Timbers & Tile!

IHola! We took a little Christmas vacation from the blog... And we also didn't have a lot of action going on at the house to really blog about. Until this week that is!

All of our rough-ins for electrical, plumbing and HVAC are done. Woohoo!

It's hard to really see what's going on when it's pictures of a bunch of studs (but Jake wasn't in any of those pics? Kidding, kidding!)

One thing you can definitely see as soon as you pull up to the house is the timber frame front porch!

I'm in love!! They will be working on the back timbers this week... I can't even tell you how excited I am to see them up. 

We also picked all of our tile for the floors and tub and shower surrounds over the holidays. I'll try my best to explain what we're doing. 

The main bath is going to have 7" hexagon tiles in white. 

We love the retro look of hexagon floors, but thought the giant version might be kind of cool. 

The tub in this bathroom is going to have white 4"x16" subway style tiles laid in a brick pattern. 

We wanted to do a border, but nothing flashy because we (ok I) have some big plans for this little space. So we decided to sandwich one row of tiles with white 1" square tiles... Confused yet? 

We made a big decision for the flooring in the ensuite bathroom this week... We are going to continue the hardwood flooring from the bedroom right into the bathroom. Hardwood in the bathroom? Yes, you read that right. We researched it, and we're willing to give it a shot. We've promised each other that we're going to be diligent at wiping up water and running the fan. 

So that just leaves the tile in our shower. Again we decided on the same white 4"x16" brick pattern. But this time we're going to do 1 row (about 6' or 7' off the ground) in gray, and we're going to sandwich the gray tiles with black 1" tiles. 

Here's a rough (really rough!) idea of what I'm talking about.

I think it will be a nice touch and hopefully simple enough that we won't get sick of it too quickly! I'm not sure if you remember that there's a 16"x16" alcove in the shower wall for shampoo and stuff? We're going to use the white 1" tiles in there as well. 

I'm hoping we made good, smart decisions. It was a bit of a challenge concentrating and imagining how everything would look with 2 crazy kids running around. I have learned not to give my  kids hot chocolate and expect them to sit calmly while I picked "boring old tile".

There's not a whole lot going on at the house this week. Once our back porch timbers are up we'll be having our framing inspection (again) and hopefully pass so we can start insulation and drywall. Siding, soffits and fascia will start going up on January 5th. 

Thanks for checking back in... We'll have an update on our hardwood flooring this week! 

A Day of Disappointment

Tuesday was supposed to be a really fun day in the house building world. Our plumber had set up an appointment for us to pick out all of our fixtures from a business in South London. The appointment was set up the week before so I (im)patiently waited for the long weekend to be over so we could finally go. I couldn't wait!  

All weekend I had pictured a GIANT showroom with every possible faucet, tub, sink and toilet you could imagine!

My expectations were a little high, as they usually are. So I did anticipate a bit of disappointment... 

We walked in to the showroom and were promptly ignored by 2 sales people. I must have been wearing my invisible coat again. After a few minutes of touching everything in sight we managed to get the attention of one of them. 

Now on to our appointment...

1) there wasn't a ton of selection. I wanted bathroom faucets that were a little retro looking. Nothing country, nothing super contemporary, just something classic and timeless like these: 

They didn't have that style in an affordable option... They only carry "premium products". And that brings us to # 2) Not so friendly staff who made assumptions about our budget (albeit she was right). But how did she know that I wasnt extremely passionate about top of the line toilets and willing to splurge?! 

Multiple times we were told that we "didn't want that" when we actually did... 

Square kitchen sink, "you don't want that. You won't be able to clean the corners." 

"That's really expensive. Like 3 times more than the ones you were looking at."

Our choice of freestanding tub, "don't buy your tub from there. They're not CSA approved and you'll fail your inspections."

She ended up being right about the tub, but her choice of words were quite poor and I wouldn't be grumpy and writing about my crappy day if she had just been a little nicer and a little less 'better' than us.

I know our floor plan didn't load clearly for some people earlier. If you were one of those people then I'm going to assume that you didn't get a good look at our ensuite floor plan. 

See that tub? We found the perfect tub and faucet combination for around $1000 somewhere else. We actually designed the bathroom around that tub. You know, the not-CSA-approved-fail-your-inspections tub. Crap. 

Since Jake nor I are really big bath people, we couldn't justify spending the extra $3-4,000 to get a different CSA approved tub that we liked. We'd rather spend that money elsewhere. So we made our first major change today. We said good-bye to the freestanding tub, shrunk the window width by 1/2, moved the toilet in front of the window and made our 1 big vanity into 2 separate his & hers vanities. 

Professional sketch artist for hire.

We're actually both pretty pumped about having our own vanities. No more looking at someone else's old toothpaste crusted to the side of the sink! Yay! Maybe not such a bad day after all.

Except that it doesn't end there. We decided to cheer ourselves up after the horrible service at our 1st appointment by going counter top shopping...

I love the look of Carrara Marble... Don't worry, we weren't crazy enough to price marble. But they do make some pretty good Carrara Marble look-a-likes in quartz!  

This is LG Viatera in Minuet. My top pick. 

It's beautiful. But it's also $6,000 just for the kitchen perimeter. 

Regrettably, we have decided to pass on quartz  for now and go with a laminate top with a Marbella edge. 

Laminate: Wilsonart Carrara Marble

(I have this in my kitchen now and I still love it)

Marbella squared edge profile

As much as we'd love quartz counter tops, we are trying to stay on budget. We have made some splurges on bigger things that can't easily be upgraded later like the stone exterior all the way around and using open web floor trusses as opposed to I-joists. More on those later. 

One exciting thing that happened was picking up our 'saddles' for the posts/beams for our porch and deck. These will be mounted to sonotubes filled with cement and then beams will be attached to them. 

9 heavy duty beam saddles taking up real estate in our garage. Along with some mudroom tile. 

I have no idea why these things made me so happy, but they did!  I think it could have to do with my obsession with timbers. The timbers we're using are true 8x8s so we needed to have the saddles made custom. 

I cannot wait to get to the framing stage to be able to walk through and see what this place will look like 3D!