Just pictures today.

Here's the kitchen island, with granite and stove-top.

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In reality, there's a very slight and very light green cast to the granite. Camera didn't quite pick it up.

Here was the staircase in July, delivered in one piece, sitting in the garage.

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And here it is today, awaiting its final finishing.

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And here is the living room wall, almost completed - need some face plates on those holes. One of them is a conduit down to a hole in the bookcase on the right. TV cables will snake through there.

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Shit's lookin pretty opulent.

Welcome, readers, to this week's tale of mystery!

In June, we picked out our appliances. In July, we struggled to get the woman at the appliance store to tell the cabinet makers how big the appliances are, so they could build the cabinets the right size. We eventually succeeded, and having completed that task, thoughts of appliances quietly slipped from our minds.

Two months pass...

Last week, the appliances appeared in our garage, bundled in their boxes, safe and snug. Today, the builder's foreman called Mrs. and says the appliances do not fit into the cabinetry. The microwave doesn't fit the cabinet, and neither does the refrigerator. The stovetop does, however, fit the hole that was cut in the granite. That's good. But, he's going to have to get the cabinet people to remake the cabinetry.

Now wait just a minute!

What brand are the appliances he's trying to install?

It's all a different brand from what we ordered - except for the stovetop, which they luckily got right.

How can that be? How did the appliance people deliver a different brand to our house? And which measurements did the cabinet people get, if they weren't for the appliances that were actually delivered? And why won't the appliance people answer anyone's calls?

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And what lives behind that little door?!

Stay tuned! Maybe we'll know the answers to these questions, and more, when it's time for next week's Mysterious Fuck Up Of The Week!

Do you have the time to listen to me whine? *

Today's house fuck-up relates to the counter-tops in the upstairs bathrooms. When we ordered the cabinets, back in May, we told the cabinet makers that the upstairs bathrooms were going to get swirly white/off-white polymer / artificial stone / Corian / whatever counter-tops. It's the stuff you see everywhere. It's standard bathroom counter-top. We picked it out, at the cabinet showroom, the same day we picked out everything else - we did it right after choosing the surface for the laundry room counter, and right before picking out the door pulls. I saw the guy write it down on our work order.

Today, we learned that the cabinet people never made the counter tops. W-w-why? Because our builder, without our knowledge, told the cabinet people that we were getting granite tops for the upstairs bathrooms. He didn't go so far as to ask the granite people if this was true or not, of course. And I don't think we even had granite picked out at that point; so he even if he thought we wanted to put granite upstairs, which we never wanted to do, I don't know why he wouldn't assume it was a tentative decision, based on price. Plus, you know, we had, or so we thought, already ordered the (non-granite) counter-tops.

But, the builder just went ahead and cancelled that part of our order. He just pulled a decision out of thin air. And when the granite order went through, he could have seen that we didn't order granite for the upstairs counter-tops. But because he either didn't look or didn't think about it, he did un-cancel the original counter-tops.

This is a small problem. And it will probably be easy to fix. These aren't huge complex pieces of [whatever that counter stuff is]. A few days delay, at most. But, fer fuck's sake, why does it feel like we're constantly cleaning up these screw ups?

This is our first attempt at building a custom house, so I don't know how other builders handle things. But there have been so many situations just like this - where the builder, or a vendor, makes a decision without asking us first, or without asking any the relevant sub-contractors - that it's obvious that this builder is in dire need of a customer-facing project manager. He needs someone who knows his process and who knows what we want, what we've decided, what we need to decide on, and who can act as our day-to-day representative in his process. Totally clear the ground in front of the house? Choose their front door? Change the staircase? Change the shape of the island? Pick different tile? Choose your fireplace surround? Make all the ceilings a foot taller? Why not! It's long since stopped being a joke for Mrs to say she's been to the house today, and for me to ask "What did they fuck up now?" And it's actually a pleasant surprise when she says "Nothing."

It's a good thing Mrs is self-employed right now. If she couldn't go out there three or four times a week, the number of fuck-ups would be in the triple digits.

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On the bright side: there's our bathroom tub. Though it's hard to tell in this pic, the tiles are actually a dark chocolate brown - and very dusty. Mrs is almost totally in charge of decorating, so it's always a surprise to see things come together. And she's pretty good at it, so it's usually a nice surprise.

We lowered our asking price for our current house today. After two months, it felt like it was time.

One weird thing about tubs: they get installed very early in the process, just after framing, before the drywall, before plumbing, before wiring, etc.. And they sit there uncovered, collecting sawdust, drywall dust, dead bugs, mud, plastic and wood scraps, etc. for months and months. They look kindof gross.

* - Yeah, I suppose it's pretty obnoxious for me to spend so much energy whining about tile and counter-tops and paint colors. I am very aware that these are problems that we're lucky to have. So, I write this stuff definitely not to brag, but because as we've gone through this, I've often wished we had a better idea of what we were getting into, when we started. The process drives us crazy, but I doubt the kind of problems we're running into are unusual. And so, maybe this can be helpful to someone else.

Cabinets are in!

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That's going to be the world's biggest kitchen island^*. Something like nine feet long, IIRC. It's supposed to get a single piece of granite, basically 9' x 4', but with a slight curve sticking out on the side facing us and a cut-out in the middle for the stove-top.

We happened to be there at the time the granite people showed up with the finished countertops. We peeked in the truck and noticed that there were no pieces with curves. About this, we inquired. "We were told to cut it straight", was the reply. By whom, we inquired. "By <the builder's foreman>", was the reply. The order form for the granite mentioned the curve. The house plans show the curve. But, the builder's foreman decided we wanted no curve. And so... we get no curve.

We were also there while they were drilling the well. Loud! big drilling trucks rumbling away.

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That's a bunch of crushed stone and cement, sprayed around the trees and ground, after they left. I guess they line the well hole with cement and tubing. I wonder how that gets cleaned up.

The builder also cleared out all the shrubs and brush that was growing between the big trees in the front of our lot. Now it's going to get seeded for grass. Which means I have a giant lawn to mow. We didn't ask for that.

On the positive side, we had three house showings this weekend, after three weeks without any. No buyers, but interest is better than no interest. Plus our neighbor's house finally sold: after 14 months on the market, a $20K price reduction, and $8K in kitchen upgrades last month. Whew. Nice to have that off the market, it was making our house look expensive!

* - This claim is unverified.

Cabinets have been installed! Only one minor issue with one cabinet that sits next to a door frame - cabinet door won't fully open. So, they're going to install a cabinet with a slightly different door position to get around the door. Excellent! They look good, too. Whew.

I had noticed, back in June that the house as they were building it seemed much taller than the house in the architect's drawing. Part of it is the drawing itself: it's a sketch, not a 3D rendering of the plans, so maybe they took some license with the proportions. Then, there's the extra foot the builder added to the ceilings - the first of many changes he made without asking. But the real difference is the foundation. The first floor of the house in the architect's drawing is basically level to the ground - with a basement, presumably. Our house, because we're in the south, is built on a crawlspace foundation. The first floor is two to four feet off the ground (varying with the slope of the ground).

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This is what it looked like in May.

So, add all that up and the roof peaks on our house are five or six feet higher than the sketch would have you believe. It's nearly a squat cottage in the sketch. It's a big, tall house, in real life.

This also means that the front and back porches are three or four feet (or more) off the ground - as opposed to level with the ground, as in the sketch. The front porch is on the top-left of that picture; so it starts six cinder blocks (4') up.

So, the builder's agent calls Mrs. yesterday and tells her that, because the front porch is so high off the ground, building codes require us to install a railing of some kind around it. And, that cost ($700) will come out of our pocket.

The builder, who put this foundation in in May, built the house so fucking far off the ground that he exceeded the building code for porch height. And he didn't know this until this week. And we have to pay to remedy this.

We can, instead, have him raise the ground level around the house, which would effectively reduce the height of the porch. This will mean burying at least one of the (very nice) stone steps they built for the front. I don't know how much he wants to charge for that.

It's a fucking clown show.

Rumor has it that our kitchen and bathroom cabinets are being installed this week. I can't wait to see how they screw this up. Maybe they'll be the wrong color, or they'll have done the design with the house plan flipped, or they'll arrive on-site all smashed into little tiny bits. Anticipation is keeping me waiting ! (Carly Simon, that makes no sense)

Tile guy says it was his fault the wrong tile got installed. He ordered the wrong tile. And he will fix it. Sweet.

We're pretty much ready for this thing to be done. We've started packing small stuff. We want to move.

But, it's been two weeks without a showing on our current house. Might be time to start dropping the price?

I also learned that a house on the next block has been for sale for 700+ days.

I hope we're not about to learn a lesson about impulsiveness v. prudent financial planning.

Mrs. just discovered that the people who installed the tile in our master bedroom installed ... the wrong tile. They loaded their truck with the wrong stuff, drove it to our house, and installed it.

So they started the interior painting. We chose three colors: a thrilling beige that they'd do (nearly) the whole house with, one color for our bed room, and one other color for the dining room. Each time they switch colors, it costs us $200, yay. When Mrs. stopped by to see how they were doing, she noticed that they were painting the dining room with the color we wanted for the bed room. Arg.

Also, last week it suddenly became urgent that we pick out all of our lighting fixtures. So, Mrs. hopped over to the lighting store, and spent three hours looking through catalogs with the salesguy. There aren't any prices in the catalogs, so the salesguy had to enter the product code for each fixture into his computer, for every fixture Mrs. was considering. Glad I missed that... Our lighting allowance is, or course, a bit of a joke and Mrs. nearly doubled it with her choices. So, we knocked a few things back, and shaved as much off as we could. We're still over, but there's not much we can do. The simple titty-shaped ceiling lights are dirt cheap; florescent lights are cheap; ceiling fans are expensive; bathroom lights are expensive; pendants are super-expensive.

We chose our garage door! Well, not so much chose it as said "OK", when the builder said "this is your garage door."

Back in June, there was huge pressure for us to pick out our cabinets, right away! And so we rushed. Last week, the builder's foreman casually mentioned to Mrs. that it was about time for him to order them. Ummm... ? Nothing makes any sense.

There's almost nothing left for us to choose, now: tiny things like bathroom towel fixtures and maybe the placement of the shrubs. Now we just wait for it all to come together.

Our future neighbors to the right are starting to build. They've cut down nearly all the trees on their lot. That could mean they'll have a huge lawn. Which means a lot of lawn mowing. That would suck. Maybe it's just a huge house. That would be fine.

Showings for our existing house have dropped off. We had one last week, none this past weekend. School started again, so that could have something to do with it. Not worried yet! Well, maybe a little.

They've finished the exterior painting. The wood floor is all in place, though it won't be sanded and poly'd for a while. The front steps are done. No cabinets yet.

Bedroom

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Today, they start the interior paint. We learned about this Thursday. So, we had to scramble to come up with paint colors, over the weekend.

The back and front porch ceilings were done with beadboard and some nice trim details, and we were hoping to do a natural poly finish on them - something like this. But, we discovered that the painters have now covered them with a thick layer of goopy white paint. Nobody asked us what we wanted, of course, and we didn't feel like we had to specify that they leave the ceilings alone, since they already looked awesome - why would we think they'd cover up all that nice wood?

They also installed a fireplace mantle/surround of their own design without asking us what we wanted. They just went ahead and did it.

The guy just wants to build his standard house exactly the way he builds all the rest. Lesson learned. Next time we build a house, we're going to specify every fucking thing; not a nail will be set without our approval.

Last weekend, a tree fell over, missing our house-in-progress by a few feet. Let's just hope it is the last tree to ever do that within 50 feet of our roof.

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Granite! Mrs. was able to find a stone we liked, and which fit our budget. Well, it almost fit. It ended up being $13 over, but they waived the excess to keep the billing simpler. Success!

Tile! After much round-and-round with the tile guy (who has some family medical issues complicating his days) Mrs picked out tiles for our bathroom. And she managed to keep that within the budget, too. Success!

We've had a lot of showings for the current house, but no offers yet. Our neighbors across the street, who've been trying to sell for almost a year, just installed new granite countertops and tile floors backsplash in their kitchen. Competition!