April 27, 2004


The painting is done throughout the house and we're all feeling much better about it.  No more plastic sheets covering things.  Furniture placed again in its accustomed spots.  And when you clean flat surfaces, there's not so much dust in the air that it doesn't stay clean for 12 hours.
Everything looks fantastic.  We're feeling good again.






Craig installed the knobs and pulls in the kitchen.  The distressed nickel Kristi picked out goes great with the cabinets.  Tomorrow the granite counter tops arrive for installation. 


Another reason our spirits are up is that the living room and dining room have been put back together.  And we're now eating dinner together as a family at the dining room table as opposed to grabbing a spot wherever we can in front of the television as we've been doing for the last month.



The master bedroom is 98% complete.  Still need a fan above the bed and handles on the french doors, but the electrical face plates and switches are in.

This is a good view of the one regret Kristi is developing. (We've made literally hundreds of choices, so if just one is being questioned, we are in good shape!)  We wall mounted the lamps and ran lines to them inside the wall.  So the bed is practically chained to this very spot.  Kristi thinks we may need to move it, perhaps only a few inches to the left to make more access room for the furniture we'll be putting on the right wall.
Office is completely painted (well, except for the closet interior, and that's a long term project to get shelving in there) and the electrical plate covers are up.  Last job is the floor.  Kristi and Keith were originally going to do this themselves, as it couldn't be too hard to install click-in laminate flooring.  But then in a classic case of "feature creep" we decided to add it to Craig's list of jobs.

That's the phone line creeping across the floor by the way.  We have three phone lines in the house, and every single one was affected by the remodel.  Two were in walls that went away, and this one started out in the master bedroom, but ended up in the office after the wall moved. It was the only phone we had until this week (other jacks are now operational), and would often get disconnected when work was being done in this room.



There was a reason they readily gave up on the original plan of doing this floor ourselves.  A little bit of the reason was Craig wanted it done while he was around; he doesn't like to leave jobs not 100% finished.  But the big reason was we knew he could knock it out in no time. Kristi caught him and Ben halfway through the job; they would finish this same day.
The stucco guys finally got their truck fixed and showed up.  They got halfway through the job before Craig stopped them and said the color match wasn't good enough to the old stucco.  Too yellow.  He sent them home and told them to bring the right color tomorrow to finish of the job and to cover what was done today.
Although I'm all for getting the color matched correctly, I wonder if there wasn't just a little bit of revenge being extracted by Craig for the stink they raised about the concrete and scaffolding blocking their way the first time they showed up.  Probably not; Craig is too nice of a guy.


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