Kitchen Cabinets

What a pleasant surprise to arrive at the house and find the base and wall cabinets hung in the kitchen. The desk area cabinets were stacked in the corner and the island was still "floating" on the floor.





The laundry cabinets weren't installed, but appeared to be next!

Herro, have you seen godzirra?

Ok, it's not Godzilla, but it IS green: The guest bathroom. My dad and I managed to assemble the vanity without much help from instructions. Not because we're such manly men that we didn't need them, but because the single piece of instruction it came with was essentially worthless. If it was 2-ply it would have been twice as useful. It did provide us with some humor though because it was written in Engrish. I'll have to see if it's still around to provide a few quotes.

Some completed baseboard trim and more to put up.

How to install a ceiling fan on a 20' ceiling

...using a 12' stepladder. Doesn't seem very feasible when you do the math does it? Neither one of us were 8' tall so we had to improvise. Here was the first plan of attack: attach a 25' aluminum extension ladder to the face of the 12' stepladder.

I "anchored" the step ladder while Jeff climbed up to the ceiling. In theory this worked until Jeff reached up to grab the wire. At this point, the stepladder decided to lift itself up about 2 feet in the air (while still being attached to the extension ladder) which prompted a string of expletives in stereo. We managed to get back down our respective ladders without crashing through any windows.

We came up with Plan B: sawhorses. Seriously, we weren't drinking; yet.


The above contraption actually worked well and was pretty stable.


Attaching the motor and the 6' downrod was the hardest part.

...and finally the finished product. Lovely.

Flooring

We started off with marble silk tile in the master bedroom.


Then went with a dark slate/greenish tile in the laundry room.

Hand scraped brazilian walnut in the master bedroom.

And Bruce oak hardwood for the rest of the main floor.

Finished staircase

Final touches on the staircase:

Holy cow it's stairs.

I really grew attached to the double 2x4 treads that served as temporary stairs along with the 15' 2x4 nailed across the loft area to keep you from falling into the living room. So needless to say, I was quite surprised when I showed up and saw the following:


The clamps you see were actually pretty interesting. They rip the hand rail into 5 approximately .5" pieces and proceed to smash it between 2 pieces of hard plastic and bend it to the exact radius of the stairs. So they start halfway up at a straight part, then bend the wood to the shape it needs to be. Once the wood takes on the correct shape, they reglue all the pieces together and it looks like one nice bent stair rail. Pretty cool!

How 'bout a snag?

It's really no fun building a house if everything goes right. Right? A couple problem areas with water popped up creeping into the living room/kitchen area and the front door. They weren't too bad in that none of the interior walls got wet (or insulation) and didn't do any damage.