Stairway to... Somewhere

So, we got the stairs!

That brown and orange stuff is just for protection so we won't damage the stairs while we are still building. The actual color is grey. It's the same color we have in rest of our floors. 

Alongside the stairs, we got railings:

The shape of the pillars mirror the shape of the bigger pillars in the kitchen. The color ,arches the color of our walls. It looks really nifty!

Other room that has progressed a lot, is our utility-room. We have almost finished installing the cabinets there:

We still need to hide the legs of the cabinets, Install the sink and the lighting (those are done by others) and sort out few errors in the shipment (one of the cabinets was wrong, and we got an extra unwanted cabinet), but other than that, it looks pretty good!

I couldn't get proper pictures of our bedroom in my last post, because the floor was freshly painted. But now I have few extra pictures:

And the living-room and the guest-bedroom:

That's it for today. Plan is that we will move in to the bedroom one week from today. As a bonus, here's a detail from our utility-room:

Paint it, grey

Ok, some geekery first: this blog-posts done entirely with an iPad, using blogging-app Blogsy. Let's hope everything goes well. 

So, what's going on? Lots. We are getting there. With little luck, we should be able to move in in a bit over week! There's a lot to do, still, but the place is becoming livable. Which you wouldn't believe by looking at it right now. 

Tomorrow we get our new stairs. Right now the stairwell looks like this:

We carried our utility-room cupboards through that. Yeah, it was difficult... But that will change tomorrow!

What else... We have worked on the exposed timber-surfaces. We can't leave them as they are, since it would be difficult to keep them clean. So we applied a reddish-brownish lacquer-surface on 'em:

To compare to the original color:

I can hear you thinking: "what's the deal with that un-lacquered square area?". It contains text written by previous owners of the house, from long ago: "Wirtanen omistaa talon", "Wirtanen owns the house". We'll be putting frames around it. 

We have also installed woodwork on the floor, and it has been painted in the bedroom (two layers) living-room and guest-bedroom (one layer so far). Bedroom looks like this:

Here's the difference between the painted and unpainted floor:

We will be having the same color across all wood-floors. It looks really good! It's a classic color often found in old houses. So we have three main colors in the place: grey floors, pure white walls and brownish-reddish timber-surfaces. We tried some other solutions for the floor, but they were not satisfactory. So we ended up painting them. 

So the bedroom is almost done. Electrician still needs to install electric-work there, and there are some finishing touches to be done. But the room will be livable. Our plan is to move in as soon as possible. 

I guess that's it for now. Here's a bonus-picture of Fasu the Cat:

Long and winding road

No pictures this time, just general musings about The Project.

It's been.... crazy and nerve-wrecking. Original timetable said that we would be more or less finished 3 months ago. But here we are, still unfinished. And there as been more delays as we get closer to the finish. We were supposed to get our new stairs in 2-3 weeks, but we were told yesterday that we will get the in December. Hopefully in the first half of December. So that delays our moving-time, since we obviously can't move to a second-floor home that has no stairs to it.

The good news is that the renovation-company is almost done. There's still few walls to paint, and they are out of there. After that it's just finishing the surfaces, finalizing the electric-work (that can't be done before we finish painting the walls and receive the cupboards in the utility-room) and the like. Some things will be postponed in to indefinite future. Things like balcony (hopefully next summer), heat-pumps (hopefully next fall), fireplaces (god knows when. Assuming we can get them at all) and kitchen (ASAP). reason being that we are way over budget, and I need to focus on things that are absolutely essential.

So, am I disappointed? No, not really. Of course I'm annoyed by the extra expenses, and I wish we could get more finished. But looking at the place, I can't really be all that disappointed. It's shaping up to be a really great home, and I can take joy from the fact that it's going to get even better in the future.

So why are we over budget and behind schedule? Basically, this is a old house with history (during Winter War a Russian bomb fell close to the house, seriously damaging it) we are dealing with. Had this been a "normal" house things would have been a lot smoother. But this place was about 20cm crooked, and it took a lot of time (and money) to straighten it. Oh well.

I still laugh at articles telling of "easy kitchen renovation!", or how modern homes are built like huge jigsaw-puzzles: just snap few parts together and move in. Takes few days. Our project is a polar opposite of that. We are now on day 311.

The funny thing is that we haven't really had any horror-stories to tell. You always hear stories of crappy workers, moisture-issues, accidents and the like. We have had nothing like that. Our workers have been top-notch, we didn't run in to any negative surprises (apart from the fact how crooked the place was) or anything like that. Things have been really smooth, all in all. Slower than anticipated, yes, but smooth.

But yeah, I'm quite tired.

Almost there...

It's been a bit over a month since I last blogged. Back then the bathrooms were taking shape, and we had started installing panels on the ceiling. So, what has changed in the last month or so? Plenty.

The bathrooms

Yes, we have installed panels in our bathrooms! And the tiles have been installed as well! Only thing missing is the showers, sinks and finishing the electric work. So basically, they are almost done!

Here's where our main shower (Hansgrohe Raindance showerpipe with 24cm showerhead) will be located:

View towards rest of the bathroom from same location:

Our guest-bathroom is also tiled and paneled (spelling?):

 

Utility-room is almost done as well:

We are still missing shelved and closets, but the will be delivered in 4 weeks. Then it's really DONE!

What about rest of the place? Well, regarding the paneling (that we had just started last time):

That's our dining-room. Our living-room and bedroom are paneled as well. Only rooms that are left is the kitchen and the area around the staircase. So paneling is about 70% done. So what does kitchen and the staircase look like?

 

So we have floors, insulation is 100% and those little walls have been dismantled. Only thing left is dismantling the old staircase, and installing the new one. Once that is done, the renovation-company is DONE! That's about 1+ weeks of work! It looks like totally unfinished, but we are really getting there!

There is one extra thing for them to do though. I asked for their help in painting some of the bigger timber-walls. But those should be relatively easy tasks.

Here's a bonus-picture from sunday-morning, taken through the kitchen-window downstairs:

Bathroom!

I mentioned in my previous blog-post that bathroom has been one of the focus-areas recently. And a lot has been accomplished:

(I hate to think how much blood, sweat and tears the tiler had to shed to get those diagonally cut tiles on a wall with an angled ceiling…)

The bathroom is still missing the floor-tiles and the panels on the ceiling, as well as seams. But it's definitely taking shape. For reference, this was our starting-point:

Related to the bathroom, is the room next to it, our utility-room. It currently looks like this:

It too will be receiving tiles in the near future.

Taking shape...

A lot has happened with the project. We have received the panels, and they are quickly being installed:

Yeah, they are looking good! And those panels really underline the height of the rooms! In a perfect world we should have put those panels up a bit later, after we had painted the walls. But we have to install them ASAP, since we do not have much storage-space for them and there's a lot of them.

In the last picture you can see how the horizontal beam looks crooked. That's because it is. We could have tried to hide it somehow, but it would have been extra work. And we decided not to. This is an old building, and we don't have to, nor do we want to, hide that fact.

Other focus-area in recent days has been our balcony. The frame is now finished, but we will probably finish it next spring, in order to save our resources (read: money) for more urgent and important things. Besides, if we did it this year, we would be finishing the balcony in november or so, not exactly the hot balcony season of the year… But it does look quite impressive, and big:

Yeah, those beams are quite massive. But they need to carry the weight of the entire balcony. And they are well anchored on the ground:

There's a third focus area as well, our bathroom. I could post some pictures of it, but they are already obsolete. I will be taking new pictures soon, and make a separate blog-post about it.

What else… The installation of the floor has been started as well, initially using the old 120 year old floorboards:

We will sandpaper and paint them grey, so that is not our finished floor. We have old floorboards for about 40m2, rest will have to be new.

Well, that's it for now :)!

We have rchooms!

No, not "rooms", but something like them:

View froom our kitchen towards our utility-room, WC and bathroom:

View from our "tv-room" towards our second bathroom/WC:

View from our tv-room (from where our couch will be, as a matter of fact) towards our study/guest bedroom:

In one week we got the frames for the walls and electricity-work. This means that we now have outlines of our rooms that we can actually walk in to. We have doorways and we can see what the rooms will actually be like, as opposed to having to imagine that "the wall will be somewhere around here....". The visible changes in the site have been absolutely huge, and in only one week!

So, what's happening now? This week they will be installing plumbing and other pipework, as well as finishing the floors in some areas. We are planning to more or less finish the work in our study (minus paneling, since panels will not arrive in few more weeks). It's the simplest of the rooms, so we can use it to double-check what our color-choices look like. And once it's finished, we can move some our stuff there. After that, 11 m2 finished, 139 m2 to go. Tiny steps people, tiny steps. But after that we should get additional 30+ m2 done relatively quickly. Of course we might still be missing some finishing touches, but we would be getting there.

Since we now know where the walls will be, we got clearer idea about some things: we are re-thinking our kitchen. The original wasn't all that convenient, especially if we have our dining-table in the middle of the room. So we are thinking of moving the dining-table to the next room, and re-arranging the kitchen a bit. Instead of having the kitchen spread on opposite walls, we will be having a kitchen island with oven, stove, tablespace and storage-space. Fridge, dishwasher, washbasin and more cupboards will still be next to the walls, but the overall desigh of the kitchen will be more convenient and natural.

It has been a while since I last blogged, and now it seems that things are happening so fast that I can't keep up. I visited the site few days after those pictures were taken, and in that time they had installed half of the plumbing! Next week they will apparently actually close up the walls, so we will then have actual rooms, with actual walls. How about that?!