Last weekend when we were out working on the house, we had all of the living room and dining room windows open. It is surprisingly comfortable in the house, even when it is 90+ degrees outside with the windows open. However, when we went to leave we discovered the big window in the living room would not lock. We called the builder about it since the windows are his responsibility and after inspecting it, he informed us the window is “defective”. He ordered the replacement which will hopefully be in within the next week or two.
Our mail-order interior doors from Menard’s arrived last week while I was out of town on business. One of those was also “defective”.
I will say Menard’s was really good about the whole thing though. I e-mailed them a few photos of the door and the SKU sticker on the door and they agreed to ship a new one the next day. I expect that will arrive either late this week or early next.
The other 9 doors look pretty good. Except 3 of them had damage to the door jambs from shipping. I do not think any of those are beyond repair. Worst case, I might have to make a few new door jambs, but that is not the end of the world, just a little more time consuming.
The major accomplishments this week were to get the second coat of paint on Tina’s big orange “accent wall” in the living room and to get most of the electrical topped out.
I have decided to call the living room “accent Wall” the “Trump Wall”. First off, it is a wall. Secondly, it is big and orange just like our president. A couple times I found myself walking into the room and saying: “Well hello Mr President. We both voted for you but never expected you would show up in our living room.” Then I realized I was just talking to a wall. But never let it be said that Tina and Mike did not do everything in our power to make “Living Rooms Great Again”!
It is really nice to finally have electric outlets and fans and lights inside the house. Just running an extension cord from the outside circuit breaker box to wherever we are working (and having to pull around construction lights) is a time consuming process. It is much better now.
The outside fixtures are also in.
And the security lights. We have security lights on all four corners of the house, controlled by two switches inside the house, and they light up the area around the house like a prison yard!
Finally, one of our biggest problems has been finding the tools we need to work on the house.
When we moved from Minnesota, we intentionally did not unpack anything that we did not immediately need to live in the rental house. That means, the garage of the rental house is literally packed floor-to-ceiling with stuff, and my workshop stuff is squarely in the middle of it all.
So we decided to move a couple of my workbenches and my tall shop cabinet to the build house along with most of my small power tools.
That freed up a fair bit of space at the rental house as well as giving me access to most of the tools I will need to complete the build. Until now, we have been working from whatever hand tools we could carry in plastic bins. This finally gives us some organization on the build site and some tools that we will need moving forward.
We did leave all of my woodworking machines at the rental house as we still have to epoxy the garage floor. But the stuff we brought out is all on wheels so it will be easy enough to roll into the living room to do the floors in the garage. Once that is done, we will bring out the big guns!