Getting punchy

It's hard to believe that this renovation is just about completely finished. Right now Wagner is just working on his punch list. (A "punch list" is the final list of tiny details that need to be fixed, like touching up painting, adjusting doors, and the like.) The other weekend he came over to the house and spent 3 or 4 hours going through the addition, waving a hand-held light over every inch of the walls to look for drywall or paint issues that needed touching up, trying out every door, etc., and taking notes for his punch list. Anything he saw that needed work got marked with a little piece of blue masking tape.


Progress accomplished this week:

--Touch up painting/drywall work, lots of it.
--Sconce in bedroom replaced; it had a faulty ballast so we swapped it out under warranty.
--Wagner moved out most of his stuff stored in the garage, so now Jonathan can park in there, too.
--New vinyl flooring installed in former laundry closet. (We had some left over from the garage study.)
--Washer and dryer hookups in former laundry closet dismantled, water line capped, spot where hookups were drywalled over. Closet repainted. We now have a large, functional backup pantry; see photo above.
--I was so pleased by how the new laundry closet floor came out that I asked Wagner to put down a new floor in our main pantry.
--Cleaned out main pantry; sorted and transferred all the household maintenance items (tools, light bulbs, etc.) to new closet; pantry will now be devoted solely to food items. Went overboard and sorted canned goods according to food type, though I stopped short of alphabetizing it all. I'm not quite finished (there's still a shelf of vitamins/medicines I need to reorganize), but my pantry has *never* looked this good. (See photo; you can't tell from this angle, but the pantry stretches out about 8 more feet to the right around the corner.)



--New bedroom furniture delivered. It looks great, and to my relief, the dressers/armoire etc. match the new bed very well in terms of color and style. I was a little nervous about it given that I had only the digital photos of the bed to go by when shopping for the rest of the furniture. We're shopping for mattresses today; I'll post photos of the furnished room after they get delivered.
--Blinds ordered. I was overwhelmed by all the window treatment options and the cost, so I ended up going very basic: cellular (honeycomb) blinds on the bedroom and closet windows, wood blinds for the garage study. I went ahead and paid extra to get the cordless option for the honeycomb blinds, because I have never liked the look of strings hanging down, and our old blinds inevitably got the strings all tangled up. We also decided to pay extra for an "operational" blind covering for the fancy arch on our bedroom window, so we can open and close it, rather than getting a fan-shaped blind that would be permanently closed. So we'll start with that for our window treatments, and if later on it looks too industrial, we can add draperies.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--We had an episode of extremely heavy rain accompanied by strong wind. The new skylight leaked about 5 drops from one corner. This did not concern me. However, we got a veritable downpour for about 5 minutes coming through the doorway between our dining room and family room. Although this was completely unrelated to the renovation/addition, Wagner--bless his heart--sprang into action and got a roofing company to come out and investigate. Turns out that we had a roof vent that needed replacement. We also had to go through and replace a big chunk of insulation in the attic that had gotten soaked. The roofers also redid the flashing around the skylight. I wasn't sure it was necessary to go to all that effort (it had been a ferocious downfall, and we only had a couple of drops coming through), but Wagner just said sternly, "Skylights should NEVER leak" and insisted that it would be fixed.

--Two days after the carpet was installed, I noticed a small spot on it where the color is different, almost like a bleach stain. It is barely perceptible (Jonathan swears he can't see it at all), but... it is there. And it was a brand new, expensive carpet. We reported it to the carpet company, who have sent out two people investigating it. They even took a sample of the fiber to analyze it to see if they can determine the source of the discoloration. The guy who installed the carpet says it looks to him like it was a flaw of the milling process. The carpet people are eager to suggest that it occurred AFTER installation, perhaps by one of Wagner's men, or they even had the temerity to suggest that our cat had peed on it. I've seen how careful Wagner and his crew have been about cleanliness throughout this job, so I'm quite convinced the carpet came this way. And our cat has been so freaked out by the renovation process that she never even goes in the addition (besides, most of the time the door to that area stays closed).

So, we'll see. I have no stomach for making them replace the entire carpet. And the spot is barely perceptible. Unfortunately, it is located in a high visibility area of the room, not in some corner or where it would be hidden under furniture, drat it. But as Jonathan said, we're going to be making plenty of more obvious stains at some point in the future. On the other hand, we paid a lot for the carpet, darn it, and it should have been unblemished. The carpet guy said he could just plug in a replacement patch (we have plenty of leftover pieces), which would look better in the short term, but the seams could become visible after a year or two with repeated vacuuming or cleaning.

We'll wait to see what the carpet analysis shows, but at this point I'm leaning toward NOT doing the repair and just taking some kind of credit for having a new carpet installed with a blemish.