Though we had water, we needed a couple of more things to happen before we got our certificate of occupancy. The mechanical contractors had to hook the water up to our systems and make sure everything worked, and we needed a bit of final electrical work done. While we waited for those things to happen, we worked our way through our punch list of additional finishing work.
Faucets and Fixtures
First on the punch list was final water and light fixtures. We had purchased most of them months ago when we worked through our big interior to-do list. Fortunately, we were still happy with our choices. We wanted to stick with name brands, since they are so much better than the cheaper options when you need a part or a cartridge down the road for a leaky faucet. So we stuck with Moen and Kohler faucets. Showerheads were Delta. Towel bars and the like we were less concerned about name-brands since there aren’t many moving parts to break. We got these sets from Amazon, and they seem fine.
A Big Glulam
Another project was to weather-treat our giant glulam board that served as the foundation of our front deck. The deck was engineered to hold a hot tub, and big boxes full of water and people are heavy. So the deck framing needed to be pretty beefy. At this stage of the project I was trying to donate as much time as I could to try and move things along, so I spent the better part of a day up on ladders to get this thing treated.
Other Odds and Ends
There were lots of other little things to do. We installed a Wolf gas range that one of our neighbors was kind enough to give us when they were putting in an upgrade. I gave my office another coat of paint after our touch-up paint didn’t match the original coat. I installed doorknobs on all of our interior doors – a simple Kwikset handle like this one. I got lights onto our bookshelves and multiple coats of polyurethane on our exterior doors. I waxed our butcher block counters and my dad helped me paint a bunk bed for one of our kids. Overall, we plugged away at a lot of projects and slowly moved the ball forward, but it was all waiting on the big CO stuff.
A Nice Essay about Home
McMansion Hell is a great architecture blog. And this is a particularly great little essay about what it means to be home.