This past week has been all about floors and windows! The bathroom floor tile is almost complete and when I talked to our tile guy yesterday, he was nearly as excited about the window as I was. It makes the room so much brighter. You can see that this isn’t finished yet. Everything takes lots of steps. But three of the new windows are in and they make such a huge difference. You can see we matched the style of the windows downstairs with the three dividers in the top pane. These will be painted to match the woodwork everywhere else upstairs which is dark stained red oak, copying the style from downstairs.
We only have some of the windows still. Two of them are still on order. Since May. And sadly, these aren’t exactly right. Some of these windows are supposed to have tempered glass in them to meet code requirements and they didn’t do that. (Not sure whether it was a mistake in the order or the manufacturing). Fortunately there’s a solution: a film you can add to the glass to which is acceptable instead of tempering. So that still has to happen. And they also forgot to make this window with frosted glass. Since it’s basically floor to ceiling, you would get a very good view of anyone stepping out of the shower. So that’s really not going to work. Fortunately they make the film in a frosted version too. So our contractor is working on tracking that down. It’s always something!
Another new thing I learned is that there is an inspection for everything. Yesterday’s was the shower pan/drain inspection. A guy in a safety yellow vest showed up and went right upstairs, ran some water down the drain to make sure that all worked correctly, signed off on something official and got back in his car and drove away. We’ve had two plumbing inspections, electrical, framing, structural. Honestly, probably a few more I don’t even know about. They are very efficient.
Right now you can’t see the beautiful floors in the rest of the room because as soon as they got them down, they quickly covered them up with heavy paper so they don’t get damaged while everything else is still happening. But I got a photo before that happened. We picked LVT or luxury vinyl tile that looks like wood. I picked one that was the closest match I could get to the original hardwood floors downstairs. Because I love the look of wood, but we really decided that real hardwood was probably not in our budget. We don’t have any carpet anywhere in our house. I just don’t like it and it’s impossible to keep clean when you also have a love for large labradors. I’ve started thinking about rugs, now that I have a better idea of what this new space looks like. If anyone has a place you love to get rugs, send me a link!
