The current week of March 3rd is Week 9 of the 14 active weeks of the remodel. (Week 15 is final cleaning.)
Things continue to progress, sometimes several steps forward and a half-step or two backwards. The weather hasn't been exactly cooperative these days - can't lay tile and grout in freezing/near-freezing temperatures in an unconditioned house in the rain, for example.
That said, we have drywall; we have wood and tile floors, with grout applied in several locations even; we have a bathtub and a shower base and much of the tub and shower surround tile has been set; we have interior doors; and we have floor and door trim. It looks like a real house again!
Painting is scheduled to commence next week. We have been struggling with selecting paint colors for the past 2+ weeks. We were held up when my favorite paint lady (the only one who knows how to mix samples at Home Depot on this side of town, apparently) went on vacation for 10 days or so.
While she was out, I tried 3 different Home Depots in an effort to find anyone else who can mix samples properly!! The guy at the store down on Hillcroft at the Beltway actually had colorant running down the sides of the sample jar -- and expected me to want them. (I spoke with a supervisor and explained the myriad problems with the 4 paint samples I had just had made, and no, I didn't buy any of them. At that point, I was pretty livid, explained why they were wholly inadequate as color samples, and left.)
The good news is, we have managed to get colors selected for most of the rooms in the house, though we did go through numerous candidates to get there. I have gone through a number of "touch-up" kits, which are perfect for applying paint to foam-core boards from Hobby Lobby, which is how we evaluate colors.
Here is a glimpse into the past several weeks' purchased paint color
candidates, though there may have been additional colors that were so
awful as to have been tossed almost immediately into the trash. Of
course, the picture doesn't include the half-dozen plus recently purchased candidates.The rooms we struggled with the longest were:
- the front bedroom, which has a 6x6 foot south-facing window through which you see the parterre garden, and which I want to be a shade of green
- the study, which faces the neighbor's house to the west and now opens east to the kitchen, and which Roy wants to be a shade of mauve
- the laundry room, which I want to have some fun with - Roy describes my desire to have it "be something that makes me smile" as "whimsical" (he's one to speak, what with trying to find a color he likes for the study!) - ooh! I just had an idea...we'll see what Roy thinks of it (he agreed to it! you'll just have to wait to see what we decided to do in there)
So that's where we are at - about two-thirds of the way through the remodel and finishing up our time in color selection purgatory.
The big news of the week is that someone literally bought every slab (all 10 of them) of our chosen granite for the kitchen less than 24 hours before we were to go out and choose a mere 2 slabs. That created a multi-day panic that isn't over quite yet. I have spent the better part of the past 2 days in the granite yard haunting the aisles looking for solutions.
The good news is, we have a potential work-around that may cost us more, but should still get us the desired countertops, as we cannibalize pre-fabricated countertops and island tops that are broken and/or stained to get the linear feet that we need. At least for the main kitchen countertops. The island might have to come out of a different piece (color) of granite, so I spent today ferreting out candidates for an island top.
We'll be back at the granite yard in the morning for more perusing and weighing of options. Then I'll meet the fabricator at the yard next week to look over what we've been able to cobble together and see if he thinks it will work.
