updates for the past 3 weeks

For every photo capturing precious progress, there are hours of conversations, meetings, and decisions (!!!) that preceded said progress.  

I mention that to justify, in part, the naked fact that little has occurred over the past 3 weeks inside the house -- despite the fact that November 1 is only 6 weeks away.  Amazingly, there was not a single shred of progress within the house last week.  Want to talk about uncertainty?

At any rate, some progress was made outside the house:

View from the garage out to the freshly-poured driveway.

So if the house never gets finished we have a nice flat surface upon which to pitch tent!

Despite the lack of in-house progress, the was in fact activity.  That exercise involved delivery of hardwood for 1st level flooring, installing a portion of it, and then deciding that, after all, this was low-quality wood being installed incorrectly.  Ooops.

So a brief tutorial for anyone out there considering wide-plank hardwood.  

We decided that we liked the look of the wide-planks.  In our case, we decided to go with a 5" wide white oak.  Typically, hardwood floors are 2.5-3" wide.  The wider planks are more expensive, but have a less-busy appearance to them.  Wider planks can "cup" however, where the plank would pop up off of the flooring below them.   Hence, the planks should be glued down.  Narrow planks don't have this issue -- wider planks do.  We had seen TaC's previous clients' floor going in.  For them, 12" walnut was being installed, and the glue was laid down similar to tile adhesive, with a grooved trowel, etc.  

Our builder has never had this experience, and they trusted the sub-contractor who said nails alone are fine.  So after installing a bit of the downstairs, our project manager, Fernando, had the good sense to stop the crew and ask for a meeting so that everyone could weigh in.  A second opinion -- your classic eastern-European tradesman -- also came.  It was immediately clear that the install was incorrect. 

Also, we were getting stuck with a bunch of shorties -- short pieces of wood, that is.  So all that nice hardwood is going back to the store, and we're awaiting shipment of new hardwood, and the Romanian guy is now in charge.....

Here's how the front looks, now that the limestone, metal and stucco are complete:

I felt very happy today when a potential client of TaC, after visiting the site, told me "My god, how small!"