Renovation - Week 28

The guys spent the week doing clean up and little jobs - things are finally wrapping up.

As for me, I started laying the flooring. We finally made a decision and went with laying the floor straight. (Given some of the challenges I've hit, I would have hit some real problems with laying the floor on the diagonal.) It's not going quite as quickly as I had hoped, but it is looking good!

Renovation - Week 27

The guys are cleaning up the outside of the house. They put the railing on the front stairs and they've started to put up the siding.

Inside, the stairs for the craft room have been installed.

The flooring has been acclimatized, so hopefully I can get it installed next week. The first job is to turn the sheet of bamboo into nosings for around the stairs. What I wasn't expecting is that the smell of the dust from cutting bamboo reminds me of riding in the combine with Grandpa. (It does kind of make sense - in both cases the dust is from dried grass.)

Renovation - Week 26

Not much happened on the outside of the house this week because it was too busy snowing! The middle of April and it's snowing - that's just not right!

Inside the house, our bamboo flooring arrived. Right now we have to open up all the boxes and let them sit around for a week so they can acclimatize to the house. While we're waiting for that to happen, we've got two important jobs:

1. I need to take the 4x10 sheet of bamboo plywood and create the nosings for around the top of the stairs. That won't be too tough, but then we have to stain and varnish the plywood so that it looks good with the floor.
2. We have to decide how we're going to install the floor. We're debating between:
• On the diagonal - there's a natural diagonal in the house from the top of the stair to the hallway and we can lay the flooring to match. It's a good look, and not something you see every day.
• Lengthwise - this makes the space seem bigger, but its much more traditional. However Christine would really like to get some curves into the house, so it would allow us to do something interesting with the tile at the front entry way.

To help us decide which way to lay the floor out, I quickly pieced some of the flooring together. Unfortunately, both looked good, and we didn't have an obvious winner.

Renovation - Week 25

This week saw the guys finish off our back deck and get the network cables hooked up in the house.

While they did that, we got most of the place painted (just two closets and the den to go) and I hooked up the network hub in the basement.

Next week, the flooring arrives - all 2.5 tons of it! (When we heard how heavy the load of flooring is, we decided to splurge and pay the delivery guys to bring it into the house.)