Christmas break?

Matt and Phil have been working hard over the last couple of days, making good progress on the house! See, it wore them out:
Matt's been installing flooring on the staircase, making it all look quite lovely.
Phil's been installing doors and trim and things.
Now, nearly all the trim is in place in the house!
I'm told the Mom put the doorknobs on, though, while she was there Monday.
I think the stairs look quite gorgeous in photos, and look forward to seeing them in person.
The plan had been to sand and begin finishing the flooring this week, but the sander we rented had electrical problems--it wouldn't run for more than a few seconds without blowing a fuse--so other projects moved up the list, and sanding will have to wait.

Monday, carpet was installed upstairs and in the front t.v. room. A nice change-up from the plywood, don't you think?
Phil also got to work on constructing steps up to the front porch from the side, digging a nice footing. (And we thought we were done with digging footings... So naive...)
Here's the step he built up to the garage's side door.
Mom tacked a herculean challenge: sorting out the garage. It was kind of messy anyhow, but then because a disaster zone in recent rain and snow storms, when we just dumped stuff in as quickly as possible and shut the door. See, before:
And after.
Much better.

stepping it up

Matt's in the middle of finals, but has been tempering his study time with some building time; yesterday, he prepared flooring for the stairs. Don't they look nice, all piled up?
Of course, they'll look even nicer on the staircase!
Thanks for the hard work, Matt.

nailing down things

This week, we finished installing the wood flooring; now it just needs to be sanded and finished. Oh, and installed on the stairs... So basically, we're just done with the big flooring nailgun, but that's a good step. And the good news is that it looks lovely. Matt and I went up Friday afternoon, and worked 'til midnight, nailing it all down.

Matt had also gone up for a quick visit earlier in the week, to check the fit on some flooring pieces that needed to be customized, and he installed the second toilet. Now, if there were only doors on the bathrooms... :)

We didn't get around to taking any pictures, though.

Instead, I'll share these pics from Thanksgiving weekend, taken by Shan.
The snow was so lovely through the windows.
We all stopped for a snow-watching break, upstairs.
And then, looked down for a floor-watching moment. It's gonna be cool.

flooring it

Matt and I spent the night in Julian yesterday; this Saturday, we didn't awake to new snow.

We made good progress on the flooring. Our hope was to finish, but our desire to do things well got in the way of that. See, we installed flooring up to the point where the floor in the kitchen meets up again with the floor in the big room; the boards were about 3/16ths of an inch off from each other.
So, we decided to do it right, with the help of a router. And either router we might use, of course, was down the hill...
In the meantime, we did some little jobs--sealing the granite tile and the backsplash in the kitchen, finishing up little duct box over the microwave, sealing and caulking the upstairs shower, and hanging the first stairway handrail.

It's nice to cross these little things off the list, but also feels like every one we do reveals 2 more: the toilet needed a different wax seal, there's more patching and painting to do in the stairway and upstairs bath now, the shower spigot needs a different fitting...

Even so, it feels wonderfully closer to done than it's ever been.

I think we'll go up again next Friday after Matt's morning class, and finish laying that floor.