Siding

During the same time frame that we were doing the floors, Troy was working on the siding. We went with a vertical board and batten style of vinyl. The brand is Certainteed, and I was impressed with the quality of it compared to the stuff used on the Buffalo house. It's twice as thick, and therefore should not be so likely to crack when hit by a foreign object. I've waited to make a post because we couldn't get a nice picture of the front of the house with a dumpster in the way. 

Troy started with the backside. We were at the time of year when things were starting to warm up, and he wanted to do the areas over mud before it thawed. The parts over gravel would be much easier to deal with than mud after thawing. 

From there he went to the back side of the shop, then the front of the shop, and eventually to the front of the house. 

Ugh! All the mud! EVERYTHING is muddy when the frost comes up. 

House, but with a forklift and trailer in the way. 

Another story of Brock the Fearless: He was MIA for a week, and when asked, Troy told us that he had a broken wrist. He and a cousin had been tearing out a wall and the cousin challenged him to punch through the drywall. As any 17yo boy would, he took the challenge, and hit a stud instead of just drywall. After it was determined that he did not require surgery, he was back at work with a cast on. Using the forklift with its work platform, he was working on the side of the upstairs dormer. They have brackets that hook to the roof under the shingles to hold boards to create a support platform. Brock was on top of that platform when a bracket broke loose. He slid down and off the roof, and managed to grab the forklift platform on the way down. With the broken hand. Dustin quickly helped him down from there. A few days later he was back at work. This time he had been told that he DID need surgery, but not for function, just to prevent a weird lump in his wrist. He opted to not have the surgery. Boys and their battle scars!

FINALLY! A full front picture with no dumpsters or forklifts in front of it. 

Bathroom Vanities

 One of the design/budget choices I made was to use dressers for the bathroom vanities. Buying new vanities would be about $1000 for each bathroom, an expense I knew I could do better than. For months last year I stalked online sources for appropriately sized dressers. They had to be the right length, and had to have a design that would allow for the plumbing in the middle. I eventually found one for the upstairs bathroom for $150.

I would have liked to refinish it to match the rest of the woodwork, but various logistics made that impossible, so it will have to be done later, if it ever is. I did, however, sand the top and reseal it with a marine-grade varnish. The sanding did a nice job of highlighting the grain, and now I want even more to re-do the whole thing. 

This dresser was the perfect length according to the numbers, but when we went to put it in place, it was about 1/4" too long, so Sid had to trim the tiniest strip off each end. Also, the trim around the doors was in the way, so we had to have Troy remove the trim for us. It was about 3" taller than a kitchen cabinet, so it had to be shortened. I like the kitchen height rather than a typical bathroom height because we are tall people. To shorten it, I removed the front and side trims, cut 3" off the bottom edges, cut 1" off the trim pieces, and reattached them. 

For the sink, we bought one that is intended to go on top of a small vanity. I like the sink integrated into the countertop so there are no edges to get gunky. A hole cut into the top, and the sink dropped in. Some adhesive underneath, and clear sealant around the edge.

The dresser came with a mirror, but it's frame was intended to sit on top of the dresser, which did not work with the sink, and I thought it looked too bedroomy, so I took the mirror from the frame and mounted it on the wall instead. 

In the downstairs bathroom, Sid did not like the idea of a dresser, and I was having a horrible time finding one long enough that did not look downright UGLY. Dressers of that length were a 70s style, and the furniture designs from that time were awful. At one point I bought 2 kitchen drawer cabinets to use, planning for Sid to build a central section with doors between them, but we learned that as well as being shorter, bathroom cabinets are also less deep, and the kitchen size ones would not fit between the back wall and the adjoining doorways. These cabinets will end up in my sewing room instead. 

We then decided to take a day to check out the various salvage and clearance outlets in the city to find something that would work. Our first stop was Building Materials Outlet in Eagan. A friend had told me about this place, but I had not yet been there. It was a gold mine! If we had been building this house ourselves from scratch instead of using a GC and his suppliers, we could have saved a LOT of money shopping here! In the end, we came away with 2 drawer cabinets, and one with double doors, total of only $320. They are the same brand and same finish, but the drawers are kitchen-height, and the door cabinet is bathroom-height. All the same bathroom depth though. I knew we would need some filler strips to complete the fit, and tried to track some down from the manufacturer so the color would match (It's amazing how many different shades of white exist!) but could not find a local dealer or one that would ship them to me. I ended up ordering white filler strips from Menards, but the color does not quite match. While Sid was messing with kitchen cabinets,  I put these together. A little math to make the strips fill the right spaces, a little caulk to fill the cracks, and the same handles as the kitchen cabinets.

The countertop for this cabinet DID arrive in just a week. It's only formica, but it has the integrated sink I want. The mirror came from one of the salvage dealers. I priced large mirrors online, and they go for about $1000, IF you can even find a place to order from, as they are not currently in style, but we got this one for $50! 

All in all, I'm VERY happy with the outcomes in both bathrooms. 

Kitchen

 Wow! Three months since the last post! Mostly due to the kitchen install, which, like the flooring, dragged out unexpectedly long. 

We opted to order our kitchen from Menards, as there are features to their cabinet line that I really like. They are "European style" cabinets, which means they have no face frame on the front, allowing full-width access to the interior and wider drawers. They are also modular; you can choose to swap out doors for drawers, or different size drawers, etc. 

I chose almost entirely drawers for the lower cabinets. They are easier to get stuff in and out of, and allow for full access w/o having to get down on knees on the floor. The only lower doors are the corner carousel, the ones under the seating overhang, and the pantry cabinet. 

When we picked up the order at Menards, they loaded it all very quickly. It was not possible to track the items against the order sheet to be sure that we had everything. The staff assured me that the order was triple-checked as it went through the process, so I gave up and took their word for it. Once we got to the house, they all got piled in the dining room. Per the advice Sid found online, Wanda and I attempted to sort all the pieces and parts according to the respective cabinet, partly to double-check the order, partly to organize it for assembly. Good in theory, but in the long run, it really didn't help.

Cabinet install begins with the corner. Super easy right? Just attach it to the two walls. But it didn't fit square. The corner seemed to be obtuse, making the cabinet only reach the wall on one side. Sid and Tim fussed with it for 2 days, trying a few different options, and putting up/taking down several cabinets in attempts to make it work, at one point taking a mental break and putting the island together instead, so they could use it as a work surface. Finally they took it all out again and called on Troy. He checked the walls for square and flush, and found a bowed-out stud was causing the problem. He picked up his circular saw, carved out a hollow on the back of the cabinet wall, and fit it into place. Sid and Tim were able to take it from there. 

While Sid and Tim worked on the cabinets, John, Matty, and I worked on putting drawers together. When you choose all drawers for the lower cabinets, that's a LOT of drawers! 

When the cabinets were finally completed, we had to fit the countertop templates. A little tweaking was required, so we had to go back to Menards to make some adjustments. They told us one week is the usual turn-around. When I recieved the confirmation e-mail, it said *3* weeks until the expected shipping date! Three weeks came and went. At 4 weeks, I found a place to check the status online, where it said "partial" delivery had been made to the store. 

When we needed to go to Menards for other things a few days later, I checked in with the pick-up desk to see which parts had arrived. All progress on the house was stalled until we got those countertops in, and I was hoping for the 2 side pieces so we could at least move forward on other aspects of the house while we waited for the rest. But, the only thing in was the island top- the least needed piece. The staff was confused because "they NEVER send partial orders of countertops". The Pick-up staff walked me over to the cabinet dept. because they have the ability to connect to the manufacturer and find out more detail. The guy there, Peter, looked it up and found the rest was on the truck due in at noon that day. Yay! He promised to keep me posted and let me know when it arrived. At 1:00 I got a call  from him. The truck had been pulled over in Wisc. due to something dripping from the cargo. Per the cops, they were not allowed to continue. Per company policy, they were not allowed to break the seal on the truck w/o permission. So, they had to square things with their superiors, and probably get another truck to meet them to transfer the cargo. I don't know what all happened at their end, but we didn't get our countertops until 3 days later. 

While the island top was very nicely packaged, the other pieces were less so. Maybe it was a result of the extra handling in the truck issue, but the corner of the miter was cracked. The top surface was only bent, so we opted to attempt a repair rather than have to wait ANOTHER 4 weeks for a replacement. It got glue in the crack, and flat pieces clamped on both sides to hold it flat. It worked, but it still wanted to curve upwards. 

Installing the tops into the corner required removing the side of the fridge space, and shaping the back edge to accommodate that bowed wall near the corner. I ordered the top w/o a backsplash because it would have complicated the pass-through and because I am going to do tile. We also realized after the fact that it would have been an issue with the window trim, so I'm glad I made the choice I did. 

NOW we can finally get the plumbers in to install sinks, and the electrician in to do the oven, along with all the other things that are in their respective purviews. The oven as you see it in the pic above is just set into it's opening. We had to use it to get its shelf into the right position in relation to the drawer underneath. The shelves and drawer above it are just stuck up there out of the way, w/o concern for their final position. Not knowing what goes into the installation, and knowing the electrician needs clear access, we left that part until later, to work around whatever the electrician does. 

After the electrician came to do the wiring, he let me know that the oven does not fit! The cabinet is not deep enough, and we need to add some strips of wood along the front edge so it can be anchored. He  put in the wiring, but because of lack of space behind, he had pulled the junction box up into the space above the shelf and drilled holes in the shelf to pull the wires through (the shelf that was not intended to stay in that location.) Another hold-up while we get this figured out. We found a few scraps of cabinet material to use as build-up strips that would keep it all matching. It made NO sense to me that a cabinet sold as an oven cabinet would not allow the oven to fit, so I pulled out the assembly instructions to see what I had missed. The instructions take you through all the steps, including how to put on the back pieces, with no mention of special accommodations for an oven. Instructions appeared to end at the bottom of the last inside page. Then I turned the booklet over. On the very back outside page, it adds, almost as an afterthought, that if you are installing an oven, leave off the backing in that area! Well, at least that's an easy fix. It had been glued and nailed into place, but the precision use of the appropriate saw removed it easily. We had to make some modifications to make the drawer and shelf fit around the junction box, but in the end it all fit properly and functionally. There is now a mess at the back of the microwave shelf, but we have matching contact paper, so I'll make a false back to hide it all. 

It took MUCH longer than anticipated, but the kitchen is now DONE. All appliances are in place and functional. A couple small finishing details needed, but if I wanted to I could cook a meal here.