The Build: Week 28 – Keri's Blog

Wednesday, February 13th – Tuesday, February 19th

After the snow storm we had on day 189, we didn’t see any progress for three days, aside from the caulking that was done. Was this because the driveway didn’t get plowed? Whatever the reason, we had reached our breaking point, again, and sent Rick an email.
I’ll spare you the details, but he replied twice telling us we were responsible for plowing the driveway, and then a third email telling us we didn’t have to plow the driveway. In the end we ended up having the driveway plowed in the hopes that someone, anyone, would come over and work on the house.
Later that day we also emailed the owner, Mike, to express our concerns and ask if we could meet/speak with him. Wouldn’t you know, on our way to a very early Valentines Day dinner we received a call from Rick. Rick and John spent about an hour on the phone while I spent a half hour alone with our chatty waitress and a delicious red blend. Overall, I suppose it was a decent conversation (with Rick, not the waitress) and it seems that things will slowly start to turn around.

On Friday, day 192, the carpenter was in doing his thing and he should only need a few more days to finish up. Rick and crew also showed up on day 192 to work on the powder room wall and fix the ceiling in the master bedroom shower. As you can see from the picture below, Rick had a tiny incident with the attic access point.

One of the things John discussed with Rick on Thursday was marking the items throughout the house that would need to be fixed, so that’s exactly what we did on Saturday, day 193. We ran into the electrician, (I know, on a Saturday!), and got to talk to him and see some of the light fixtures go up. He also told us the pendant lights over the island are in the wrong spot which means more holes in the ceiling that will need to be patched.

Everyone is magically in a hurry to get things done now and the painters showed up on Sunday to start the trim. There was a full crew in the house on Monday, day 195, painting, finishing up the electrical work, and putting the countertops in. It’s nice to see a lot happening but we know there’s still more work to be done.

We received a call from the electrician on Monday regarding our light fixture for the foyer. It was broken. The weld or screw that mounts the actual lights to the outside orb broke. This meant that the lights hanging in the middle were left to dangle by their wire. I called BBC Lighting right away and a replacement is on the way. I’m crossing my fingers it won’t take longer than the 2 week timeframe we were given.
The electrician also mounted a light fixture in the wrong direction. While this isn’t a huge deal, it is mildly annoying because I had put a note on the box stating which direction it should be mounted. I pointed this out while we were there looking at the broken light fixture but my request seems to have fallen on deaf ears because it’s still upside down.

And we’ll end this week on day 196. The electricians finished wiring everything and we now have light. It also looks as though they had to move the electrical box over because it would have ended up in the future basement bathroom. The painters continue painting trim and cleaning up edges. This week didn’t start out strong I’m happy with the progress we’ve seen the past few days.