Day 170 | Wood flooring delivery, shelving complete, and light fixtures

House Day: 170
Loan Day: 185

We've got an assortment for a blog post today. We had our Buffalo Ridge Ash wood flooring delivered today. They were low on 5" planks, so we have 3-4-6" planks to play with. We will be purchasing a floor nailer to help us install this. Definitely going to be reading up on what we need to know about installing this come next Wednesday. 



Here are the two closets that are in Brady's room. The left closet we did shelving on one side and double rods on the other side. The right closet will have one rod and then two shelves above. I'm so glad we decided to have our trim guy do our closet organizers for us!


We have two hall closets upstairs. This first one is located on the catwalk area, and where I'll keep the vacuum for upstairs since it will be carpeted. And then also put a tall laundry basket in here for all the boys to put their laundry in. 

This other closet is going into the hallway with the other two bedrooms. This seemed more appropriate for a linen closet setup so thats what we went with.

Here are the other two boys' closet organizations complete, pretty much the same.


A little hiccup with our kitchen sink/cabinet. I'm pretty sure I would have mentioned that we are having a farmhouse sink to my cabinet place, but it isn't in the notes anywhere and therefore it wasn't ordered as a farmhouse sink base. :/ So Mat was going to cut off the top for us, no big deal... but when he actually took the sink out of the box to get that ready., then he realizes it still doesn't fit right. The apron on the sink would need to go down about 2-3" more. So instead of these doors, we are ordering 11" doors ( I believe) and he will be able to adjust this base into making our sink fit it. I'm so glad I don't have to buy a whole new sink base! 

Another hiccup, this is where the range hood needs to go thru the cabinet to vent. Well there is a pocket door behind there and and the HVAC guy says he will need to go thru the top of the cabinet and then straight up thru the ceiling. This really doesn't sound appealing because then I'm going to see a bump in the wall because it will have a soffit of drywall around it. I was hoping he could go from the cabinet straight into the wall and then up between the studs, but maybe there is a header there that he can't go thru? If it resorts to having a soffit visible then I will probably have him do it on the laundry room wall rather than the kitchen side.

We purchased the light fixtures for overhead on the porch and they were delivered today. For having to buy 10 light fixtures, I knew that would cost a lot as light fixtures are pricy. But fortunately I found these for $10 each and thought we would spray paint the metal on them to make them a dark bronze color to match our other exterior fixtures. These actually turned out to be bigger than I thought, and I love them!

Day 167 | Garage door mishaps and other updates

House Day: 167
Loan Day: 182

I pulled up this morning and saw this! Eek, what happened to our 2 day old garage door?! Our trim guy Mat said he just pushed the button inside to open it and this is what happened. It looks like the cable is loose on the right drum and wasn't lifting the right side, therefore putting pressure on the left side and bending the track. A quick message to who installed our garage door and they will be out at noon, awesome service!! Turns out the screws weren't completed in the drum, easy human error. I'm just glad I went with someone that guarantees their work and replaced the track with a new one. Thank you!

Mat and Rich got a lot of shelving done inside the house today too. Pantry shelving.. which there is a little story to this.. The original house plans had this as a pantry, and then opposite of the foyer they had a coat closet. Well when you add in the basement option, it takes away those coat closets and then labels this pantry as the coat closet. I didn't think anything of it when I read it and was just going to use it as a coat closet. 

Until my trim guy Mat says "So what kind of shelving do you want in your pantry?" 

I stopped him and said, "well, its not a pantry, its a coat closet." 

He looked a little puzzled and then realized oh yeah, there isn't another front closet." 

But after he said that, I was very curious in thinking, "Could I make this a pantry though? Do I need a coat closet when we are having the mudroom setup in the garage? And I can just have our tall coat rack in the foyer for guests.." 

So I made the decision to make this a pantry. BONUS storage that will definitely be used more than a coat closet would be!!

Master closets are done as well. My closet has a single bar on the left, double bars in the middle...

And then shelving on the right.

Tony and the boys also have a similar set up as this, with double hanging, single hanging and shelving in the middle.

The toe kick venting issue was fixed in the upstairs boys bathroom and now their cabinets are installed.

Here are before pics of the closets, as I'm sure they will get their closet organizers in there fast.



Window trim is up in the foyer, looking great!

And I can't stop drooling over the kitchen window trim with the cabinet moldings in now too!



We also have some grass coming up! Tony and his parents laid some seed down a few weeks ago and then topped it off with straw. -- I swear I have some pics on my phone that Tony sent me, apparently I didn't make a blog post about it thought, oops!

Day 164 | Garage duties

House Day: 164
Loan Day: 179

Tony and his dad installed the plywood on the one garage wall that he wanted to leave not drywalled. It is insulated so we needed to get the plywood up soon so the insulation wouldn't fall out. I think it turned out pretty good and will look nice when he starts adding his tin roof material and barn wood to it along with antique signs.

When we first pulled up to the house this morning we could see them working on installing the garage door. Wahoo!!

Garage door is in, they just need to complete the track install. There was a mess up on the window choice, we didn't want the arch in this style. -- I don't have any arches in the house style, lol. But they are fixing that for me and should have the inserts next week. 

We went with a high lift to keep more space in the garage when it is raised. If we could do it again, we would have made a taller garage door opening. We made our garage bigger than normal, 24'x24', but we didn't think to make the garage door bigger than the standard 7' tall. 16'x7' is the size of our garage door. But thankfully Tony can still fit his jeep in the garage if he needed to.


Looking good! This was just as we were leaving the house for the day. 

Day 163 | Cabinets and window trim

House Day: 163
Loan Day: 178

A little hiccup with our cabinets. When we had them measured, the pocket door wasn't in yet so it had to be estimated based on what the door measurements were going to be. Originally we had two 18" cabinets up top on either side of the range, and 18" on the bottom right, with 9" cookie sheet cabinet on the bottom left. Well this would have put us about 3" hanging into the pocket doorway. So to make it look best, we need to cut back 6". 
After playing with several different options (Thank you Jen from Chelsea Lumber-Saline!), we found that changing the 18" upper left cabinet into a 12" cabinet would make the most sense for cutting our 6". We did lose the 9" cookie sheet cabinet there, and have to do just a 3" filler to the left of the stove. But it actually turns out that Jen was very generous with our island walkway and we had 47" on both sides of the island. So we have decided to put the 9" cookie sheet cabinet at the end of the island, but split the different on both sides, 4.5" off each end. It will still give us 42.5" isle around the island. And we only have to order a 12" cabinet to fill that upper left spot. 

So they were able to keep trucking along, adding in the other cabinets and adding the doors on them.  And look how awesome it is looking! Even our electrician came in and added can lights in our kitchen. --Notice the space between the cabinets and pocket door opening now.. its perfect for finishing it off with trim. 





Laundry room cabinets are in. We are doing a floating counter top in the laundry room, so that I can roll laundry carts underneath.

Dining room trim is coming along! Obviously I have some catching up to do with finishing the painting near the ceiling in here.

Our e-space (office) area, with the outlets higher up so they can be reached above the future countertops.

Beautiful trim on the interior of the front door.





Master bath cabinets are being installed. There was a small issue with how the toe kick registers were put in, they were sticking out the front a bit. But Mat was able to fix one of them, and the other was fixed by our HVAC crew.