Getting up to date

Ok, time to catch up on some photos. I’ll start with the earliest as-yet-unposted things and work toward the current.

First, the kitchen. It’s basically all now complete, except the electrician still needs to install the lighting fixture over the sink. But the sink itself is there, installed on its cupboard, and with its beefy new faucet:

This picture was taken before we moved in. Where the orange juice bottle is sitting is now a nice strip of wood (maple?) along the time. The sink has butcher board counter tops on either side.

Here’s a picture of some of that counter top, over a corner cupboard by the back door:

The last time you saw the kitchen, the range top was on temporary legs so that it could be installed in time for the appraisal. Later that day, its real cupboard was delivered and installed:

You may not be able to tell from the picture, but the cupboard has two wide drawers in it, to hold pots and pans. Our old baking table (also with a butcher block top) is now in the place where you see a ladder, so we have continuous counter space from the range top to the corner cupboard that I showed you (to the left of the range top).

I just realized I don’t have a picture of the counter top to the right of the range top, which shows that the prep sink and faucet are installed and working, so I’ll have to take that picture today and post it tomorrow to give you the full picture of the kitchen.

Now for the downstairs bathroom. When we moved in, the toilet was working, and that’s it. As of yesterday, the sink is hooked up and working, and the faucet on the soaking tub is installed. Here’s that faucet:

and the tile that’s being installed (not yet complete) around it:

The tile for the upstairs tub is due in sometime in the next week or so, and then the tile guy will return to finish both tubs. Until then, we’re a shower-only family. Speaking of which, here’s how the tile in the shower turned out:

Actually, this is how it looked before the grout was done and the fixture was installed. The finished shower is another picture I owe you for tomorrow (so much to look forward to!).

In the above picture, though, you can see the nifty little shelves in the corner that Eric (tile guy) made for us. We didn’t want a standard soap dish installed into the wall, and, for some reason, creating a niche built into the wall to hold soap bottles and such wouldn’t work, so Eric came up with this idea. The shelves are made from leftover black VT slate, which is what we used to tile the vanity top in that room. It ended up looking really nice.

Here’s the vanity top, with the sink and faucet installed:

The vanity is now finished off with an edging of cherry around the three unfinished sides.

Eric also used that same tile on the little ledge/step from the shower down to the bathroom floor, as well as on the hearth pad downstairs for the Jotul stove:

The marble in the hearth is the old marble top from the table that David made for Michael (the table that is now converted into the upstairs bathroom vanity).

The Jotul stove is actually sitting on that hearth right now, though not properly installed yet (the stove pipe needs to be adjusted to provide more clearance between the pipe and the walls and beams). The stove guys are coming on Friday to install the other stove and fix this one, so I’ll post pictures of both of those after that happens.

On the roof, there are now three metal pipes coming out of the two chimneys:

The chimney on the left has the pipes for the furnace and the Jotul wood stove. The one on the right has the pipe for the Morso wood stove.

Just before we started to move in, Eric (the tile guy who is also a tree guy) did a little clearing for us to the North of the house, to help open up the valley view. This gives us a view of a hill that we never had before:

We’ll have Eric (or someone else) back to keep clearing to the right so that we can open it up even more.

Then moving day came, and the snow.

With four days of time, a Ryder moving truck, and some truly helpful friends, we managed to unload the entire contents of the two containers and the rental house back home. The first night we stayed home we noticed the house was very cold. We were in the middle of a cold snap, so we wondered if that was the problem. Michael finally came up with the answer: we’d just unloaded two containers’ worth of basically refrigerated goods into our house. Once the stuff warmed up, the house did, too…

Here’s what the new living room looked like after we’d moved some stuff in:

Thanks to Michael, this room is more organized now, and most of the walls are painted white, too.

We were hoping to have a lot of stuff put away by last weekend, but we still have plenty of painting to do and don’t want to put things away only to have to move them again, so we’ve been working on the painting first. First priority was to get Hyla’s room in shape so she could move in. Last night, for the first time in almost six months, she slept in her own room, bathed in the colors she chose: “Dragon Fruit” (pink) and “Hyper Blue”: