Love it...Hate it.

LOVE the paint colors!  Whew, I was pretty worried after seeing what Donna went through at her house.  You just never know until the paint is on the walls!  I love the contrast with the ceiling white and wall a soft gray.  Then those dark stained beams against the white, vaulted ceiling....heart be still.


 The painter is still doing a little touch up here and there, he painted the garage white and he's staining the library pocket doors and stair handrail.  Then he'll be done.  


HATE is a strong word and my mom always told me I should say "strongly dislike" instead, so let me start over.  I strongly dislike our whole amateur tiling experience.  After a full day of scraping, washing, measuring, cutting, mixing thinset, and trying to smoothly install the newest type of underlayment for the tile, I am strongly wishing we had given up something else in order to afford to have the professionals do this.  

Even with knee pads...tiling is not for sissies.

We were warned, but we forged ahead and I'm sad to say, we failed in our first in attempt and the professional is coming to the rescue tomorrow to hopefully save the day. 

Mike was convinced he should use Ditra for the underlayment versus the more old style concrete board.  It's been around in Canada for several years and is being used more and more here in the states.  It's a roll of plastic waffle material with a porous fabric type backing.  You first apply a layer of mortar or thinset, which needs to be fairly wet, but thick enough to hold a trowel groove. Okay, we can do that.

 Batch number one: spread out pretty nicely, then we placed the Ditra on top and used a float to press it down.  It seemed to have a few places where the thinset  didn't flatten as well as it did in other places.  

Batch number two: A little thinner, spread out nicely, then we placed the next piece of Ditra on and used the float again...same problem, only this time when we smoothed the Ditra, the thinset just oozed out the edges..ugh.  

Batch number three: A little thicker, spread out pretty well, placed the Ditra mat and went to smooth it with the float and horrors...big areas where the thinset didn't want to flatten.  Lumps and Bumps. 

 By this time the 15x15 room was covered with Ditra and we decided to go home and maybe things would look better the next day.  Wrong.   One look and we could see it looked the same only now the soft, squishy, lumpy, bumpy areas were now hard as rock.  Time to call for help!

It sounds like we will to have to remove it all, sand the thinset down to an even layer and then redo it.  Did I say "we", I meant "we" will watch and learn while a professional does it.

It was a pretty discouraging set back.  Time is of the essence right now and we have so much to do.  It's a little overwhelming.  
We can do this.  
We CAN do THIS!   
It's not all peaches and cream, sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes we bite off more than we can chew.  It's part of the process, it's part of our dream to build this little river house and we are so grateful we are able to do it, even when it's been a hard day.

The sunrise at the rental house...another day to be grateful for.

Finished theFinish Work

...And now it's on to interior painting!  

Here's some photos of some of the finish work.  We're so happy with everything and can't wait to see it painted!   

The beams are up!

These are the locker style cabinets in the mudroom.

The staircase isn't exactly what we had planned, but it went wrong way back at the framing stage due to one of those occasional miscommunications and now we just keep trying to make it work out how we'd pictured it. 

Each sub that comes in has their own idea of how to fix the problems.  I don't want carpeted stairs but tit seems that's always the easy answer.  It finally came to a conclusion by decided to just paint it all the white trim color except the railing, which will be stained and the treads which will be painted, probably a color that blends in with the stain.  Maybe someday we can actually put in some nice stain wood treads.

Getting ready to paint! You can see just a little bit of my paint color on the wall between the doors.

The painters showed up at our house after painting Pat and Donna's interiors.  Donna is having them paint the walls in a lighter shade than she originally planned.  It's crazy how different paint looks on the wall compared to the little chip you pick up in the store.  I'm a little nervous about my color now!  He did paint a section of the wall for me and when I first thought "Yikes, it's too dark", he brought out some half strength of the same color and we took a long look at that.  I decided to go with the first one, it's a pretty strong contrast between the wall and the trim, but I just really love it.  The trim color is a creamy white and the walls are Sherwin Williams Repose Gray.  Pictures next time!

Our son, Scott is town for a week or so and he was ready to go straight out to the little river house and get to work helping his dad.  Mike, his brother and Scott worked on putting the barn siding on the shed roofed dormers.  Tricky work up on the hot, black roof.

Hi mom!

Once a daredevil...always a daredevil.  Any guess who is on the roof??

Later our son Patrick and family came out to see the progress.  We took a break and watched as Scott flew his racing drone around the property.  The kids love Uncle Scott and his toys.
A little storm blew through that brought some wind, cooler temps and a little hail storm.  It was actually so pretty.  The hail was shining as it dropped down through the sky and it looked like it was raining diamonds.  


And lastly....I'm busy with a few projects for the new house.  First up is an old dresser that will be used in the hall bathroom for a vanity.  It's getting close to being finished and I think it's going to look pretty good!

Things are heating up!

Things are so busy and moving along at a really good pace.  The weather has been scorchingly hot!  So hot, in fact, that Mike had to put little scrap wood tents over the nail guns because they were too hot to handle!  It's supposed to cool down into the 90l's this week, which will certainly be a relief.

I got a little ribbing after my last entry for referring to Pat and Donna's place as "the neighbors".   So funny!  I think I just assume everyone knows that they will be our neighbors and how thrilled we are at that prospect.  I also sometimes just refer to them as P and D. It's just a shortcut, folks...my fingers get tired of typing out the whole "Pat and Donna's house" every time I refer to them.  

And speaking of P and D's house, and as promised last time..here are some pics of their house in the dry wall, tape and texture phase.

This is such a great idea..a dog room off of the garage.

This week their finish carpenters came and knocked that job out in two days.  Then the painters have been working all through the weekend and it looks awesome!  Donna had some creative finish work done...shiplap, wood slat designs on the bedrooms wall, and some beautiful crown molding. 

Over at our place, the finish carpenters have been uhm...finishing up.

Vern the finish carpenter with Mike.  They are checking the new two panel doors.

Just a morning traffic jam in our driveway..we love to see this..things are getting done!

The roofers came out one day and worked for awhile.  They told Mike they'd found a hole up on the roof where it looked like someone put their foot through.  Mike said he'd fix it and up on the roof he went to get it fixed, so they could continue working.   

Fixing the hole in the roof

They haven't been back for a few days, so either it's too hot to work or they are waiting for the metal roofing we picked out to come in. 

Please excuse the proud wifey moment here, but can I just say my guy works so hard.  He really does have a real life full time job, but by burning the candle at both ends for the last two months (with only one day off for his brothers' birthday motorcycle ride) he has managed to work on the house every single day.  He does it all and never complains. I won't mention age here, but he keeps saying he's not twenty anymore, then laughs and says he's not forty anymore.  He's my own version of the energizer bunny and my hero.

This week he's been putting up the reclaimed barn wood siding.  It's a SLOW process.

There's so much blocking, measuring and cutting not to mention the installing.  His framer friend, Alan, came to help a couple of mornings. They decided to do a reverse batt technique and it looks so good!  I originally thought I'd like the boards to butt up next to each other without a gap.  Mike liked this look better and since he's the one putting it up, we went with it and did I mention, it looks so good!?

Ed came out to both of our places to clear out the russian olive trees and other bushes.  We can now get a pretty good look at how we'll want to landscape there.  A few strategically placed trees so we don't see that house across the river from us, some grass, a fire pit on a sandy little beach and it will be perfect!

One last little bit of excitement out at the Chuckwagon homestead this week...

A big "Thanks" to our local volunteer fire crews for getting out here quickly and knocking this down before it got to Ed's equipment.  Like I said...it's scorching hot and just a spark from metal hitting a rock can start a little grass fire. No damage done, just a little bit of charred grass.

Mike, the fire chief and Ed.