Rock and Mud

Things are steadily progressing on the house.  The sheet rock was delivered January 9th.  They got it into the house through the office window.  I almost had a heart attach watching these huge pieces of sheet rock swing left and right and finally lining up to smoothly go through the window.

The following couple weeks were spent finishing up all the fun stuff that goes on inside the walls.

Here's the brackets that will hold up our floating entry bench

Lots of pink insulation

Somehow in the bitter cold, they managed to finish installing the soffit and fascia.

We've got soffits and fascia!

On January 24th, I headed over to the house for the cabinet walk-thru and was extremely excited that the house was now being heated!!  It was so warm inside that I was actually hot with my jacket on!  Thank goodness because the cabinet walk-thru took 4 hours and boy was it cold outside!  The other exciting news was that the sheet rock was finally being installed.   White walls were popping up left and right!  One thing we really wanted in this house was to isolate the noise in the kids bedrooms.  So we had sound channels put between the sheet rock and studs in the walls of the kids rooms.  Hopefully this will help prevent one restless sleeper from waking up their siblings.

The following day we stopped by and all the sheet rock was up and they were on to mudding.   I've done a fair share of mudding in the past and it sure was impressive to see the experts at work, mudding on stilts!

Mudding the Family Room ceiling

The Great Room with walls!

The main floor hallway with art niche

The stair railings were something we waivered back and forth on between doing either a half wall or spindles.  I really wanted a bench in the entry and saw a very cool "floating" bench on houzz.com (I am addicted to that website!)  Eventually we decided to keep it simple and do a half wall all the way up the staircase which made wall space for my bench.  I'm hoping it doesn't make the space feel too enclosed.  But at least now there will be less of a temptation for the boys to drop toys through the spindles in the upstairs hall and watch them plummet down the steps.

The entry and stairs (the doors are only temporary)

Some plumbing fixtures also went in this week.  We now have two bath tubs installed and soon the tiling will begin!

Our Kohler Expanse tub hiding under the plastic

We decided not to texture the walls and ceilings and instead to keep them smooth, which is a bit more work for the mudders.  To even out the ceilings, they sprayed on a thin layer of mud.  Now they should be ready to paint.

Sprayed mud on the ceilings

While the guys have been hard at work at the house, I have been losing a bit of sanity trying to pick out tile, granite, hardwood floors, lighting, and paint colors.  Slowly, but surely, things are coming together.  Here's a glimpse of some of our selections:

The tile (it's not really that white) and Butterfly Green granite for the boys' bathroom

The main floor bath tile and Ivory Gold granite

We were a bit limited on the granite for the kitchen since granite slabs usually run about 10 feet long and we needed one 11 feet long to eliminate the seams on the dining room buffet.  So the granite we had originally picked out for a couple of the bathrooms upstairs became the kitchen and dining room granite.  The 11' 4" River White granite slab means no seams!!  I definitely don't want to be there when they haul in the 10' x 5' cutout for the kitchen island.  It'll be quite the beast!

River White granite for the kitchen and dining room

We wavered back and forth on the hardwood floors, first stained maple, then natural walnut, and then, after hearing how difficult maple was to stain, stained birch.  But after talking with the hardwood flooring guy who's been working in the business for 15+ years, we decided to go with our original choice - stained maple.  It'll be stained a dark chocolatey brown similar to this:

Lighting was (and is!) very difficult for us to figure out.  Everything we really liked the looks of, gave off barely any light.  And after all, isn't the purpose of lighting the light?  So after looking at hundreds (maybe thousands) of lights online, we have the majority picked out.    Here's a couple of the more exciting ones:

The entry light with lots of sparkles!

The stairwell light

 The painting is set to start next week so I had lots of decisions to make.  Thank goodness I know an interior designer!  Jenna (another FANA Mom) has been a huge help making sure everything works together.  We have all of the colors picked out with the exception of the upstairs baths and bedrooms.  Because of our open floor plan, there will be many, many walls covered in "Intellectual Gray".

Next on the agenda is to finalize the rest of the paint colors and lighting, order the door hardware and figure out all the cabinetry.  The next couple weeks are going to be busy ones!