Week 27: Stairs, Drawers and Paint
The countdown is on... four weeks until move-in! Just under four weeks actually, but you get the idea. We are feeling really good about the state of everything, especially after all of the progress this week. The major checklist item? THE STAIRS. These things have been getting some serious love over the last few weeks. The stairs are front and center and don't have a lot of room to "hide" imperfections, so it's been a real trick to get everything just right. Luckily, we have a wonderful millwork team with excellent attention to detail.
Tyler stopped by the house on Tuesday and got to see the risers in place (the front part of the stair). As you can see on the left side of the stair near the big window, we doubled up the framing to get us a bit closer to the wall. Since we have the big window, we can't just attach the stairs to that wall. They have to "float" yet we still have to be up to code and can't have a fall hazard. Therefore, we're trying to get the stairs as close to the window wall as possible.
Tyler stopped by again on Wednesday to find the stair treads (the part you walk on) installed and looking AWESOME. The treads overhand the stairs by a few inches on each side, further decreasing the gap between the stairs and the window wall. The treads will be stained to match our wood floors and the risers will be painted white.
By the time we stopped by on Saturday afternoon, the stairs to the basement were also completed and all trim work for both sets was finished. We are using oak treads upstairs and poplar treads down to the basement. Poplar is a softer wood, meaning it will likely get dents and dings over the years, but it is cheaper than oak, so that was the deciding factor. I still think they look really nice. We will stain the poplar treads to match our floors (just like the oak treads) and paint the risers white.
While the stair work was being completed near the end of the week, the painters got started upstairs. They filled in all of the nail holes, caulked the seams, and then started to paint. As I've talked about in the past, we are using Dunn Edwards paint. Dunn Edwards isn't sold in Indiana, but I did find a distributor in Louisville, so Tyler and I contacted them to line up our order and drove down a few weeks ago to pick everything up. I'm pretty darn picky about paint, so this was a big deal to me - clearly. :)
Least to say, I was SUPER nervous to go upstairs and check out the paint this weekend. Did I mention that I've never actually seen Dunn Edwards paint in-person? haha... Well I'm happy to report that the paint looks fantastic! We used "White" on the trim and doors and "Droplets" on the walls.
Well actually... funny story there. The walls in the guest bedrooms are supposed to be "Faded Gray". They were incorrectly painted "Droplets", so we need to get that fixed. I just hope we have enough "Droplets" to finish the rest of the house. You know that place in Louisville where I got the paint originally? They were in the process of moving when we picked up our order, and I have no idea if they're open anymore.... oy vey. Building a house is fun, right?!
We were also greeted by a graded yard this weekend - aka they moved a bunch of dirt around and made sure that we now have soil up to the base of the house. The views out of the back slider looked awesome - just wait until we have some green grass!
The house is really coming together, isn't it? A few minor details to point out... toe kicks installed in the kitchen, shiplap in the nook, finalized window trim, and a bit of kitchen trim. It's like Where's Waldo... can you spot the updates?! ha
Our project for the weekend was to put together all of the IKEA kitchen drawers. The fronts from Semihandmade haven't been painted quite yet, but we went ahead and assembled and installed the drawers anyway. Luckily, this part proved to be our easiest project to-date. While slightly time consuming, it's a mostly snap and click system, so we knocked it all out in a few hours. We have A LOT of drawers. I'm sick of assembling IKEA systems....
All in all, it was one heck of a week. We are really looking forward to moving oh so soon!