Grout!

It's a great feeling to come home from a weekend to find more work done!

Floors are all finished! They completed all the grout work on Saturday and by the time we got home, all was dry and well with the world.

The bathroom is looking more and more like a bathroom now that the show is in... just need to wait for the vanity so we can get the sink put in! oh yeah, a toilet would be nice too. But at least the walls and getting done and the floor is complete.

The closer we get to completion, the more we are liking the work we they are doing! Curious to see what tomorrow brings, as they are probably 2 days from completion.

We have paint - at least on part of the walls... the bathroom is still purple drywall.

We also have tile on the floor... but we can't walk on it yet LOL The crew was here today and put down the tile floor. They will come back tomorrow (Yes, they was working on our basement on Saturday of Easter weekend) to grout. No more bare cement floor!


It is weird to come home to find a note on the floor "Do not walk on floor"... um, ok, where should I walk? The ceiling? Guess I better go dig out my spiderman shoes!

They also have finished boxing in the area that we are considering putting a built-in wine rack. But now when we look at it, that wall that is open for the wine rack would be the perfect wall to put the pinball machine on... oh why do we not think of these things earlier in the process??

Day 4 has come and gone!

Building inspector was here this afternoon! Everything is starting to look more and more complete!!

I am getting anxious to actually see what the flooring is going to look like once it is installed too.

We were told that they opted to cut out bathroom door a little shorter. They knew that we are going to be finishing the ceiling at some point and will end up boxing in the duct work. The top of the door was going to end up right near one of the ducts and when we boxed everything in, the trim and door frame were going to be in the way. The result... a doorway that is about 4 inches shorter than a standard door. But that is definitely the best of the two options - don't want to just make more work for ourselves later!

They did bring the vanity over today and it is a little on the large side. Now the quiestion is, do we go with on 3 inches smaller or 6 inches smaller? Depending on which size we opt to go with, we may or may not have drawers... I think I would be willling to give up the drawers for the extra space to move around. We figure we are not going to have that much to store in this bathroom and we have a whole closet on the other side of the bathroom that will have all kinds of shelving space.

Day 3

The work continues! Drywall is up, Inspectors have been visiting, Shower is in!

Tomorrow they should be brining the vanity in so that we can see how big the ones she ordered us actually is.

Fozzy is fascinated by the spot on the floor where the toilet will be. Everytime he walks into the bathroom, he has to go and sniff the same spot!

We hav ealso discovered that Fozzy does not like the plastic that is covering the basement steps... he refuses to walk on it! Any time he goes up or down the stairs, he gets as close to the wall as possible and tiptoes down, making sure that he goes nowhere near the monster on the stairs that might bite his paws! LOL

Everyday, when the crew leave for the day, this is what the basement looks like where they have their stuff left... and since every day it is moved around a little, all 3 cats have to veture over and check everything out .

Bathroom/Basement Project Day 2

Day 2 is officially behind us!

Dry wall started, shower in and several outlets installed. They also got rid of the annoying pipe that was sticking up in the middle of the floor from when the furnace use to be there.

We talked to the deisgner about the options for the vanity. They are going to bring one over later this week so that we can get a better idea of how much room we will (or won't) have between there and the toilet. You can almost see the pencil lines in the floor on the picture of where the vanity will be. We think the inside lines are where the smaller vanity would sit if we went smaller.

Cats are getting annoyed with us each day, as whey have been quarantined to the spare bedroom during the day when the crew is here so that they are not in the way and we don'g have to worry about them sneaking outside. They hear us come home from work and start whining to be let out of their prison...

I think it's going to get harder and harder to find and catch them in the morning before too long!

Basement bathrom is one day closer to being done!

Basement remodel - day 1

It's finally started! The crew was here this morning starting on the new bathroom in the basement! Today they got everything framed in and all the water lines run.

Tomorrow the shower goes in and they will start drywalling. We are actually looking at possible swapping out the vanity/sink with a pedestal sink to save a little room. With the vanity that we were planning on putting in, it seems like it is going to be a little tight between the sink and the toilet. Will have to call and see what our options are there.

One thing I will say - These guys take the time to keep their work space contained. There is a huge canvas tarp hanging in the basement to keep the "construction dust" contained to the ones side, stairs covered with plastic etc. Not to mention, before these guys leave the job site for night, everything is cleaned up (as you can see from the picture!).

Can't wait to see what tomorrow looks like

Final Day of Construction.... tomorrow we plant!

The final day of construction is here!

Once the boxes are built and in place, it will be time to blend together the "magic mix" that was recommended in the "Square foot Gardening" book. No dirt involved. The boxes are filled with a blend that consists of equal parts compost, peat moss and vermiculite. No fertilization needed. The vermiculite was pretty hard to find. On Tuesday afternoon, we started making calls to find it. Most places that carried it, were either out of stock or only had small bags, of which we would have had to by way too many, making it really expensive! Finally, when we called Green Bay nursery, they said they did not have any in, but they could order it and it would be here before the weekend.

So that was the first part of the project for tonight was heading to pick up the vermiculite and check out what else they had at GB Nursery. Aside from the vermiculite, the only thing that we needed was a few more bags of compost. It was recommended that you do not buy all of the same type of compost... but at least 4-5 different kinds. So we pound a few more bags here! Shopping complete!

A quick drilling of the drainage holes in the bottom when we got home, we were ready to go. Time to figure out exactly where we were going to put everything. Better decide that before we fill all the boxes!

We figured that Darrin would have been all over helping us combine the mix for the garden, but not tonight. Oh well, more fun for us! LOL

We quickly decided that there was no way that our tarp was big enough to mix everything all at one. So we opted to do half at a time. This was the easiest way to divide it up as we had even numbers of bags to work with.

What a mess! It became evident why they recommended spraying a light mist of water over the mix once you have everything poured onto the tarp - it is very dusty!

With everything mixed together, it was time to fill the boxes. Funny thing, even though we checked and double checked out math to figure out how much of everything we would need for the mix we ended up with A LOT of extra. Granted, we knew that we were going to have a little leftover, but we only needed about 2/3 of what we mixed! Works for me - now I have some of the mix that I can up in my potted plants!!!

Garden Project Day 3 - Construction nearly completed!

With the work that was completed in the last few days, Darrin took a few minutes to sit down with the "plans" to figure out what we needed to do next.

Today's mission, get the rest of the boxes completed so that we can play tomorrow! It could be a long night!

Actually, not too bad though. Since everything was cut and all holes were drilled it was just a matter of putting everything together. It was fast work to get the boxes put together and the bottoms put on.

We did make a few modifications to the original plans as we worked through the project. We were not going to put bottoms on the boxes. However, in the end, all of the boxes were getting bottoms - just in case we decide that we need to move the garden or something goofy like that!

One of the final steps in the building process was to get the grid bars put on. Each box will be divided into 1x1 squares for planting. So that means in each large box, there will be 8 boxes for planting in and the small one will have 4. The biggest challenge in this step was to actually get the grids attached to the boxes so that they were even. Can't have one square bigger than another! LOL

Once the grids were in place, the final step is to drill drainage holes in the bottoms of the boxes and we are done! We will get those in first thing tomorrow and my garden will be ready to put into place and plant!

Garden Creation, Day 2

After dinner, the guys headed out to the garage to start on the garden boxes.

Tonight's mission - get the boards for the boxes

Mom can't help with her own Birthday Present". Now of course, that was never said, I was just getting other stuff done in the house. But tonight I didn't have to do anything. They had everything under control. All the boards were cut to the appropriate length, double and triple checking the numbers of course.

Darrin helped with the measuring, marking and sawing of most of the smaller boards and then John tackled the 2x6's with the "big saw" as Darrin called it.

After all the sawing and banging I heard, of course I was curious. They were on a mission! I guess my job for the night was taking the pictures. Apparently Darrin told John "oh yeah - mom can't help make her own birthday present!" But of course no one ever said that LOL

Once the boards were all cut and final counts were done, it was to move to the next step. Darrin wanted to help here, but John got to do all the drilling.

Once everything was cut a prepped, they decided that they needed to at least put one of the boxes together to make sure they were going to be what I wanted. So the small 2x2 box was the lucky on.

Looks good to me! Phase 2 begins tomorrow