Last Friday, the appliance installers came back to adjust some of the appliances they installed on Thursday and to install the refrigerator and freezer. We chose to go with the 30" refrigerator and the 30" freezer so they match. Both of these pieces will be 'integrated' meaning they have a wood front that matches the rest of the cabinets in the kitchen.
The finish carpenter has been working his a*& off putting the amazing sweeping staircase together. He has fitted all the glass and has cut and dry set all the wood top rail. It sounds very simple to just cut and dry set the wood top rail, but it is not nearly simple; in fact, it was very time intensive. It was not a small task as the stair company just sent us a bunch of rail that was not cut to size so the finish carpenter had to do it all himself without any support from the stair manufacturer. He has done a great job getting all the railing to fit together, but now he has had to take it all down again so it can be stained inside the groove that sits on the glass. All of the wood top rail is now sitting on the living room floor waiting for staining.
It did not have to wait very long before the painters arrived to stain the groove along the bottom of the rail. The groove in the top rail sits on the top of the glass that makes up the railings of the amazing sweeping staircase and the catwalk.
A view of the banister that will run downstairs in the foreground and the staircase from hell in the background.
The finish carpenter spent many days fitting the glass into the stringer of the staircase making them all nice and pretty. He has now spent the last two days filling the space between the glass and the wood of the stringer with silicone to finish the fixing process. It too is nice and pretty.
The posts for the decks have been in for a while. The top rail for the deck railings arrived about a week and a half ago, but it was three and a half inches in diameter. For reference, it was about twice as big as the posts. That was what was specified in the drawings, and we didn't even check it. We assumed that the top rail would be the same diameter as the posts. Whoops! It looked ridiculous. So we asked the steel guy to redo the top rail in a two and half inch diameter rail instead. The first parts of this new rail were installed today and it looks a lot better.
The top rail for the master bedroom deck is on as well.
Since the garage floor was poured last week, we can get the final painting done in the garage. This was finished yesterday
and makes the garage look much brighter!
Peter took this week off to move into the house. Although that is not happening now since we haven't gotten occupancy, he is working on setting up the networking cabinet. Here he is connecting the 27 networking cables into the back of the networking cabinet.
Although the garage floor is beautiful and could hold our cars now, we cannot get into the garage because of the lack of a driveway. That will not be the case for long! Or at least we hope it won't be long. The driveway has been quite a journey because the City of Santa Barbara did not bother to check if our original plans were actually to code. We got in a heated conversation with the publics works representative over the geometry of our driveway. He wanted us to follow code which effectively made our garage useless because we would not be able to get our cars into the garage. We wanted to follow the plans because, legally, we cannot deviate from plans that are stamped by the City of Santa Barbara. It sounds like our contractors have agreed to a happy medium for the driveway. Hopefully that will still be true when the concrete truck arrives and the driveway will allow us to get our cars in the garage.....
Today, they started digging out the driveway so they can check for any water and place road base down in preparation for the concrete. First, the digger digs down twelve inches
and then they shovel in road base.
We received our first UPS delivery today from Macy's. Notice the garage floor, here you can see the channels that were carved out of the wet concrete.
and I picked up a few things too.
We are ready to be done.