We have passed a turning point: the wraps have come off, and we’ve been given permission to start moving into the kitchen!
It’s not done yet. There are still some details to be finished, but the cabinets & counters are all in, the appliances & plumbing are hooked up and functional, and we’ve started preparing our meals here instead of in the basement. The kitchen is now treated as finished space, meaning there are dust barriers between it and ongoing work, and any dirty or dusty work should go on someplace else or be cleaned up immediately.
We are not moving in fully yet, primarily because one of the remaining steps is the final finish coat on the floor. That will generate some dust (which we don’t want to have to wash off of plates etc.) and smell (which we don’t want to permeate food items), and will also mean we won’t be able to get into the kitchen for a period of 24-48 hours at some point this week. We’ve brought up some minimal items but the rest will have to wait.
The three remaining significant work items are the door for the pantry (which is cherry, and they’re staining it to match the cabinets), the tile backsplash behind the stove, and the final coat on the floor as I mentioned. There are, of course, myriad smaller tasks as well. Here’s the pantry awaiting its door. You can also see the resolution of the “white stripe” question: they installed a trim board here for us and it looks much better.
Yesterday I spent most of the day priming & painting the trim they got done since last time, and doing another round of touch-up. This time I paid attention to why this process takes me so much longer than I think it should, and I figured out that it’s the primer. Primer is designed to stick really well to raw wood surfaces, and the wood really seems to draw it off of the brush. As a result, it takes a lot of brushloads to cover. I’m also on the lookout for any final surface defects worth filling or sanding, and I’m taping those few areas I don’t feel confident about cutting in without tape. So while the finish coat of semigloss on three windows and about 12 feet of baseboard took me a couple hours, the primer coat took me more like five.
They’ve got a little more baseboard to install, and a few parts of the trim could stand some sanding and a second coat of semigloss. So I expect I’ll be painting again next weekend as well. We’re really pleased with how the trim is coming out.
We saw good progress on the sunroom this week too. They finished framing the roof early in the week and installed ice-dam membrane over the whole thing (since it’s so small), and the roofers came yesterday (yes, Saturday) to put up the finished roof and gutters. And it got a good workout yesterday from a truly massive thunderstorm that rolled through. The soffit & fascia are installed, the walls (such as they are) have sheathing and tyvek, and the footings for the new back stoop are poured. Pretty impressive progress for a week that gave us a heat wave. Itt already feels nice to be in what’s now actually a room — breezy, lots of light, very open — and so I am happy to think that we’ll be able to sit & relax out there in a month or so.