The big push this past week, and coming up this week, is flooring. Tile-setter extraordinaire Kurtis continues to make progress on getting tile up on the walls and down on the floors, and the results continue to be spectacular.
The tile in the master bath’s shower is smaller pieces of the tile that floors the rest of the room. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the master bath, the storage cabinet “towers” are now up on their granite pedestals.
There’s still some trim and electrical work to be done, and the lights will have to be raised for better clearance above the yet to be installed mirror, but placing the towers marks another step completed. The faucets look good with the granite, even though we selected them months apart. “Blind squirrel finds nut,” as the saying goes.
The same is true for the hardware in the guest bath.
The bamboo floors that are going to go down in the “German” bedroom, the master bedroom, and the office, have been another story. Bamboo, it seems, is very sensitive to temperature and humidity, both in the air and coming up from the slab. Kurtis also does floors and he has a tool that measures the (tiny) amount of moisture coming up out of the concrete. In the “German” bedroom and the office, it was fine; not so in the master suite. Why? No idea, but something–several somethings, actually–is going to have to be done to ensure the bamboo doesn’t misbehave once it’s down.
One of those somethings is putting down a “quiet walk” pad. The bamboo boards are actually three layers of material, with the strands of the middle layer set at 90° to the other two, and then each board snaps together with the boards on either side. This “floating floor” (it’s not nailed or glued down) needs the pad underneath both for moisture control and to do just what the name suggests: make the floor quieter to walk on. This is what the pad looks like in the “German” bedroom.
In electrical news, a whole shipment of replacement switches, wall plates, and LED bulbs came in last week. The switches will replace the half-size ones that were originally ordered, like these…
and the wall plates are a more silvery color that won’t stand out against the walls the way these cream plates do.
There’s progress outside the house, too. The support beams for the slats over the south patio have been put up.
The slats themselves will follow in the next week or two.
And the lawn, such as it is, is starting to come in.
It’s still the grass equivalent of peach-fuzz, but it’s a start. It’s a low-water-use, drought-tolerant grass called Buffalo grass.
We’re about a month away from being done. (There: I’ve actually said it.)
I will never look at a floor, any floor, again the same way.
I applaud your continuing attention to detail.