Milestone

This weekend we moved into the rear of the house! Here's what it looked like before we moved all of our stuff back there:

The final walkthrough of the back went okay, yielding a number of small issues. Those have been mostly addressed, and we were told that it would all be done and we could move in by end-of-day Friday. And of course, they managed to leave some little things to Monday, meaning they have since been working in the back of the house - sanding, no less! - when we made it really clear they had to be out of there before we moved in. Grrr! By end-of-day Wednesday the space still had details left unfinished - for example, we went to run the dishwashers to clean dishes before we put them away and, although they ran beautifully, they didn't do such a great job because they didn't get any water. Oops.

There are still a lot of things, large and small, that we are very dissatisfied with, but we're just going to have to deal with them and work them out ourselves over time. The project has to move forward. Overall the space and layout are what we wanted, it just looks like it's going to take more time, effort, money, and possibly a visit from another contractor to fully realize our vision here.

So we have moved all of our things out of the front two rooms and the workers have been in there fixing up all the stuff they missed. So we're still in a somewhat cramped situation, but the scenery has changed.

On the plus side, we have fire! And we used it for our first home-cooked dinner in 3 months.

Progress?

We are now nearly three months into our move-in, and the back of the house is still a warzone. It seems like every week, only half of what is supposed to get done is actually finished come Friday afternoon.

A walkthrough revealed lots of little items that our contractor is now diligently addressing, some of which require patchwork, re-mudding, sanding, caulking, and painting. So we are even now still looking at perhaps another two weeks until we can claim the rear of the house as finished territory.

We also needed to make some serious adjustments to the treatment of the windows and doors in the back. The drawings called for the door to be nearly flush with the left corner, and the adjacent window to be offset about six inches. For structural reasons, our contractor decided to push the door in about six inches and move the window closer to flush. This had a tangible and unsettling visual impact on what was a carefully arranged set of apertures, so we needed a remedy.

Our architect came up with a solution to make the spaces and openings relate properly again, which involved some creative casing and furring out portions of the wall near and under the window. The additional delay and expense was not exactly music to our ears and those of our contractor, but the end result I think might actually be better than the original plan. Above: before and after.

In addition, we discovered our pantry door was located in the wrong place by a few inches. This was enough that the adjacent refrigerator would actually extend past the opening by a little bit, so they had to correct that as well.

On the plus side, the sink and all appliances are in place and our temporary plywood countertops are finished, so it's getting easier to imagine it as a working kitchen.