Brad's Birthday

This year for Brad's birthday, Matt and I bought him a ticket to an RSL game. Everyone accused us of using Brad's birthday as an opportunity to go to an RSL game, and they were right. We drove down to Salt Lake on Saturday, April 19, for the game. Brad was soooo excited. He was asking questions a mile-a-minute. He has never been to a soccer game before and has never played so he wasn't sure what everything was. Lucky for us, it was a great game! We had some shots on our goal, and the game-winning shot was right there in front of us! Brad joined in all the high-fiving with strangers when they scored! It was a really fun night!

Quick Updates

I've been thinking about it all day and have come to the realization that we are too busy. We have spent a whole six-eight hours at home awake this week. From Monday to Thursday, a whopping 6-8 hours. We are both up early to go to work, home from work only to run over to the house to start work, and back home between 9 and 10 every night. Needless to say, everything is a disaster. I have loads of laundry in a basket that have been sitting untouched since they were dried on Sunday. The dishes just sit filthy in the sink until they start to smell. The garbage cans are all overflowing. My car is a complete disaster zone. Even my purse is literally hanging by a thread. Any day now it is just going to rip and spill all my stuff out. I am exhausted. Matt is exhausted. He is so exhausted, he doesn't have the energy to hang the new toilet paper roll, so he just sets it on the counter. We have several days worth of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor. Yes. We are disgusting. I have zero energy to do any of that stuff when I get home. I need my house to be done! Not just want. No. NEED.

Here are a few updates from the past week:

I love paying people to do things. It means that stuff gets done and Matt and I don't have to do it! This week our new friend Blake started the soffit and facia. He is also going to finish the siding that isn't done (that we don't have the time, energy, materials, equipment, etc. to do ourselves). Then we can call our other neighbor Dan to come by and paint the outside.

Matt and I have been slowly working away at the rock. We are almost done. Just the post, one wall, and one side of the garage. Then we get to grout the whole thing! Gah. The nice thing is that this is pretty much the last thing we'll have to do ourselves outside. We are paying someone to pour the driveway, and paying another guy to build the rock wall and level the lot. We will have to put in lights and outlets when we do finish electrical, but that's pretty much it outside. Oh, and we need to buy a garage door. 

We started working on tile this week. We are going to do all the tile floors, then move on to the hardwood floors so the cabinets can get installed soon. We are in a bit of a rush because we decided to do granite countertops, which apparently take three weeks to make AFTER they measure your installed cabinets! We were hoping to be ready to close the first week of June, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. It's looking more like the third or fourth week of June if we're lucky.

This is the small bathroom that we started last night (technically we started prepping for tile on Monday, but did the tile work last night). Tonight we got about a third of the way through the master bath. Matt is going to work tomorrow and finish the master bath. In the evening, I will start grouting and Matt will finish laying tile in the mudroom. We're hoping to be able to have me grout all day on Saturday and Matt start hardwood. Phew. We'll see if it actually happens! I can't wait to see what the tile looks like after it is grouted and we put on the baseboard.

So there is the quick update. I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining, because I know that I am the luckiest person ever! I am soooo happy with our house. Everything is coming together even better than I thought it would and I love that we are building it ourselves and that I get to be a big part of that. I love that I know what it takes to build a house and that Matt trusts me to help him. I love that I get to make all the decisions and get exactly what I want! I am sooooo lucky. Just tired.

Rock

Matt started rock last week and it looks soooo good! I am so excited! I had to go over all the space where we are putting rock and cover it with a scratch coat before Matt could put the rock on. It is like putting together a giant puzzle trying to fit all the pieces together.

You can see the scratch coat and the black tar paper and lathe that helps keep the rock on. This picture is a little outdated. On Saturday, I finished all the scratch coat on the house and the post.

Again, this picture is a little outdated. The rock now wraps all the way around the front door and up to the corner. We still have to put rock on the house below the two windows and on the post.

After we put all the rock on, we have to go through again and put grout between all the rock pieces. Matt says we put the grout in the cracks the same way you put icing on a cake, with the icing in a bag and squishing it out. Then we'll use a tool to smooth everything down.

We still need to finish the siding (we are sooooo close! Only one gable left!) and then the painter can come back and paint the siding. All the trim will be white and the paint will be a brownish-grayish color. After paint, a guy will come and do soffit and facia. We are very close outside! Only a few final touches!

This week Matt and I will continue working on the rock outside and start putting in the hardwood floor inside. We have our cabinets ordered and being made, hopefully they'll be ready in three or four weeks. The floor has to be done before they will install, which means we have to have the floor done in the kitchen and bathrooms before they can be installed, so we have a lot to do! Wish us luck!

Paint

Deciding on a paint color was the first of many difficult decisions. I am the type of person who is fine when I have a limited number of options. Like, give me three to five choices and I can handle that. Don't ask me to walk into Home Depot and look a like a thousand different options. And let's be honest, after like ten minutes of looking at colors, they all start to blur together and look the same. Finally we decided on a color, and everyone told us it was too dark. Well, I basically told everyone not to question my judgment and I am glad I did! I love the color sooo much! The more I am at the house, the more I like it!

Mudroom- Holy crap it looks even better than I thought it would. There will be cubbies under the bench, but we won't put those in until the floor is down. We are doing tile floor in the mudroom. Opposite of the lockers will be the washer and dryer. There will be cabinets over the washer and dryer.

Kitchen window- I love how Matt's trim just pops with the dark paint and the white trim.

Hallway

Master bedroom

Master bathroom tub and shower

Dining room/living room

View of entry from the dining room- There will be a cabinet in front of the half wall that will be like a desk area. The cabinet and counter will match what we have in the kitchen and bathrooms.

Master closet- My half

Master closet- Matt's half

Master closet- My half again, but you can see how the shelf on top wraps around the entire closet. I couldn't resist squishing in extra storage anywhere I could!

Family room/dining room/kitchen view from the hallway

Mudroom with the pocket door

Spare bedroom with big closet

Closets

This post is a few weeks late, I know, I've been slacking with blog updates lately. Matt and I were able to build the closet interiors after we set all the doors. Mostly I built the closets while Matt worked on trim and headers for the doors and windows.

Linen closet

Spare bedroom- On the left, there will be the two bars for hanging clothes, and on the right the single bar for the longer stuff. There is a shelf at the top along the full length of the closet.

Spare bedroom- This is a pretty small closet and room, so it will eventually be a nursery. On the right there will be three bars for hanging clothes (baby clothes are TINY so we thought the three bars would be a good idea). On the left, there are the shelves and one bar for longer things at the bottom. There is a shelf across the top.

Master closet- This is Matt's side of the master closet. He has the two bars for hanging clothes and the shelves for shoes and other stuff. There is also a small shelf that wraps around the top of the closet, including over the doorway. 

Master closet- This is my side of the master closet. I have the double bar for hanging clothes and another single bar for dresses and long coats and stuff. I also get the other half of the shelves and you can see the shelf that wraps around the top.

Pantry

Mudroom! I am so excited for how this has turned out. Matt let me decide how I wanted the mudroom to look, so I got to design the bench and locker space (thank you Pinterest!).

Coat closet in the entry

Texture and Trim

Near the end of the week the texture on the walls and ceiling was finished, which meant that we could get to work on trim! Matt had the finish materials delivered on Friday, so Friday night Matt and I set all the interior doors and on Saturday we started doing door and window casings. We still have to do the headers on all the doors and windows but Matt is doing some fancy work, including creating his own piece (since he couldn't find the one he wanted anywhere) and some crown moulding. We also need to put on all the baseboard. Once the trim inside is done, the painter can come paint! We are pretty close to picking the color we want inside.

As far as things outside, you can see that we are finished now with three of the four sides. The west side is up pretty high and Matt has been hesitant to finish it without the right stuff. After the siding is done, the painter can paint the siding (the color has already been picked), we can put rock on, and we can have the soffit and facia done. Soon the outside will be done and it will look like a finished house!

I am starting to see the end of this huge project, which is good and bad. Good because we have been working hard (Matt even more than me) for a long time and it will be nice for that to be over, and of course nice to have our own house! Bad because we still have a lot to do and I am more antsy than ever to get out of Randy and Jenny's basement and into our house. I want all my stuff out of storage and I want my own space. We have loved living with Randy, Jenny and the kids, but we definitely have a new appreciation for privacy and freedom that you don't have living in someone else's house.

Unfortunately, Matt has to work all during my spring break this week, so we won't get much done except at night. I was hoping that he would have some time off while I did so we could just work all day like we did during Winter Break. Oh well.

More Siding

Luckily while the sheet rock has been getting done, we are able to work outside on the siding. Thank heavens it hasn't been raining. We have had some perfect Saturdays to work outside, considering it is only March. I almost got a little sunburned this week. Anyway, my dad has been a trooper helping Matt and I with siding. Matt did most of the back of the house by himself, but has had my dad helping out with the other three sides. We did the entire front of the house on Saturday. There were a lot of trim pieces to cut, which took a lot of time, but it helped having an extra person to hold things in place, cut stuff, nail stuff, etc. I was mostly in charge of cutting pieces on the chop saw. I'm certainly not perfect, but getting better!

We are left now with just the three gables, which will be a little different because they come in big sheets rather than big slats and fit together differently. You can see that we are ready for rock too, so as soon as that is ordered, we will be able to work on that! We are hoping to time it right so that we can be working on trim inside, and the painter can paint outside, then switch and work on rock outside while the painter paints inside. We'll see how it works out in the next couple of weeks.

The gables will be white with the vertical siding. The windows will be trimmed in white and the rest of the horizontal siding will be a brown/gray color. Where you see the black in the picture will all be rock. There will be a white trim just above the rock (it's kind of hard to see in the picture).