Shower Sadness

There has been some confusion and concern over the shower in the master bedroom for the past few weeks.

Namely, it's tiny.

When we were choosing a floorplan, we walked through every model home that Estridge has in the area, including some that weren't actually models, but someone's home. There were parts of many of them that we loved, but none of them were exactly what we wanted. We met with Mr. Estridge himself one afternoon and discussed what we had in mind. A few days later, his architects had completely redesigned the plan, especially on the second floor. This included a complete overhaul of the master bathroom to include the extended tub that we wanted, an enlarged closet, and less unfinished storage space. We loved it. It was exactly what we'd been picturing, and included a window seat and multiple showerheads. I was sold.

What we failed to notice, however, was that the bathroom resdesign meant a much smaller shower stall. It makes sense. We probably lost 18 inches by upgrading the tub, and those inches have to come from somewhere (the tub was on the opposite wall, under the window, in the original design). To compound our ignorance, our purchase agreement that lists all of our finishes - everything from carpet selections to what faucets we chose - lists a shower base measuring 34" by 48". Plenty big, and similar to what is in Don's house now.

As we watched the framing happen, we did question whether or not that area was big enough for that size pan. We were gently reminded that "everything looks smaller during the framing process." We accepted that and let it go. After all, our purchase agreement clearly showed the dimensions.

Fast forward to a few days ago. Through a series of emails, it was determined that our signed purchase agreement was wrong. That shower base would not possibly fit in the space. We considered not using a fiberglass base at all, and tiling the entire thing so we could extend it out further into the room. We learned that would add more than $3300 to the cost of the home. We passed (though we may do that on our own sometime later).

We're disappointed that our upgraded master bath won't be what we'd envisioned. We're disappointed that we didn't realize earlier that our signed purchase agreement was incorrect. And we're disappointed that no one at Estridge noticed the error sooner, or alerted us to it once they discovered it. It took us digging and pushing the issue, only to learn that we really had no reasonable options at this point.

So, this will be our shower.

It's itty-bitty, but at least we'll have a bench!

Laundry - with reader participation!

Don and I have very different laundry habits. He'll do a load every other day, if not every day. I can go weeks before I'll run out of clean clothes to wear. Then I'll spend an entire day doing load after load to get caught up.

Don also prefers to use his laundry room as a closet and dressing room to avoid those exhausting trips up and down the stairs.

So, it should be no surprise that we have differing opinions on the laundry situation at the new house.

The floor plan calls for a lovely laundry room on the main floor, right off the of the mudroom. It will have lovely shelving, a separate lovely wash tub, and eventually a lovely counter and maybe some lovely cabinets.

See? Lovely.

However, Don is convinced that we'll ultimately wish we'd put the laundry room on the second floor near all of the bedrooms. I've taken several informal polls of friends and family, and the results are pretty mixed. So, we compromised. This house will have TWO laundry rooms. One for each of us, I suppose!

Fortunately, there was a perfect spot for a second level laundry room that didn't require changing any layouts or making any rooms smaller. It just meant adding some extra plumbing and electrical work. I'm sure it's far more complicated than that for the people installing it, but it seems pretty minor to me.

The dryer vent in that photo is in the wrong place, but it's been fixed since the photo was taken.

I've persuaded Don to put our washer and dryer in the main-floor laundry room to start. If we hate it, I'll agree to move it upstairs. In the meantime, the rough-in for the upstairs will be entirely concealed and we'll use that space for storage.

So, here's the question. Which laundry room would you use? I've created a little poll over to the right of the page. Voting is anonymous, so we won't know who chose which side!

At Least We'll Be Clean

Over the past few days, we've seen the plumbing pipes and tubes go in. It's nice to see something other than two-by-four after two-by-four. Now we have red and blue tubes to break things up a little bit.

You can click on the pictures to see them bigger. It's kind of cool to see all the inner-workings going up, knowing that it's all going to be covered up very soon.

Then they started installing the bathtubs. I had no real reason for it, but somehow I figured these tub and shower stalls would come in much, much later in the process. Nevertheless, they're in.

That is one of the upstairs guest bathrooms, and I got the shower curtain for it for Christmas. It's already packed away, but I've considered going over and hanging it up. You know, just to liven things up over there.

That is the tub in the master bathroom. We splurged on an extra-long tub (we're tall!), but it's difficult to tell from this picture with no real frame of reference. The shower stall will be to the left of that - more on that in a separate post coming soon - and the toilet is in a little room off to the right of the tub.

It's not the greatest picture (all of these pictures were taken on Don's iPhone, actually), but that's the shower stall in the basement bathroom. I love the little seats.

Up next - laundry!

Details

Since we started this process almost 11 months ago, we'd forgotten about a few features that the house will have. It's been fun to see these things being added.

For example, it was nice little surprise to walk in and see these arches in place this week. It shouldn't have been a surprise, of course. We chose them! We just didn't remember. Now we're excited to see what other little details come up that have been lost in our mental folder labeled "house stuff".

A Productive Week

Estridge really came through this week and did a great job making up for the framing error. We ended up not losing much time at all, and things are pretty well back to normal at this point. We even have windows!

That picture is from Monday, Day 64. Everything had been pretty well re-assembled by then, but the house still felt like a mess and we had a hard time being excited about the windows when everything seemed so haphazard.

Things started looking up by Tuesday, especially on the exterior. Look! No snow!

The color of the second story siding (it's not really siding - I'm not sure what it's called, actually) will be similar to how it looks in that photo, but it's still unfinished at this point. That will all be painted sometime later. Everything that's pink will eventually be brick. Though the pink is kind of growing on me. I think I'll miss it when it's covered up!

On Wednesday, Day 66, the front awning was put back in place and more windows were installed. We even have a front door now!

No back door just yet, though I don't know why. I'm sure there's a reason.

See that big square window on the top level? There's a window seat there that I'm already loving. I think that may become one of my favorite spots in the house.

The Walls Came Tumbling Down

I think we underestimated how stressful it would be to see our house be taken apart. We weren't sure how they'd go about it, since the top floor was done correctly and it seemed like a pretty big waste of time and resources to scrap the whole thing. Last weekend, we were out at the site walking through the house, and a rented crane was delivered while we were there. We talked to the crane owner about what he thought might happen (though, to be clear, Estridge only rented the crane from him - he wasn't going to be doing any of the actual work), which was reassuring.

By Tuesday (Day 58), our house had gone from this:

To this:

It was hard to not be a little bit heartbroken. What the ultimately did was remove the roof panels and trim that had been done, then used a crane to remove the trusses, like this:

Then they used two lift cranes in the front and back, along with about 20 mechanical jacks, to brace the top story of the house. Then the vertical two-by-fours were taken down, resulting in a gigantic mess of lumber.

Once those boards were taken down, the second story of our house was gradually lifted, inch by inch, until it was about a foot higher than it originally was. Support beams were put in place, and then they could begin replacing the two-by-fours with new all new lumber.

As you can probably imagine, this process took most of this week and it's been pretty gut-wrenching. We know it's being done correctly and we're grateful that the building team has worked so quickly and efficiently. Still, we're hopeful that this misstep will be as rough as it gets, and it will be smooth sailing from here on out!

2 Steps Forward, 410 Steps Back

On Day 51, earlier this week, the house looked like this:

Despite more bad weather and very cold temperatures, the roof panels were placed and some trim work was done. And then we learned that it's all coming down. There was mistake in the first-floor framing. Estridge caught the error, not us, and we're glad that they did because I'm not sure we would have caught it until much, much later in the process when it could very well have been too late to correct.

While disappointed that we'll be delayed by a few weeks, I think Don and I are both handling the situation better than I would have guessed a few months ago. We're absolutely excited to be able to move in and really make this house ours, but we also recognize that we've put in months and months of planning (and saving!) to make this house exactly how we want it and we want it done correctly. Estridge does, too. In the grand scheme of things, a few extra weeks is a small price to pay. We're grateful that Estridge is shouldering the expense of taking our house apart, bringing in more lumber, and putting it back together again.

I can only imagine what the neighbors will think when they notice the house coming down over the next few days!