Lots of Ants On The Hill & Oops We Goofed

Another busy week!  Things are moving pretty fast and it's fun to post so many changes.  I know this will change soon.  Pete and I are planning on doing most of the interior finish work ourselves.  Once drywall is up we will be putting in long days trying to finish things up.  That's when I'll be posting, "We Are Painting, and  the following week, "We Are Still Painting."  

Well, on to this weeks progress...

Johnson Construction was back this week to pour the garage floor.  I TOTALLY stressed this guy out and I wish I could remember his name.  The reason why is, Pete and I wanted our garage floor to have some texture.  At our old house each of the kids wiped-out in the garage.  They would run into the garage with wet feet, hit that smooth garage floor and down they would go.  I too almost fell many times in the winter getting out of my Sequioa, it was like an ice skating rink when it was wet.  

From the first day I met the flatwork crew I kept telling them, PLEASE put a texture to the garage floor.  Jamie the supervisor told me he would put an orange peel finish on the garage floor.  The guy that worked for him thought I was crazy and he really wanted to give me a perfectly smooth troweled finish.  He was concerned that I would hate sweeping the garage floor. 

Here it is, the textured floor!

Thank you, Jamie and crew for my textured garage floor!

On Wednesday the windows were installed! 

 Notice we are missing a window...I'll get to that in a moment.

An interior shot of the windows.  We've been eating in the someday Great Room.

Our neighbor to the north is a 30+ acre grape farm.  They were harvesting the grapes on Saturday right next to us.  The grapes are all Welch's grapes, so the next time you buy jelly it could be from grapes grown by our home.

I also went for a walk and took this picture from the east property line.

Now for the oops!  We missed the tray ceiling in the master bedroom.  In our previous house we had 8ft. ceilings on the second floor, but in our master we had a tray ceiling and our ceiling fan tucked nicely into the tray.  I had mentioned to Pete that I wanted to do this again but wasn't sure with the window bump-out how big I wanted it to be.  He said no problem we'll figure it out when they are framing.  Well, the roof trusses were installed and it became apparent that we messed-up on tray ceiling in the master.

This is the view as you walk into our master bedroom.  It's hard to tell from the picture, but the ceiling fan would hang down into this beautiful view.  We were both sick about it, we have poured over every detail of this house and couldn't believe we missed this.  I was ready to give up on the tray and was working on paint colors for the ceiling and crown molding to give the illusion of a taller ceiling.

Pete, that never gives up called our friend Doug at Zeeland Lumber and together they figured out how to make it work.  We have 6 trusses coming on Thursday that will slide through the large window opening and be set in place.  Once they are attached to the existing trusses they will cut the frame out of the old truss and we will have a tray ceiling.

The good news is, this wasn't very expensive to accomplish.  I decided to take the $ out of my garage door budget and go with a much more basic garage door.  I think it will be worth it.

This is basically where the tray will fall.  

The front porch and the screened porch were constructed this week too.

  

Remember the post about the missing shorts?   Well, Pete can't seem to locate some of his basic tools like his hammer and tape measure, see this post A Lot of Changes in 1 month.  I drove his car Friday night and sitting in the passenger seat was a brand new hammer and tape measure.

  I guess I'll cut Superman a little slack, he's been working pretty hard.