day 76

I finally had a chance to grab some progress photos on the real camera.  I've been out to the lot a few times this week to check on things, but it's always been a quick trip at lunch.  The siding guy must think I'm nuts.

Speaking of the siding guy...  He was out working again today - by himself.  The first few days there were two workers, but all of this week there has only been the one.  It just doesn't seem efficient to me.  The good news is that he's just about done.  There is a little bit left to do on the side of the garage and then he'll have to wrap up the trim on the front of the house.  I'm anxious for the stone to go up so I can everything pulled together, but based upon the cold front coming our way, I'm guessing that's still a while out.

We also finally had the inspection on the carpentry, rough plumbing and rough electrical this past Thursday (day 74).  I have no idea what is normal, but there is a list of nine things that must be corrected before they grant approval.  The various crews are supposed to be out there making fixes this weekend so that the inspector can come back on Monday or Tuesday.  Once we get sign off, they'll begin insulating.

The HVAC was installed at some point this week as well (day 73 maybe?).  We've been told it's ready to be turned on as soon as they're done insulating so that drywall work can begin.

And, thanks to a Garden Web forum, we took a second (or one hundred and second) look at our kitchen plans and realized that the pantry door and refrigerator door would have interfered with one another as laid out.  The cabinet guy suggested adding a 15" utility cabinet to scoot the fridge down a bit, so we now have slightly altered kitchen plans.  I also had him make the switches I'd previously talked about -- getting rid of the full-height doors between the oven and cooktop and then switching to three drawers under the cooktop.  The floating shelves aren't shown within the diagrams below, but we're still planning to hang them to the right of the fridge.

 

There were several other changes people suggested, but I wasn't willing to make the trade-off for some of them (e.g. getting rid of our pantry to extend the space to the right of our sink or moving our sink to the peninsula).  I'm sure there will end up being things I want to change later, but right now I'm thrilled to have something larger than our old galley kitchen (which, despite being small, I adored - the before/after photos are worthy of a post... actually the whole house is).

[ignore that there is nothing on the wall - this wasn't long after we moved in]

My dad came up this weekend, so Hubby and I had a chance to get out for a date night tonight.  We went grocery shopping, hit Taco Bell for dinner and stopped at Pier1, JCPenney and Target.  Date nights have seriously changed in the past three years