Construction Woes

So the construction is going really well. Our contractor still thinks we'll finish on time, if not early--yipee! In between all that we've found that somewhere between the lack of detail in the architectural drawings and the contractor's interpretation of the drawings, we will lose 2 inches off the side of our dining room where they will have to 'pad' the wall to account for the placement of a beam (or we can have a little nudge in the dining room wall. Wouldn't be a big deal on the long wall, but this makes the dining room that much shorter and when you are talking about 11 feet, 9 inches, becoming 11 feet 7 inches is a bit of a bummer. Esp. when...

The screen porch you envisioned was 12x12. For whatever reason it will be about 11.5 by 10 foot 6. Partial contractor error, partial architectural error. This coupled with the fact that one of us (who shall remain partily nameless) really wanted a larger porch to begin with. I bet you can't guess who. That will be the part of the project I obsess over wishing we'd done differently.

Oh and the little closet we had in the family room is even smaller than planned thanks to the ductwork for the HVAC system. HVAC ducts seem to have taken over our basement and emerged in the most bizarre locations on the main level. Our contractor has had to move ducts out of the back of closets and figure out other fixes.

On the bright side, we are going to have a HUGE basement. We'll probably have it filled up in no time flat, but it's gigantic--really glad we decided to remove the entire back wall of our house! Plus, we'll have a first floor powder room --the benefit of which you don't realize until you are potty training.

We really do like our contractors, were it not for the porch error. Grrr.

The above picture is from several weeks ago, but it's the view from just outside the powder room to the dining room--nice straight shot, but we were kind of limited, so we'll have doors between the DR and family room.

Don't know if I mentioned this, but our beloved Nikon that we forked over enough to fly to Australia for bit the dust. Thankfully we bought it with a credit card that doubled the warranty. So, we're able to get it fixed and it's working again. We can't figure out what went wrong except that Nikon seemed to have so many problems with this model that this discontinued it not long after the model debuted.