The Build: Week 25 – Keri's Blog

Wednesday, January 23rd – Tuesday, January 29th

We started this week off with a few more inches of snow. In an attempt to kick the winter blues I did more landscape planning and ordered trees for the yard.

Meet the Aristocrat Flowering Pear tree.

We’ll be planting four of these along the east edge of the property. We have a corner lot so this should create some privacy along the street and make for an eye-catching view.

I’m looking forward to eventually having a large backyard that’s more than a giant mud pit. I also have a Solo Stove on order for chilly evenings when s’mores are in demand.

As for progress inside the house, we continued making trips to the house to drop off the rest of the light fixtures and faucets. We also did a bit planning to idiot-proof the installation process by removing the extra pieces for the light fixtures that could be mounted at variable heights.

We received a Friday morning wakeup call from our pal, Ricky. Apparently the plumber installed the wrong bathtub in the master bathroom. We were supposed to receive one with a fiberglass front but instead received one that requires the finishing carpenter to build a frame that can be tiled. Ricky calls this an upgrade.

What we received
What we were supposed to receive

The other bit of fun we had was when we stopped over at the house Friday morning to meet the carpenter and discuss our bathtub options. To keep a long, painful story short, one of the walls for the powder room on the first floor will have to be torn down and replaced. Yes, an entire wall. That’s because the opening for the pocket door is roughly 8″ off and there isn’t room for the vanity. The depth is currently around 17″ and the vanity is 22″. Well, shit.

Where it should be vs where it actually is

There’s currently ductwork in the wall where the pocket door should be, which would explain how the door ended up in the wrong spot to begin with. That means they can’t put the door where it actually belongs without rerouting the ductwork that heads up to the master bathroom. We’re not quite sure what their plan is at this point and we haven’t actually heard this from Rick, only the carpenter.

So all-in-all, not a stellar week. Of the five available weekdays, workers only showed up at the house on two of those days. As it turns out, there always seems to be some sort of reason to not work on our house.