Progress Report --- Week 20

Progress accomplished this week:

Hurray! It's amazing how much has been done once the weather and utilities started cooperating.

--Tile work in bathroom FINISHED. It is gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. I'm thrilled with it.
--Installation of cabinets in bathroom begun. Should be finished tomorrow.
--Knob selection for bathroom cabinets made. I must be getting better at decisions because it only took me an hour to decide.
--Exterior paint on addition/garage trim begun, should be finished tomorrow, weather permitting.
--Concrete poured outside garage (see photo above). Wagner says that the garage is close to being completely done and that we can set a date for when we can start using it to park our cars. Hurray!
--Design of closets begun. I'm using a free service that ClosetMaid has where you send them measurements of the closet space, tell them how much space you need for long vs. short hanging stuff, shoes, etc., and they ship back a plan with all the part numbers identified. We did a first round of this, but I want to tweak the plans they came up with a bit. I'm trying to decide between using mostly functional (and cheaper) wire shelving units vs. more expensive but better looking laminate shelving. Given how much I went over budget for the tile, I'm leaning toward functional and cheap. ;-)
--Caulking and prep work for interior painting in addition begun.
--Rest of bedroom furniture purchased. We found a nice dresser and chest of drawers that would match nicely the new bed we had already bought. It was a discontinued line and thus on sale. The snag is that the furniture store would only sell it as a complete set, including a bed (which we didn't really need) and an armoire (ditto). Jon still liked it better than the other dresser I had identified, so we went ahead and bought the set, on the reasoning that we can use the extra bed in the garage space and squeeze the armoire in somewhere. The children, who were sick and tired of me dragging them to furniture stores and looking at dressers, didn't care one way or the other as long as we bought something.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--The tile person had miscalculated the amount of tile we needed and we were short a couple of pieces for the floor. Rather than wait for a new order to come in, we used some of the leftover budget tile from the laundry room to put on the bathroom floor under the cabinets. No one will ever see it, but I think it bothered Wagner not to have it all uniform. "What if you swap out the cabinets?" he asked. I told him that (a) we probably won't ever do that, but (b) even if we did, we'd be putting new cabinets over it, so the different tile STILL wouldn't be visible. We'll still go ahead and order an extra box of the main tile just to have spares in case something happens, but this way we didn't have to delay work on the rest of the bathroom.
--Steady rain beginning this morning will probably delay pouring rest of concrete around side of addition and finishing exterior painting.