Pictures of the completed renovations have been uploaded to my flickr account, which you can see at the bottom of this page. I’ve been wanting to do a “before and after” spread, but haven’t had a chance yet, so feel free to browse on your own!

That’s right. No more pictures of the house until after the Open House!

Granite was installed yesterday and this morning the plumbers showed up bright and early to get all the stuff hooked up.

Our oven now has gas heat running to it, so, Seth, I’ll start on those brownies right away.

Today is a big day for 2 reasons:

1. Dexter is squatting to pee now. This may sound like a small step, but it is a signal of greater muscle control in his hind legs. We’re seeing progress everyday, and its very exciting. He is still not able to walk, and cannot stand up from the squatted position, but its the first step.

2.  Our house should be pretty much done by the time we get home. We’ve been waiting on the electrical to be finished and had a snafoo with one of the sinks, so they couldn’t put the granite in last week. But both of those should be done today. They are also moving furniture back into place so we can put stuff away. Finally! A functional house!

We’re coming down to the final steps in our home renovation process and everyday seems like a week. Especially the days when its hard to tell what has been done. Friday they did come in and finish the cabinetry (there was one upper that was too large on the first pass and there was some additional molding to be done) and built the bench in the shower (you know, in case we get tired while showering).

Today we should see progress on the tile in the bathroom and I think the hood should be put up over the stove. Last week the contractor said we should be done by the end of this week, but I highly doubt that, seeing how Friday was the only day anyone worked last week.

We had Brinks come out to reinstall our alarm system (for which we’ve been paying during construction (they reimburse for 2 months, but that’s it)). Our first attempt to have them reinstall it went from bad to worse because apparently they don’t like to install them in the front wall of houses because of the likelihood of the flexible drill bit going through the exterior of the house.  The preferable location really is the front wall so the guy said, if he could drill a hole halfway down the wall (supposedly where the fireblock was), that he’d be able to get the wire down to the basement. Not only did the drill bit punch through our siding, twice, but he was also unable to get through the fireblock. We asked him to leave because we had our 80’s party to get to and he left with no progress and one significant hole in our new paint job.

Sooo, Saturday morning they sent out two installers, both of whom seemed more capable and creative than the first guy, to see if we couldn’t find another solution. Long story short, they ended up installing it on the hallway wall above our new light switch. The wires were run up (instead of down) into the attic, over to the closet, down through the closet into the crawlspace, and back to the power box. Granted, it wasn’t a simple solution, but should’ve been something that the first guy at least suggested. He didn’t even want to consider the attic when Jason brought it up the first time.  Anyway, our home is now resecured, which is good since all of our new stuff will soon be in place.

They installed our brand new huge stove/range/oven (if anyone can explain the difference, I’ll bake you brownies) yesterday and man does it look impressive.

It looks great with the wood floor and I am very excited to cook on it. Of course, they have to turn on the outlet into which it is plugged, but then we can bake away if we want. It might be helpful to wait until our countertops arrive though:

Our house is coming along really well. We are beginning to see what the end product will be like and its coming together in the details. One big picture is the living/dining room. It is complete except for the hanging light fixtures:

The floor boards and shoe molding are two of the nice touches that really make it look pretty high class:

We’ve also added nickel doorknobs to all the interior doors. One of my coworkers summed up this process well when she said “Did you ever think you’d be excited about nickel doorknobs?”:

Yesterday they added the molding around the cabinets in the kitchen. It looks really nice:

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

This is our “prep” area. The box on the wall is for the microwave so it doesn’t have to take up counterspace.

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A lot is happening around the house today. They are painting the living/dining area, the tile guy is starting in the bathroom, and, most exciting, the kitchen cabinets are being installed today. One downside is that Jason is sick today so while he’s trying to rest, its going to be noisy upstairs. But maybe that means he can send me periodic updates!

As the title may suggest, we had our kitchen painted today and I am very pleased with the outcome. I was a little worried that the color would be too purple or too dark, but I think its just right. I was going for a “wine” effect. Its pretty difficult to capture the color in a picture, but I think this shot does it the most justice (of course, monitors may vary):

The vent in the ceiling ran right into the drop ceiling, so they found a pretty classy solution for the crown molding (which looks great, by the way):

One last view looking through the pass-thru:

This weekend we installed some of our new real wood blinds and they look impressively stylish. We had a little difficulty because of the curvature of the window trim in our bedroom, but the wooden header evened things out so you can’t even tell. The biggest benefit of the new blinds is that it cuts out 95% of the light coming through our windows, opposed to the 60% (if that) that our old metal blinds cut out. This made it very difficult to get out of bed this morning, the one drawback. Well, enough commentary, here they are: