Product Placement

Sorry for the lapse in postings. I went back to work this week (for those that don't already know) as an Academic Advisor at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame! Our whole life will be contained in an area about a mile square now that Brian and I both work at ND and Conor's school is just across the street. If you're going to live the dream, you've got to go all in!! I think it's going to be a great job and it feels good to have something to obsess about besides the house for a change.

But work continues at 918. Despite some inclement weather, Mike got the patio poured, stained and stamped this week. Since the house has such square lines, we purposely put some curves in the patio for a little variation. Not sure how much planting we'll get down this fall (ok, probably none) but we envision this as a lawn-mower-free zone ultimately!

We also got our final stairs and some beautiful oak banisters going up and down! The half walls will also have oak tops to match the wood floors on the main level, but you still need a banister to meet the ubiquitous and all-important 'code'. One thing I didn't know when we started this is that they put in "construction steps" and only put in the real deal as part of the finish work. Even if you're carpeting, as we are. We put the stairs in the back so we didn't have to spend so much money to make them centerpiece worthy!!

Three out of five areas finally have tile, but that has been the biggest challenge of this project. Poor Rob! He's carted more 'wrong' tile around than you would think possible. After scrapping Plan A due to cost, Plan B for the master bath came in wrong TWICE. The wall tiles were fine but two different lots of the floor tile came in with a greenish haze that just didn't fit with our planned decor!! Gotta love the Chinese quality control standards! So we're onto Plan C for the master bath, which is a combination of some tile from Plan A in a lighter color, the layout from Plan B and some new deco tiles and ceiling tiles. I did tell Rob that at this point I almost don't care what he puts in -- no matter what, it is going to be new and clean and he does beautiful work so slap something up already!

To the right is the basement bath/hall - almost complete. The diamond pattern was originally planned with 6x6 tiles, but those ended up only coming as wall tiles which are too thin to put on the floor and trying the mix and match routine just made my head hurt. We kept the same plan for a rug-look in the hallway and just used the 12x12s. I think once it's grouted and cleaned up, it will be just the thing! In the laundry/mud room we finally got the right color tile but a couple of the boxes of the 18x18 were more than a shade off so some new stuff were supposed to be delivered today. I'll check it out tomorrow when we take the football fans down to check out the progress. Hopefully the tile odyssey will come to an end within a week or so.

All the cabinets were delivered on Wednesday and Alan has started installing the kitchen. So far - so good. It's a bit of deja vu as the kitchen will look remarkably like our Vienna kitchen when it's all put together! Why mess with perfection? I haven't picked backsplash tile yet, but that can wait until the granite goes in!

We're less than 6 weeks to MI day so keep your fingers crossed. I'll try to update at least once a week. Next week we hope to finalize the main floor furniture and paint colors. Stay tuned for more of the Perils of Pauline!