, they took over 2 garage bays to do it and apologized for not asking first as they had to dry overnight. Wouldn’t the time to say “Don’t touch them for 14 days” have been before they were sprayed so they could be somewhere suitable.
I’m not OK with any more spraying in the house (we have final finishes on floors), and it also occurred to me that we should verify that the problem really is cure time versus something else (lacquer primer with latex paint is supposed to be OK, but possibly it’s the surface or prep that’s the problem.
When I talked with the project manager about e-mail I had sent on this and we were looking at flaws on the doors, I mentioned how soft the paint was after a week and a half and my skepticism that it would be that much different by next Monday. He said the backs of the doors were not resprayed – this paint was from the original spray. I looked up the date (via pictures) and that was 7 weeks ago on June 25th. If cure time is the issue, we’re way over 30 days, so how long exactly is needed? I’m guessing it’s not cure time; the project manager is suspicious of how smooth the primer is under the chipped paint. Solution TBD.
Glass templating was completed this afternoon and the other gray (Warm Gray) was a bit yellow, so Medium Gray (the one I saw a sample of yesterday) is a go.
Thursday: We’re leaving mid-day for New England. No more pictures until we return (unless I can persuade Brandon to take some for me!).
Friday: ??