full shiplap on island

Island and Bathroom Floor

Soon our kitchen island will be completely clad in the shiplap we had left over when we cut that 7-foot-wide doorway between kitchen and den, and I wanted to get a couple of pictures of early progress up, so here you go.

Also, our master bath tile just got installed, and will be grouted today. But it looks so cool I was just excited and wanted to show it.

New Cedar Front Pillar

This is a moment to which I had really been looking forward. In order to run the new steel hand railing on the front porch and steps, Luke had to first install the new 6"x6" wide cedar pillar in the old ones' place, and I think it looks really sharp.

Lower kitchen cabinets framed-in

Bill and Bob are building all the kitchen cabinets off-site at their studio, and bringing them to the house and installing them in place. Now you can really start to get a feel for the orientation of everything in the kitchen. The little square of green material resting on top of the island box is a sample of the silestone color we chose, of which it is going to be made.

New Tile in guest bathroom, shampoo shelf in master bath

I bought some very cheap (.50c/sqft) but beautiful, white 13"x4" tile for the new master bathroom shower, but miscalculated the square footage and didn't have enough of it. I bought the entire stock they had at the store (100sqft), and our new shower's interior surface area is actually 150sqft. We had a concurrent conundrum in the old (guest) bathroom, where we had installed a new shower kit (nozzle and faucet), and had a huge patch of broken/missing tile that needed to be replaced. However, that particular size of tile (4-3/8"x4-3/8") is not frequently used or manufactured anymore, so it was impossible to find, much less purchase in time for Moses the tile subcontractor to install it this week. Our only other option was to devise a homemade mosaic solution with broken pieces to surround the new shower kit, which we REALLY didn't want to do.


So Moses suggested a brilliant solution: rather than do the weird mosaic patch, just completely remove the tile in the guest bathroom and replace it with the 13"x4", since the guest bathroom's interior surface area is only 60sqft. Then go to Home Depot and get 150sqft of regular 3"x6" subway tile for the master bath, of which they'll have plenty, and at a decent price, which they did. So we are doing that, and it's turning out really nice. Thanks, Moses!


In addition to all this, in drawing up plans for this project with our architect Craig, we somehow completely forgot to account for a built-in shampoo shelf in the master bath shower, a feature we'd really been looking forward to having in there. So we had to hastily frame one in at the last minute, and luckily got it in there JUST in time for Moses to start covering it with the requisite Hardie backer board. In case you don't know, Hardie is just like drywall, but stronger and more water resistant.


So many considerations, just with the tile issue. I haven't even mentioned the gigantic headache that was the Plumbing Top Out Inspection - that should probably have its own post.

more befores and afters!

I realize it's still kind of hard to tell what's going on from these pictures, but all you need to know is that drywall has finally been completed, and now the crew is taping and floating. Here are some pics of what different areas of the house looked like before and after drywall.