Progress report -- Week 18

Shot of complicated tile work that needed to be done around whirlpool tub, with holes drilled for the faucets:



Photo of the elusive plush carpet with a mixture of colors (which I talked about in a previous post):



Here's our shower floor, all tiled and grouted:


Progress accomplished this week:

Good heavens... where do I start? Wagner says the house should be finished by the end of February. I'm not sure I believe him (the addition still looks very, well, unfinished), but he's the expert. At any rate, we seem to be very much on schedule, which is a minor miracle given the weather.

--Underlayment for garage study floor installed
--Cabinets in garage study hung. We're re-using our old kitchen cabinets that we had replaced during the kitchen renovation this summer. They are still quite serviceable and look fine.
--Cabinets in laundry room installed. We re-used some more of our cabinets/counters from the kitchen here.
--Tile work begun in shower and bath area. This is probably the most visible and important progress made this week. Larry (the tile guy) got the shower floor put down and grouted, and he is now hard at work putting the wall tiles in place. We hope to have the shower portion done this week.
--More closet doors installed throughout addition

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Cold weather has prevented work starting on pouring concrete around garage. Man, I'm tired of putting this down as an obstacle. The temperatures have been in the teens or even single digits all week, never approaching anything close to freezing. This is particularly frustrating because Wagner made the off-hand comment, "Too bad we haven't been able to pour the concrete, because otherwise you'd be able to use the garage for your cars." I think of that comment every time I'm scraping ice off the windshield in 5 degree weather on dark mornings.
--We don't want to put up the rest of the fence until the concrete is poured (to avoid any mess or concrete splatters), so we still only have fence posts in the back yard.
--The doorknobs I had chosen for the addition doors have not yet arrived. They were a new product line that Home Depot had samples of, but the shipments have been delayed with no assurance that they will be in stock any time soon. I'll have to go pick out some different ones. In keeping with the goal of adopting universal design for the addition (to plan for the future should we need things accessible), I had selected the lever kind of doorknob (as opposed to the round kind). But most lever types don't look very attractive. This new model was quite nice, so I went with it. I'll have to look around some more and see if I can find another lever type that looks as good, or maybe switch back to ordinary round doorknobs.