My last post was about how real it's all becoming - including some light online vanity shopping.  Then Black Friday struck and stuff got really really real. These are the big sales! There may be more around the corner, but who wants to wait for President's Day, or Memorial Day, with the supply chain being what it is at the moment?  Especially not now we have walls to paper - well, almost. Once the windows are in and the drywall is up we will.  Also honestly I've been ordering samples and looking at pictures and daydreaming and price comparing wallpaper for almost two years now and at this point I just want to stop thinking about it and know that the decision is made. This is the tip of the iceberg of wallpaper samples which I have now bequeathed to Penelope's craft supplies. It represents months of contemplation. In 'man days', it's a very expensive strategy engagement. Time to act. So I went ahead and hit the Black Friday sales. Hard and all at once. I orde...

 Stuff's getting really real.  What started out as pencil sketches 2 years ago -   - and then became proper floor plans not long after -  - prompted some sketching. Here's my rough idea of how our vanity would look: Here's the cabinet maker's rather more technical version: Now, wires and pipes have been put in place based on those renders. The plumber was done weeks ago, the electrician finished last week. Then I started looking at lights and mirrors and - oops - fell hard for some lights and mirrors that won't work with the way it was plumbed and wired.  I think this might be the perfect cabinet - not too hard-edged, but practical, slim but not stingy. And t hese lights will chime nicely with our Japanese tub and vaguely Asian spa tile. But to make them work we need the vanity to be more like this sketch which took me hours to produce: ...which required the lights to be rewired and the pipes moved. This picture shows all the conversations I've had with th...

Returning after over three weeks away, we were excited to go and look around the build site. We didn't expect much of interest to have happened while we were gone - just a bunch more boring stuff going in. Still, it was nice to walk the site and see all those wires, vents, pipes and cables.  Then something unexpected caught Ash's eye. 'Are these windows smaller?' he asked. 'I hope not,' I said. Not just because we liked them the size they were, but also because the windows are already in production and it's way too late to change them. But something was definitely up. This is the size of the window when we left at the end of July:  This is the guest room - the windows in the bathroom and in Penelope's room are the same size. This is what we returned home to in late August: Different, isn't it? And the windows in bathroom and Penelope's room had also moved. Which is odd because no-one called us to suggest moving any windows around. A quick 'um...

I did say, in my last post , that it was all about to get boring.  I was right, it really did. But what I didn't realize was quite how time consuming, and intense the boring bits would be. Now the walls are up, it's really just a bunch of pipes and wires, and who really cares about how that stuff? I thought I could just continue dreaming up colour schemes and tile combos, while the 'rough trades' did the boring stuff. After all, we won't be actually laying tile or building cabinets or putting in showers for months yet. Several incredibly long and intense meetings with the afore-mentioned rough trades I know better. It turns out in order to do the boring stuff they need to know how the interesting stuff will work. Which makes total sense. How can the plumber put in drainpipes without knowing what's draining and from where? And the heat and air guy had a lot of questions about vents which I wasn't expecting but I now see were entirely necessary - if we want to...

 After the tortuously slow start the last month has seen rapid progress. We are now up to the top floor, and with a roof top deck we can sit and have a drink on (albeit out of a flask, sitting on camping chairs). Most days we have gone to see the house and found some progress. Most days a neighbor has stopped us and said 'it's getting big, isn't it?!'. And most days I took a photo - so as to create this pleasing time lapse video: It's all about to slow down and get rather boring for a while, as the 'rough trades' move in. Plumbing, electrical, vents for heat and air - all the stuff that gets hidden behind drywall down the line. If I'd had to guess I wouldn't have imagined that the legendary record label had named themselves after plumbing and electrical work. You learn something new every day I guess.

We've got walls! Framing the ground floor is done, and work has begun on the second floor. Compared to the snail's pace of the basement, where days went by with just coats of waterproofing being applied, or sand being moved about, this has been thrilling. Okay thrilling is maybe a stretch but it's certainly been satisfying to walk down there every day and see very visible progress. Here's thirty days worth of that progress, in 11 seconds. Now the walls are up it's possible to walk around the house and really see how the layout works and what the windows look out onto. So far nothing has surprised or disappointed us either, which is great. Here's where we got to by the end of last week: In the next couple of weeks the second floor will go on. And then, presumably (well, one would hope) the roof. Onwards and literally upwards.

Honestly, it was a nail biter. As soon as it cured we could see that the colour was good. A couple of days of polishing and the speckles of aggregate started to show through and we breathed a sigh of relief - they're pretty! But a couple more goes over with the polishing machine and the floor started looking patchy.  Ignacio said he knew how to fix it - but it looked worse before it looked better. For a few days every time we looked it we saw more patches. It was a dark time. But we should always have faith in Ignacio. Now it looks better and we couldn't be more pleased. By accident rather than by design, the colour and the aggregate give it a lovely beachy look. The scorelines, there to reduce cracking, look really nice too.  It's all wrapped up and protected now while the house is framed, and I guess for several months after that. There's plenty of comfort in the thought that this part of the house is completely done, and it looks just right.