Finishing Phase Underway

Now that the drywall is in place, it's time to begin painting, installing kitchen cabinets, putting in lights, and other things of that nature.  Very little of this involves energy efficiency or any kind of innovation so this blog entry will be relatively short.  I did want to at least keep people up-to-date on what is happening with the house.  In some ways, this is a very exciting phase for us because things are starting to look like we might actually move into this house in the near future.  What a concept!

Wow - painting makes a huge difference!  I can hardly believe how different it looks.  All of a sudden, it looks much more like a home than a construction zone.  I have to say that Virginia and I went around and around on colors.  I didn't think I really cared what color the walls were, but as Virginia brought me samples, I found myself saying over and over, "isn't that going to be too dark?" or "wow, that's really bold...are you sure?"  In the end, everything looks great and Virginia gets all the credit.

Painting - don't fall! (Click image for more photos.)

Another thing that really makes the place fell like it's almost done is that there are working lights in the house now.  Some fixtures will have to wait until later, but it's really nice to be able to flick a switch and actually have some lights come on.

The arrival of the kitchen cabinets is the last big thing to happen recently.  The cabinets were actually finished a long time ago but had to be stored until we were ready to install them.  Unfortunately, the cabinets are ready to be installed but the flooring won't be installed until sometime next week; we're putting bamboo in the kitchen and the cabinets need to go on top of it.  To get around this problem, small pieces of bamboo are attached to the bottoms of the cabinets so they sit at the correct height.  Then, when the flooring installer comes, he will slide the bamboo under the front of the cabinets and everything will look perfect.  This has the added advantage of saving on the amount of bamboo necessary since we're not installing flooring underneath the cabinets.  Unfortunately, only the base cabinets can be installed until the counter top gets installed, which will take a couple of weeks.

Kitchen Cabinets (Click image for more photos.)