If You Don't Have Time To Do It Right Then You Must Have Time To Do It Again

We are all human and we all make mistakes.  I consider it a strength of character to admit to those mistakes and do what you can to fix it.  Yesterday we had two subcontractors come back to re-do work.

The Driveway
The first being our driveway that has/had many issues.  Interesting that this is the "best mason in the area".  Maybe I should look into that line of work.

The pits

The roller coaster

Oops...missed that part

They ripped up the bottom 1/3 of our driveway yesterday and repoured to (hopefully) take care of the pitting problem we were having down there.   As for the bumps...they say that is normal in a driveway.  I don't remember having bumps like that in a driveway, but I haven't looked that closely either!

The Countertop
The counter top subcontractor had to come back as well.  Last week they installed all counter tops.  We picked remnants everywhere except the kitchen since you can save quite a bit of money.  We picked our remnant slabs a few weeks ago.  Jesse went to the house to check them out and he was really surprised by what we had picked for our master bathroom.  It had little red dots all over it...how could we miss that when picking slabs?! (Kind of hard to tell in this picture, but the red really didn't go with our bathroom colors at all!)

I was just chalking it up to a bad decision on our part, but Jesse went to the stone yard and lo and behold...the slab we picked was still there with the sticky note with our name on it.  :)
That was replaced yesterday as well.

  

Despite having some work to re-do Erbes has still been making progress.   The outside is close to finished, they just have to paint the trim white outside.  

They put up part of the railing going upstairs.  It will feel much safer when we bring the kids now!  This picture also shows my favorite purchase for the house...the great room fan.  Who knew a fan could be so exciting?

And Jesse built some awesome shelves over the weekend so we have room to store our stuff! 

Moving day is 9 days away!  Hard to believe they will get everything done in that short time, but Erbes hasn't disappointed me yet.

T-minus 15 days

Little over two weeks until the builder says they're all done and we can move in.  We're very excited!  Things are going to be coming together very quickly now. But the frenzy itself leads to stress.  Current stresses are:

• Getting blinds measured, ordered and installed hopefully before we move in
• The landscaper was supposed to be finished with our paver patio and sprinklers and have grass planted by the time we move in.  Now he says they won't start until mid-August!  Which means no steps from our patio door which might be a problem.
• What to do with the mantle, now that the painter gave his professional recommendation against our plan of just painting it a specific near-black color.
• Getting adequate garage/basement shelving built and installed so we have places to put all of our junk.  Jesse has another big project ahead.
• All the logistics of moving... childcare, etc.
• Making sure all the little dings and scratches of construction get fixed up to give us the "perfect" house we're hoping for.  Most notably....

The driveway.  There are a number of apparent "splashes" of pittted holes we noticed.  From what we've read, this may be error on the part of the installer.  It sounds like we'll be able to have these whole sections pulled out and re-poured (at no cost to us), but that has yet to be finalized.  Yikes!

On a brighter note, keeping our spirits up, countertops were installed today!  Something we were very much looking forward to.  We're very happy with how they turned out.  The kitchen below is Hanstone quartz, in Aspen and Tiffany Grey.

Moving right along

 Things have definitely slowed down now that we are to the finishing part.  They've been working on the siding and stone.  Here is a picture of the front of the house.

 

This is the fireplace stone.  When we picked stone for the exterior and fireplace Jesse and I were maxed out on decisions. Neither of us could decide so we picked one that we hoped we wouldn't hate. :)  Good news...we don't hate it!

  

I've decided there are two things I would not want to do if I were a contractor.  The first one is drywall/mud/taping.  The second would be installing cabinets.  Seems like a tedious job.  But they look really nice!

There was a little oopsie that the electrician had to come fix.  The light switch was where the refrigerator/cabinet was supposed to go.  They came back and fixed it right up.  Now about that hole in the wall...

 Yesterday they started installing the cabinets for our built in desk area.  I think it will look great!