Been a long time...

... since I left you (left you) without a dope blog to read to (read to, read to, uh read to).

So yeah, things have been rolling along. Lots of progress being made, though there have been plenty of snags and decisions to mull over and take up tons of time.

Today my mom and I went out to Bridgeville to talk to the people at Mathew's Marble about getting the countertop/sink/bathtub surround made out of cultured marble. Cultured marble is sortof like man-made/synthetic marble. In the past it's come in mainly/only corny colors like this (or worse):
But, nowadays it comes in a much wider variety of colors and is a reasonable alternative to really expensive stuff like corriane (sp?), granite, or real marble, but better quality and more durable than laminates like Formica.

In the end, in the main bathroom I think I'm getting "steel grey" speckled countertop/rectangular sink and then the walls around the shower are going to be black with white speckles. It seems like everybody but me thinks putting black all around the shower's a bad idea.... but I think it'll look sleek. The cabinets in the bathroom are going to be black laminate with a cool "microdot" texture.

This is the steel grey:
And this is the black:
I stopped by tonight and they were still working on the drywall at 9pm! Most of the drywall's up, which strangely makes the place look a lot bigger. Things were looking good and progressing, but there were also some things that my mom and I discovered that needed to be addressed like:
-a light socket that seemed to have been drywalled in
-a pulley mounted on the steel beam that's against the back concrete block wall that hadn't been removed... whoever laid the block actually broke a whole in the block so the block could go around the pulley, haha. I can't even imagine why they would've done that.
and the thing that really concern me,
-water dripping through the tops of the side windows. The drywall guys were about to drywall around it when we noticed it and pointed it out to them. If they laid the drywall with water dripping on it, the drywall would get ruined and the insulation behind it would stay damp and possibly mildew/whatever. So now the contractor's going to need to determine why water was coming in (the siding isn't up yet, so it's not entirely unexpected that water's getting in), pull the insulation board off the wall, put a heater on it to dry it off, put the insulation back, then put the drywall back.

All this stuff just takes soooo much time to think about and sort out. Lunch alone took over 2 hours, which I needed to make up at work by staying till 7:15, and I got into work at like 8:15. I need to go in early tomorrow so that I can leave early as well, so looks like I won't be getting much sleep tonight. But, before I go, here are some pictures of the progress as of March 6 (I need to take new pictures... maybe I'll do that after I get lunch nearby on Wednesday):

Insulation on the first floor:

Second floor insulation:
Second floor skylights:
This is a picture of a huge set of drawers that was in the garage when I bought it. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before on here, but if you count the holes, you can see there are 72 drawer spaces. There were a few drawers missing, but at least 60 of them were still there. My mom stripped one and determined that it was good wood (Oak maybe?) , so I made sure we got them when I bought the place and they're now waiting to be refinished in my mom's basement. I'd initially wanted to refinish the whole thing so I could have it ready for when I moved in.... but that really doesn't look like it's going to happen . No big deal though, I'll have a big basement to work on it in.

Bout time for an update

Alright, well things have been going somewhat slowly for the past couple weeks basically because it was time to put the roof on but weather was preventing it. Without the roof put on, insulation, electric, etc could not be installed without the chance of them getting ruined... or somebody getting electricuted :P Luckily this week the weather broke for long enough to do that and in the next few weeks things will really start to roll.

The head contractor/owner of Team constuction (the contracting company) had been on vacation for the past two weeks as well, but he returned this week and I think that will give the whole thing some momentum.

Insulation should be going in this Monday, so all the wiring and other things that are in the walls like duct work need to be complete this week.

The back concrete wall has been constructed. It doesn't look quite as nice as I would've liked really... but we'll see how it looks once the siding's up and all that. I can always paint it or put a mural on it or something:



The skylights have been put in and look really nice. The sides of them on the short sides are angled to the ceiling to bring more light in. There are two in the kitchen, two in the livingroom and then one in the second bathroom (it couldn't have any windows, so a skylight was kind of necessary).



I've also got some new pictures of the windows and sliding glass doors. The mil-finish aluminum is really nice and I'm glad I spent the extra money on it.



Oh yeah... and last week I got my kitchen and second bathroom cabinets and plumbing shit from Ikea. The kitchen cabinets doors are stainless steel and the bathroom stuff is aluminum and frosted glass. Gonna be really nice :)

And for the end of this, here's a video of me sticking my head out the top of one of the skylights and scanning around the roof. Unfortunately the skylights can't be opened for going on the roof once it's done or anything... but oh well, a roof deck is definitely in the future plans category.