Week 22: Nov 23 - 27

Cabinetry installation has begun. I learned that there are basically two methods of building a cabinet, one with a face frame and one without. Both methods are structurally sound and capable of accommodating solid surface countertops. The main difference is with appearance. Cabinets with a face frame have a strip of wood that separates all of the doors and drawers from one another, whereas a cabinet without a face frame is built such that the door and drawer fronts all come in close contact with one another. Unless you know what you are looking for you can easily miss the difference between the two types of cabinets. We chose the cabinets without the face frame primarily because the cabinet builder with the best bid and references happens to build this type of cabinet.This is a picture of what will become the kid's study area. Kid's bathroom. Only one sink! Rather than two sinks here we opted for increased countertop and drawer space.
Upstairs bath. When I was pulling the wiring I made a guess as to where I expected the outlet should go. It ended up right behind where the sink will go. Kevin helped me fish a short piece of wire over to the side for the new outlet location over the future countertop area. Per electric code the old outlet/now junction box is suppose to be easily accessible. However, it will be covered with a mirror. I ended up counter sinking the cover plate flush with the sheetrock so the mirror can sit tightly against the wall. The box isn't necessarily easily accessible but isn't inaccessible either.

This is the half bath. Bathroom lights were also installed this week. This was quite the project as the wiring had to be fished out from behind the sheetrock. Taking advice from "This Old House" website the lights were mounted 75 inches off of the floor. This height is suppose to provide good lighting with less shadowing on the face when standing in front of the mirror.
This is the master bathroom.
Laundry room with adjustable shelving that will serve as the pantry. The rest of the laundry area with the adjustable shelving for each of the kid's laundry baskets.
Kitchen area. All of the cabinet faces are built out of knotty alder. The kitchen is painted white with a dark brown glaze highlighting the corners, sand through and distressed areas. The rest of the house is stained brown but has the highlight of the same glaze as used in the kitchen. We went with a slightly distressed look to help blend in the expected future dings and scratches.
I installed the stairway lighting. It took some thought and several visits to the lighting store to figure out how to light this stairway. Initially, I just wanted to put a light up on the ceiling. However, it would have either required a ladder or a special tool to change the light bulbs, so the lighting store people encouraged us toward the sconces. When I asked them how high to place the fixtures they reached up above their head and just slightly forward with an outstretched arm and said about here. I thought there would be a little more science behind the decision.
Kid's bath with tiling around shower/bath.
Flooring in the bonus room is finished. It is called "Spalted Maple" and is manufactured by Lamipro. It was a much quicker process than installing the solid wood on the main floor. Oddly enough, the stars must have been aligned in my favor, as I was able to lay full floor planking from one side of the room to the next. No need to cut a plank down to get it to fit nicely to the wall.
Viki has been busy adding more color to the house.
The garage has become the work center. Thank goodness for power tools.

Week 21: Nov 16 - 20

Tom and I were able to finish the wood flooring in the entry way and kitchen. I don't think that it looks too bad for a couple of novice flooring guys. Working around corners and changing directions with the plank placement were the two most technically challenging parts of the job. Physically, the repetitive stooping, squatting, kneeling has kept the both of us sore all week.



Now attention moves to the bonus room where we are going to put down a laminate flooring. We chose this over carpet because Viki wants to do quilting in this room and she did not want to loose needles in the carpeting. Also, we want the area to be the place where the kids do all of their creative / messy projects. I wanted to avoid staining carpet with their crafts. We also looked at Vinyl flooring, which would have worked well except that the cost to prepare the subfloor and pay for someone to install the flooring made it more expensive than the laminate. Here comes some more stooping, squatting, and kneeling. All of this activity with the house is turning in to pretty good rehab for my knee. The harder I work the better it seems to feel.

I have started with preparing the floor by removing any debris, scraping down sheetrock mud splatter, and pounding down any elevated nails to achieve as flat a surface as possible. A thin foam pad is then laid down on top of which the laminate flooring will be placed. Laminate flooring is a "floating" floor meaning it does not get anchored down to the subfloor.

Kevin Layton and I were also able to put the finishing touches on most of the electrical work in the home. We hung lights, put in switches and outlets late into the night on several occasions this week. Now the focus is on putting covers over everything. After the cabinetry is installed we will be able to finish with the remainder of the lights and outlets. This picture is showing the newly hung outdoor lights by the newly placed garage doors.


Garage door installations has begun. My cousin, Jason Beck, owns Allstar Garage doors down in American Fork. He was able to get me a good deal on these doors. We are working with a company locally to have them installed. This is certainly a better look than the blue tarps.



All of the tile flooring was completed in the laundry and bathroom areas of the house. Just in time, too, as the cabinets have arrived.



Viki has been busy decorating the kid's rooms. This was Landen's choice for the theme of his room.

This has been our method of kid control while Viki and I put in time at the house. Junk food and movies make the best babysitters.

Week 20: Nov 9 - 13

The painters have moved out leaving a new feel to the house. Viki took over by adding color to the kids' rooms. This is a picture of the girls' room.
Tom, Viki's brother, and I began installing the wood flooring that will go in the kitchen, entry, and mainfloor hallway. Ray got us started and is letting us use his tools. I took a day off of work to get as much done as possible. I began the project thinking we would be able to finish the flooring in a day. I was wrong in my assumption. By the end of our first day we had made it the majority of the way across the kitchen floor. At that point, I was so tired that I honestly could not keep a focused thought other than that I wanted to stop and go home to rest, and I had worn a hole in my knee.
The process starts with first preparing the sub-floor by vacuuming up any debris, smoothing or scraping down any rough edges,and then stapling tar paper into place. The tar paper acts as a moisture barrier and helps to lessen the noise that can occur when two pieces of wood are rubbed together. The wood planks lock together with a tongue and groove system and are then held together using a staple gun. For a couple of amateurs I think we are doing a pretty good job. Viki chose the flooring, Teak wood with a scraped surface and tobacco stain. It looks great and works well with her paint color choices. We also have crown molding now in the master bedroom.
The tile guy has started by installing all of the cement board to the subfloor and has began the process of building the master bath shower. I had initially planned on trying the tile on my own, but changed my mind as we are running out of time. We are supposed to be moved into the home in the next 4 weeks. If there were no time or financial contraints building would be a more enjoyable experience for me. Cabinetry is being built. Currently, everything except for the kitchen is complete.

The cabinet maker actually makes his doors, most places tend to outsource this process. The boxes of all of the cabinets are made out of a melamine covered particle board. The final stained wood that will be visible will be attached to these boxes.

Week 19: Nov 2 - 6

Cement work was completed this week. As it turns out there was a reason that the garage steps were not centered on the door. Per code if there are more that 3 steps there has to be a railing. So, the area offset from the door is the space dedicated for the railing.
Holes have been drilled through the base of the home to allow the crawl space some ventilation. The plumbing work actually runs in the crawl space. I questioned our builder about freezing water lines. Fortunately, all of the piping will be insulated.
Painting is basically complete. There are some areas that need touching up, but that will be completed following all of the flooring installation. During the course of the week the painters went through a lot of masking tape and paper isolating out the different areas to be painted different colors. We chose a flat white for the ceiling, and egg shell brown for the walls and an antique white semi-gloss for the trim. The painters call this a three tone paint job. They started by completing all of the nail hole patching and then placed silicone at every corner and joint in the trim to smooth out all of the transition points and fill in any spaces. Next they primed the trim with an oil based primer and then primed the whole house with a latex primer. They used the oil based primer initially on the exposed wood trim pieces as water based primers would have caused the wood to swell a bit making the surface rough to the touch. That ends up being my cool learning experience about building for the week.

This is a picture of the bonus room "Viki's Space". She chose to keep the room light in color to keep it from feeling like a cave. She had it all painted antique white, the same color as the trim in the rest of the house. I find the color a bit yellow, but she finds it just perfect. The trim will then be the brown that makes up the walls in the rest of the house making the bonus room exactly opposite in color arrangement compared to the rest of the house. This pretty well highlights the opposite yet somehow linked relationship that Viki and I have.
This is the upstairs family room showing the brown wall color with the accent trimming around the doors. A painted closet. The paint sure makes that area look sharp. I am trying to imagine the color with crayon, pencil, and scuff marks. I am worried about how I am going to react when the little "accidents" start happening around the house.

Landen and I were able to begin installing the recessed can trims and light bulbs. He asked if he could try and install one of the trims. After working together on the first one he was a pro and helped to complete two full rooms.
We decided to go with two styles of trim. Inside we chose a baffled trim, a trim that allows the light bulb to sit recessed up in the ceiling. Outside the trims used are called "snow cones" because they allow the light bulb to stick down below the trim and ceiling about 1/2". Contractors tend to use the snow cone trims because they are the least expensive. Lighting professionals, however, feel thay are evil and to be avoided at all cost. In fact, Viki and I took a verbal beating from a lighting "professional" this last week for even considering the snow cone trims. They feel that with the light bulb exposed your eye is naturally drawn to the bright spot rather than to what it is you are trying to light up. The baffled trims looked better to me but were nearly 3 x the price compared to the snow cone trims. As I battled wants, needs, and costs for several days I took a lashing from Viki about being "baffled" about whether to use baffled or non-baffled trims. Real funny! Fortunately, I found a deal where I got the baffled trims at a good price.

Outide the bulbs are tucked behind a support beam so having bright spots were less of an issue for me.
The three girls in the family highlighting the doorknobs and lights that they have chosen for the house. Both Sadie (7) and Maelynn (12) celebrated birthdays this week.

Week 18: Oct 26 - 30

Trim work is winding up and the painters are moving in. We chose to go with a simple trim pattern. Simple to look at and EASY TO CLEAN
The door jam highlights the style of trim placed throughout the house. The white spots are the areas where the painters have come in and filled nail holes. They will come back later and sand leaving the areas smooth and flat.
An example of the closet organizers in the home. The closets follow the basic theme of having a shelving system with an area on one side to hang long clothing items and an area on the opposite side of the shelving split in two to hang shorter clothing items.


The forms have been placed to complete the last stage of the cement work. Garage steps. I just noticed that the forms are not centered on the door! It is stuff like this that drives me crazy with building. Aren't steps suppose to center on the door? If not, if there is some benefit to being shifted to the side of the door opening then I need to know. Otherwise, I grow an ulcer worrying about details like this. One more call to the builder.
Front steps. Exit outside the garage utility door. We initially planned to not pour this as a cost saving measure. As it turns out you have to order a certain amount of cement or get charged extra for making a small order. You have to order 4 yards of cement to avoid the up charge. So we ordered 4 yards and were able to include this pad with everything else.
Garage entry door as well as a place for the heat pump.

Behind the scenes lighting and carpet have been chosen and re-chosen. Floor coverings were finalized and ordered. I am in a little bit of a moral wrestling match regarding the lighting. When we were first planning out lighting placement we went to a local lighting store and sought help. They offered help for free with the condition that we get lights from them. They helped us with some lay-out decisions and we went back and chose out lighting from their store. Then an independent lighting guy drove up to the house one day and asked if he could just give us a bid. As it turns out the independent guy can get us the exact same lighting for about 15% less. That ends up being $400 - $500 dollars difference. As for service, the lighting store offers a show room and good help with initial lay-out but makes no contact with us unless we initiate the contact. The independent guy stays in contact with us on a regular basis and has walked through our home and met with us on numerous occasions to talk about options. What to do? Both have provided us with service. I don't believe the lighting store has provided me with $500 better service, but I feel committed to by lights from them. Right now I am leaning toward buying lights from both places and confronting the lighting store about adjusting their prices to be more in line with the independent lighting guy. Which should be interesting because I hate confrontation in any form, except with Viki, who has become my sounding board for expressing frustration regarding the building process.