Saturday, April 13, 2013

We have Rock

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Over the last week the two smaller domes have had the rock facade applied. By the end of today they should be grouted and the scaffolding all moved to the larger house. I'll get another picture once all the scaffolding is out of the way, but I wanted to share this one now anyway.

By now most, if not all, of the floor has been stripped back to the previous layer and the leveling process should begin again soon. The last time they tried the weather got too cold and the final layer did not adhere to the foundation as well as it should have. Within a few weeks it had begun to bubble up and crack. That was back in December/January. I know most of you northern readers will be saying they should have known better, but we will frequently go all winter and never drop below freezing. That said, the forecast was for temperatures that were very close to freezing and they lost the gamble.

Today is supposed to be a clean up and take care of details sort of day. The trim crew will be doing lots of little things, and by the end of the day the stairway should be 100% finished (maybe the hand rail will still need to be stained to match, but structurally it will be done). All the baseboard should be installed and a few other little details should be cleaned up.

The granite counter tops were supposed to be cut last week, but the fabricator apparently thought we had too much money and decided he wanted to raise the price by over $3000, so our contractor selected a new fabricator and the slabs have been moved to the new location. The trouble is that the templates have to be remade and remeasured. It will be at least a week before they can be installed now. sigh. But they are not really slowing anything else down, so I guess I don't mind.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

The rock is here

I know my picture does not match my title, so I will talk about the rock first, then move to the kitchen. Yesterday we got 6 pallets of rock delivered. They are supposed to deliver about 2 shipments of rock a week until we have 35 pallets total. If you figure that is 6 loads, then we are looking at about 3 weeks to get all the rock here, sigh. One the other hand, it is getting here, so I guess I should not complain. Now I get to be stuck in the quandary of wishing for warm dry weather to finish the house, and rain to save the plants and crops. The last two days rain has won, but today is supposed to be sunny. Maybe we can ask that the days alternate, rain one and sun the next.

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Regardless of the weather, the inside is proceeding. The granite counter tops are supposed to be installed this week and they are making preparations for them. The kitchen will be having a deep green marble on it. I am looking forward to posting a lot of pictures of different countertops in the near future.

The stairs now have treads on them. They were freshly glued down last night, so we could not use them, but they look nice. I am going to wait until the bannister is also up and post a picture of that soon.