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.