Week 8 report

We have a room now! We’re getting close to having something resembling a kitchen.

The oak flooring was installed and had 2 coats of polyurethane applied this week. It looks great! There are a couple spots with some swirly marks visible if you look closely, but overall it looks good, and as Lis says, finally the two halves of the room feel unified. Because the flooring made the room impassable for much of the week, not much else happened inside this week. We did get the replacement backsplash mosaic, and it looks much better. This picture also gives you a good look at the new floor. Any worries we had that the flooring would be too close to the cabinets in color is now officially forgotten.

The remaining progress indoors is that I finished up all the painting I intend to do pre-cabinets, namely the white on the inside of the two un-cased doorway openings. I like to paint the inside of these openings as if they were trim, especially if there are two different colors on either side of the doorway. And my color-blind self likes white trim because it gives my color vision a point of reference. Anyway, one of these two un-cased openings is just plain wall on one side (the opening is flush with one of the side walls). And since we wanted to paint two different colors on the 2 sides of this opening, that presented a challenge: how do we transition from one color to the other on that wall? The trial solution I came up with is what I call the White Stripe. I just continued the white at the same width as if the opening did continue on down this wall. I’m curious to hear people’s opinions on this.

Another possibility is to put a piece of 1x material on the wall where the white stripe is (same thickness as the baseboards, when they go in), to give it a little three-dimensionality.

On the sunroom portion of the project, our contractor repaired a section of decayed sill. The original (120 year old) beam had decayed away to about half its original size, propped up only because it had a knot in it that did not decay. This knot was holding up the corner of the house! Anyway, it’s all repaired now, ready to accept the ledger for the sunroom. He also dug and put forms in for the footings this week. He had hoped to get them poured this week too, but the rainy weather delayed the excavation for just long enough to prevent that from happening.

It amazes me that these footings — for a permanent, enclosed structure — are just 12″ in diameter (with a “bigfoot” flared base), in contrast to the footings required for our friends’ new deck that I’ve been helping with, which are required to be 18″. And Greg, you will be jealous to hear that the excavation found no rocks bigger than about grapefruit size.

This coming week promises to be an exciting one. Tomorrow, Lis and I are going to Container Store to buy some parts needed to build the shelves inside the pantry, which I hope to get a start on Monday. And Tuesday, we will have quite a crowd at the house as our cabinets start to be installed — complete with plumber and electrician to hook up the kickspace heaters — plus the pouring of the footings.

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