Waffle with the works

One feature that I really love about our house is the waffle ceiling in the family room.  It draws your eyes up and makes the ceiling appear taller.  There are so many interesting angles to look at.  Here is the transformation of the waffle ceiling.

The skeleton

Drywall in progress

Drywall completed with metal edges to keep corners crisp

Plastered

First set of crown moulding

Second set of moulding went on the corners

The different shades is due to the fact that the plaster mouldings are wet.
When they are dried, they become white again.

I think the crown moulding add so much depth and dimension to the ceiling.
 I'm so glad that we decided to add that second corner moulding.

Now I have to decide how I want these painted.  Time to visit houzz again!

Drywall

I really like the fact that there are mandatory inspections for every step of the building process.  It makes the trades accountable for their work and we can sleep well knowing that the work was done right.  After we passed the insulation inspection, drywall was installed, taped and plastered.  Scott stopped by after work and caught them finishing up a room.  He said the workers were wearing stilts so they didn't need to use ladders.  One guy had a big roll of tape in a box, hung from his neck, which he would pull from to put on the wall.  The second guy was right behind him to push the tape into the wall with a spatula.  Now that's what you call  teamwork! 

Kitchen

Breakfast Nook (most likely to be where we'll eat 95 % of our meals)

Office

Charley's Bedroom

Charley's bath

Master ensuite shower

Master bedroom, sitting room and closet

Laundry room

Skylight

Boys bath

Waffle ceiling over the family room area

Here is the kitchen again after the nail holes are filled with plaster.

Guest shower

Kaiden's room.  Still haven't decided if I want to do a window seat here.

Cameron's room

It's looking more like a home now that drywall is complete.  I can't wait to put the finishing touches!!

Insulation

Once the house is fully enclosed, we move on to insulation and then drywall.  The insulation went in on the hottest day of summer this year.  I think the temperature in our house must have been plus 40 degrees C.  Poor insulation guys!  We provided them two cases of water to keep them hydrated.  We went with spray foam in the attic around the heat vents and regular pink insulation for the rest of the house.  It was too expensive to go with spray foam for the entire house.

The office

Dinning Room

Kitchen

Family Room

They tape the plastic on the ceiling and then they will spray more insulation in the attic.

Every light, vent, or electrical outlets have to be taped.  What a big job!

Laundry Room

Master Bedroom sitting room

The big heating vents in Charley's room is all covered.

This is the reason why electrical inspection had to go before insulation inspection.  If something was wrong with the electrical now, there would be no way of rerunning the wires.

Windows Got a Makeover

We decided to go with stucco on two of the front windows.  The stucco guys were so fast and efficient that I didn't have time to see my colour choices and make my decision. 

Before:

After:

 I told him to get them to match it to the window trim and this is what Scott chose.  I think it's a couple of shades too light and on the green side.  Maybe it'll grow on me...

Unwanted Guests

The house isn't even finished yet and we already have some unwanted guests.  When the electrician climbed up onto a ladder to do some work in the on the ceiling, he came face to face with our masked visitor.  Yes, you guessed it!  Some raccoons decided to move in and made themselves comfortable on top of our shower ceiling.  You would think that they would run off when they were discovered but they just stayed put.  The electrician was so startled, he jumped off the ladder almost hurting himself.

A couple of days later, this is what we found.  They have destroyed a washroom fan vent.  What a pest.  We have to get rid of them but how?

Scott's friend told him to spray bleach onto the wood frames.  Raccoons don't like the bleach smell.  A couple of my co-workers told me about moth balls.  So we gave it a try.

These are flat disks but they have the same stinky smell as the round ones!

Here is Scott throwing the moth balls into the ceiling.

We don't know if it was the bleach, or the moth balls or a combination of both but we sure are glad that it worked.  No more unwanted guests!

Summer is here!

The last month of the school year was super hectic.  Now that I have some free time on my hand, I really need to catch up.  So bear with me while I catch you up.  The main reason why I started this blog was to document the process of our first really big building project together.  IF, and big IF we ever do it again, we would remember the steps that we took and perhaps not repeat the mistakes that we've made.  While I'm trying to catch up on my posts, note that these are not in real time and that most of these pictures were taken about a month ago.  So here we go.

The brick work started out really strong but then crept at a turtle's pace for over 8 weeks.  This delayed us for a good month.  Slowly but surely the brick is getting done.

The back of the house

3/4 of the wall completed

Except for the cap over the fireplace, this wall is done!

The stone work looks great here with the coloured accent stones.

Scott was planning to do his own wiring for phone, internet and cable.  When he actually really
thought about what he had to do, he decided to ask one of the trades people to run the wires for him.  The idea was easy, all he would've had to do was to run all the wires up to the attic and then run them to each room.  Sounds easy but if you had to climb up to the attic to do this, it's very time consuming.  Better leave it to the experts!

We had to locate where we wanted the jacks to be

A little work but saved us a lot of time and frustration