We are finally in the process of slowly moving into the house, although things are far from completed. For the most part, what remains inside the house are very minor things that will be left to early mornings or late evening jobs due to the rapidly declining daylight.
As you can imagine, many changes have taken place over the last two months with the inside of the house pretty much taking on its final look.
From where I left off a couple of months ago the tile was just about ready to get installed. We were fortunate to find a company out of Prescott which is about an hour south of here. They were very good to work with and did an excellent job. The cost, as a whole for the tile, was a bit of a shock, but some of that was due to going with porcelain tile instead of ceramic tile. The porcelain tile, I am told, is supposed to hold up much better. The tile was another one of those jobs that we had thought we would do ourselves, but again, the time crunch dictated otherwise. In the end, with the ideas they had for designs in laying it, I am glad it turned out the way it did.
I guess I should also mention that the granite was installed without a hitch. It took them about two days to get it all completed but it all turned out very nice. We kind of held our breaths as to how it would all look. It is one thing to look at the big slabs of granite out in the daylight but once it is all cut and in place could be a totally different look. As it turned out we were very happy with the results.
We ended up going with an engineered hardwood floor after all, which initially was not what we had intended. But the difference with this flooring is that it comes unfinished. So in the end it is treated like a solid hardwood floor but is installed as an engineered. This, as well, went rather well. It is glued down to the cement slab, sanded and then three coats of a water base sealer are put on it. I did mention it went rather well. The sealer, when it was applied, was not done evenly in some locations. So the company that did the installation made another trip back up to buff the floor out in some areas and re-sealed it.
The stairway was another one of those projects I envisioned doing ourselves. Although I would have loved to have tackled the project, it would have been a very lengthy job. And after watching the people who did install it, it made me even more certain that this was another one of those projects that was more involved than what we had time for. Not only that, the parts themselves took a long to get here, and a wrong cut would not only have been very expensive, but very costly in time as well.
As you can imagine, our time is still split between getting things moved in and trying to get the inside completed. However, our focus now is on getting things as wrapped up outside as much as possible before the cold weather hits.
This weekend has been spent trenching. Trenching in conduit for the telephone and satellite dishes. Trenching for the piers that will hold the evacuated tube solar collector, and also in conjunction with that the heat dump line. I have started some preliminary work inside for the tie in to the solar tank. This has been mainly where and how I am going to configure it all.
I will end this post with a few other miscellaneous pictures. My hopes are to start keeping up with the blog and make more detailed and more frequent updates once again!!
