Ovens and cooktop are in

Back splash is going up by china cabinet and the hardwood is installed and ready to finish.

Even more changes today

Today the dishwasher and faucets were installed along with about 1/3 of the hardwood floors.

When we first started working with Dwight to design the kitchen he suggested a back splash that would"pop" when you see it. Today when I walked in from work and saw the newly installed back splash it sure "popped" for me.It really looks great and after grouting tomorrow it should be awesome ! Great choice Roo

Tomorrow should bring installation of the rest of the appliances and hardwood.

Granite is here !

I came home from a project at the lake and was surprised to see the granite countertop was installed a week early! It looks great. Its a darker color and the natural silvers embedded really stand out when the light hits them .I call them silver but im sure all the "women" will correct me if I say it in from of them.

Hardwood floors and tile

Lots happened today.The tile floor was grouted and Payton's Hardwood Floors delivered the wood and began the installation in the master bedroom.The balance is stacked in the living room and waiting to go in next week.

Hardwood floorS are next.

The hardwood floor guy is coming tomorrow to install flooring in the new addition and in our bedroom which had carpet,until today. I received one of those typical remodeling phone calls from Dwight last week to inform me that the hardwood floors we had in the living room and hallway in fact were not true hardwood but  hardwood veneer which in 14 years of living here we never knew. Because of this, it couldn't be refinished so it had to come up and new real hardwood needed to be installed in order for it to match the stuff going in the addition. The demo guys did a great job taking it up and saved most of it for me. What am I going to do with it? To the lake of course,along with the carpet out of the bedroom.

The pics are of the living room and bedroom with no flooring.

Finally after years of hearing the floor squeak at the foot of our bed its going to get silenced ! Hurray !

Exterior is wrapping up

The soffit and gutters are complete and the vinyl underneath the addition is in.Our plans are to put a ceiling fan under there ,tile the floor and make it our covered patio to watch the pool activity from. Touch up painting is left to do then the deck will be the finale.

Tile and cabinet crown are both installed

The most recent changes are the addition of the cabinet crown molding and kitchen tile.The tile looks great on the floor .Grouting will come Friday.The cabinet molding is up and is really a nice touch.

(no subject)

Tripp and Ivey visited today and we went out to Grandma and Paw Paw Smith's in Griffin to have lunch. We came back to the house so Lowe's could deliver the new fridge and then Poppy took them to spend the night with "Memaw and Pepaw"

We had a little fun before they left though. I think they both may be in construction one day !

Island and china cabinet are in.

By weeks end, the cabinets including the island were all installed.One little "snafu" with the china cabinet but the builder has already signed up to resolve it. All the appliances are here and waiting to be installed.

Cabinet installation begins.The grandkids come for a visit!

I came home from my bi monthly trip to Rhode Island to find a large portion of the cabinets installed.There are still a lot of details like molding ,hardware and the countertop to do but it sure looks good to see something being installed that's the actual final product.It gives us the feeling that the construction phase is finally done and we can start to see some detail. Here are pics of the wall and base cabinets and already I am telling Rood there is a ton of space.That's without the island which is going to go in tomorrow. I don't think we will ever have storage issues in the kitchen again ! By far the best thing to happen today was Tripp and Ivey came to spend the night. We love "yall'

Wagon Ride with Roo!

There's always fun to be had at Roo's house!

Wow!

We are at Roo and Poppy's house today, and the kitchen renovation is going fast!

The crown moulding is up, and the painting was completed today. Tomorrow, the cabinets will be installed!

I can't wait to see the cabinets out of the boxes!!

-Pixie

Sheetrock is on the walls.Cabinets enroute

We came home Tuesday to find all the sheetrock hung and finished to its first sanding.It looks great and finally gives us an idea of exactly what the room will look like.On Wednesday they put down the "backer board" that the tile will sit on.Even thought they put up new plastic and taped it well to cut off the rest of the house and the construction zone and we put towels under all the doors, the sheetrock dust invaded the entire rest house leavings its white coating on EVERYTHING !

Its fruitless to try to clean it up so its going to stay until they are finished sanding and then the cleanup will begin .I was told by Dwight that the cabinets will be delivered Friday.

Shopping for tile and granite

This week our builder Dwight took us to pick our granite,tile and back splash. We went close to downtown Atlanta to the Daltile slabyard.There we encountered a showroom filled with tile and back splash and a huge warehouse with rows and rows of granite,marble and onyx slabs used for home decorating. We went unprepared for all the choices and quickly figured out it was going to be a task to pick. After wandering aimlessly while Dwight and the Daltile rep made suggestions we narrowed it down to 4 choices. Two of these were brown in color and really nice.The other two was darker in color .Granite is graded on levels and then a high or low grading within these levels.The higher the level the higher the cost. Our contract called for a level 2 high but the two we liked were a high level 3.That translates into double the price of the original estimate for granite.We thought about it for a minute then the reality of already being over budget and remembering that im really cheap kicked in and we walked over and picked Verde Butterfly http://www.daltilestone.com/series.cfm?c=2&s=1&cf=16

Its a dark greenish black with embedded silver spots.Im sure that's not a correct description since its a mans point of view but that's sure what it looks like. Its amazing that all this stuff was just cut out of the earth and polished.It looks too incredible to just come out of the ground.

 

After that ,we went to the showroom and chose the back splash and floor tiles.Im not sure they had names so we took pictures which I posted here.The backsplash will be a light beige color with a band thru it embedded with colored glass squares.The floor tile looked beige too. Sorry, I don't do colors very well so that's as much as I can describe it. On the way home we stopped at Lowe's to look at prep sinks and faucets .While there, we saw a fantastic deal on a Maytag fridge that was being clearenced.It just so happened we had a 10% off coupon which got the price down even lower than our builder could buy even with his discount. We bought it on the spot and left happy we had made a great deal.

Inspections are done and sheetrock is going up

Today I took a vacation day from work and decided to take a shot at cleaning the bricks that came off the back of the house.The plan is to have them placed around the piers that support the addition. It wasn't as bad as I thought, just time consuming and a little frustrating when you hammer on a brick for 2 minutes to remove the cement and on the last "whack" it breaks into. I think I probably cleaned 1/3 of them today so im hoping to get the entire pile done in about 2 weeks.

While I was working on that the guys were patching some holes in the sheetrock where the old walls came out and removing the wallpaper on another wall. The inspector came out to look at the insulation and a few small things the previous inspector wanted changed.To my surprise,the inspector was a guy I went to high school with .Everything was in order and we passed and caught up a little about the last 30 years.Of course we almost simultaneously whipped out the pictures of our grandchildren !

 

Once they got the insulation ok they started hanging sheetrock on the ceiling.They finished up by the end of the day and now we can see the ceiling height instead of speculating "about" where it will be. They also encased the line set to the HVAC unit in coiled pipe before it gets buried.