Oh man. Lots went on last week.

The house is starting to take shape nicely and it’s making all of us very excited to move in. This is mostly due to the drywall finishing up. We negotiated with our GC to have his guys finish the drywall after we hung it and provided their materials. They’re doing a fantastic job! It’s coming together quite nicely.

We were about to get about 85% of the drywall hung in the front living room and they finished hanging it (correctly). They also went around and reinforced the drywall with a few more screws (and, no doubt, fixing some of the mistakes that we made).

They even came in and worked all day Saturday. We worked after they left, hanging the last of the drywall at the top of the walls in the back family room. Eli worked on this while I worked on the drywall on the entry way between the kitchen and family room.

Another big step in this house-to-home transition was the installation of the carpet. You may remember that our original plan was to install hardwood flooring throughout the first floor and vinyl plank flooring throughout the second floor, which exceeded our budget. We ultimately decided to carpet the second floor and the bedrooms, and install engineered hardwood floors through the rest of the first floor. I’m very happy with this decision. I think that having carpet in the bedrooms is going to be a good move.

The installers were in-and-out in one day. I had set my office up in the quietest part of the house – the girls’ closet. With the drywallers in the living and family rooms and the carpet installers in the rest of the house, I had to move my office down to the basement for the day. Not ideal, but it worked. Very impressive speed for the installation and it went great! The rooms look wonderful!

Another milestone in the house-to-home transition was the delivery of the kitchen appliances. I hadn’t quite finished the hookups for the refrigerator and dishwasher by the time that they arrived, so I had them stage them in the living room for the time being. The guys delivering the appliances didn’t seem to mind that too much. After getting the water connections in place, I temporarily put the appliances in place, mostly to get them out of the way of the drywallers, but also to get a sense of how the kitchen was going to look.

Probably the most time-consuming part of getting the appliances installed was the microwave. There was a microwave previously installed where there were some cabinets previous to that. But we found that using the existing mounting bracket placed it too high (in our opinion). After some help from a couple of the drywallers (who welcomed the break from finishing drywall), and a lot of trial and error, we finally got it placed at the right height for us. Above it was a fairly large gap, so I used some leftover trim from the end cabinet next to the refrigerator, along with a cabinet door that was going to be scrapped, to make a couple of small cabinet doors. Not sure what we’ll end up putting in the cabinet up there, but it should look okay at least.

Other than that, it was just a bunch of little jobs that add up. Sonya was hard at work with the trim around the windows and doors. I trimmed out the girls’ window. The kitchen sink got installed, along with a new septic-grade garbage disposal. It’s starting to come together with a lot of little details finishing up. Very exciting!

Everyone is very excited about moving in. We even had some of the kids show up on Saturday and, since the rooms were effectively done (minus baseboards), they started to move some of their furniture into their rooms.