A Completely DIfferent House

Ok, so now this is starting to look like a house! The above shot of the first floor is what the flooring company did yesterday - only as a result of some illness amongst the tradesmen on Monday. They laid all of the new 1/2" sub floor, leveled it, and put in the tongue-in-groove hardwood all in one day. Pretty amazing how efficiently these two guys were working yesterday. They will be finishing the foyer and moving to the second floor today. I would guess they will be done with the house tomorrow at the latest.


Here is a little closer look at the wood floor that was being installed yesterday. The design of the hardwood in the first floor is something I have been looking forward to doing since we started designing the first house that we never built. The layout is a combination of 5", 3.25", and 2.25" inch white oak unfinished hardwood flooring. We bought equal amounts of the three widths of flooring and are staggering the widths across the floor. There is no specific design pattern other then I wanted it to be random, and to be equally used. The same width board will run the entire length of the house North-South. Its somewhat hard to tell how its going to look now, but once this is sanded and there are two coats of heavy polyurethane (environmentally friendly of course) this is going to look great and give the house a very long and open feel.

note: the random patches of brown on the top are wood putty they put into the nail holes that end up exposed. If they put it on now, then sand, it ends up looking like there are almost no nail holes.


Next up on the massive change bandwagon: the girls bathroom. Not only did the flooring company start yesterday, so did the tile company. They started with the girls bathroom (the only place we have all of the tile) and go a ton of work done.. There were several factors that went into the choices:

1. The walls needed to be mostly covered with tile as we wanted the bathroom to be more water resistant then the current one
2. We wanted to give the bathroom some color without it being too overwhelming or something that will get old over time.
3. We needed the floor to be stone as we are using a floor heating element which works much better with a stone over a porcelain.
4. I wanted the design to be reasonably tasteful, but still be fun for the girls to use when they are young and not age too poorly as they get a bit older.

So, as you can see from the above, I ended up going with white porcelain 2x8 tile for the majority of the wall space with one continuous line into the shower where the rest of the shower/bath inset is 4x4 red porcelain tile. For the floor I bought 12 x 12 marble tiles and had the tile guy cut them into 6 x 12's and stack them. I really like the look and will be interested to see how much different it looks when the grout goes in.

I am finally that "homeowner" with a dumpster on the street in front of the house instead of in the back yard. Why would I do this you might ask? Well, the mason's are starting to layout the foundation for the garage. I will be updating later tonite with plans and layout as the cement could be poured as soon as Friday.

This is a shot of the "secret" that I have been keeping about the installation I am doing in the house somewhere. I am going to leave it as a mystery for now - partially becasuse I am not 100% sure how its going to work out - but will send some more pics over the next few days as clues.....it should be installed later this week.

Flurry of updates coming the balance of the week with 5 different tradesmen at the house yesterday, today, tomorrow.