Biggest. Post. Evar. ??

Well me last couple blog posts I was pretty upset. Having gotten over that initial panic, I realized that getting so upset about it really does no good. It's tough to tell yourself that at the time when it seems like the end of the world, but oh well.

Since that occured things have gotten kicked into high gear.

Saturday morning at 7am I rented a U-Haul (it was only available then!) and moved the stuff from my current place and my parents' garage into the garage/basement of The Hotbox (see previous posts for explanation of the naming... whether this name sticks or not, we will see). I couldn't move things upstairs yet because the cork still needs two coats of polyurethane applied. I'll be doing that this week. It took 1.5 trips with the U-Haul from my current place and just one trip from my parents'. There's still a good bit of small things to bring over, but over the next week I'm going to be bringing a lot of them down in my car. The move took surprisingly less time than I thought and was over a bit after noon.

Here's a snap of all my stuff piled in the garage:

And here's my cat, Sanchez wondering where all the stuff in my old room went:
(It's pretty hilarious she'll just go into the room and meow while looking around, clearly confused that everything's gone.)

Over the weekend workers were there much of the time, with Otto working till 10pm Friday night! (thanks Otto) There was a lot of joint compound, paint, and other general gunk on the colored concrete floor in the finished section on the first floor that had to be removed. Saturday night I went over and checked it out in order to give them approval to start the coating of it. This stuff was applied when the concrete was first poured (there are some blog posts related to this towards the begining of the blog), and seals the concrete, brings out the color which was mixed in with it, and allows it to be buffed, to create a polished look. I went over tonight to check it out and was really surprised at how much it changed the color! Over the course of the construction lots of dirt and dust have been ground into it, so that alone had lightened the color to almost a normal concrete gray, but the combination of cleaning that stuff off and coating it has really made a difference:

The other big thing I saw today was the installation of the bathroom countertop! The "Steel Gray" looks reallllly good with the black cabinets and black (with white speckles) tub surround. The continuity of the black works even better than I had planned. I think this is partially because of the little "seat"/storage area which we created at the end of the tub, under the countertop. It's not really a seat at all... it's more just a place to put things like soap, shampoo, etc, but it's similar to the seat that my parents' have at the end of their bathtub, so that's what we've been calling it. Unfortunately, this section is a bit of a tease because I didn't take a picture of it. The faucet isn't installed yet, and I wanted to wait to take the picture until it's all done.

(update: before posting this I went back the next day and it was done, so here's a pic)

As a consellation prize though, I took a picture of the half of the kitchen that's complete:

The oven sticks out a bit more than I'd like... but the countertop was already cut away more to try and move it back some, so I'm not sure what the problem is there. Aligning all the cabinet doors was a serious pain. At first I had no clue how to manipulate the hinges to make the doors move how I wanted. But when I finally got that down, it just got more frustrating. Having the two stacks of cabinets makes it so that once you adjust one door, you need to adjust three more to match it. Additionally, each door has three adjustments, and often times adjusting one means you have to re-adjust the other two.

The fridge is all hooked up and the water dispenser and ice maker are working! At first I thought there was a slight problem with the water dispenser squirting after the cup was removed, but it seems fine today. I also played around a bit with the controls on the front above the water dispenser: you can change the temperature by degree for the freezer or fridge, set an alarm/lock on it (so nobody can steal your beer??), and a setting with some crazy name like HyperIce.

In the garage area I wanted to have a crappy sink to wash out dirty/messy stuff, so I got a laundry tub w/ faucet and everything for like $60 at home depot/lowes:

I need to keep an eye on it in the winter, because it's in the unheated garage, but I doubt it will be an issue.

Here's a picture of the light in the guest bathroom on the second floor:


Toto toilets with the super G-force ultramax technology that I think I referred to before:
I'd been planning on working on the messed up section of the floor tonight with Otto, but when I called him early this evening to talk to him about it he said he dove into it and it turned out to be a lot easier than he expected. He was able to pull the tiles out, replace the messed up tiles and even only have to use one new tile in about 10 minutes! I was really happy this ended up not being as bad as it could've been. Had I not come over to check it out it would've kept coming in and sat there all night and caused who knows how much damage.

Alright, well this post is long enough and I think I want to post a separate one about general thoughts on moving, etc.