The electrician wasn't able to finish everything over the weekend. I had to call the building dept. first thing Monday morning and ask them to cancel the electrical inspection. Unfortunately, the building dept. said they would also have to cancel framing, plumbing and mechanical as well. Apparently, they like to do one big rough-in inspection for all trades. On the other hand, they said they could still inspect gas rough-in. Now I'm really confused. Are all cities like this?
So here I was hoping to get the whole rough-in inspection and I ended up with just gas rough-in and exterior lath. We didn't even pass the gas rough-in because the gas pipe going into the house has to be X inches to the right of the city riser. The plumber will have to come back and run a short length of pipe on the outside so it's in the right position.
We decided to demo the stucco around the garage door. (More demoing!! When will it ever end?). Why? Because I realized the old stucco mold wasn't going to match the rest of the new 2x4 trim. It's a minor detail, but one of those things I was afraid I would be kicking myself later for not doing now, especially since it's all visible from the street. In fact, there are a couple of other places in the back of the house where we kept the old trim. It's not visible from the street so we just left it. I'll admit it. We're not purists.
On Friday, the additional siding + the primed 2x4 trim got delivered. That meant Steve could get to work on trimming the front door and garage door. Plus, the lumberyard FINALLY picked up and took back the extra framing beams we didn't end up using. I don't know why it took them over a month to coordinate that; I was starting to think they weren't going to take the stuff back.
Today, Sunday, I went over to HD and FINALLY picked up my special order tile. They've been holding it for us since Oct. 1st. I don't know why it took me so long to do that - oh wait a minute, yes I do. We're not ready for tiling so where am I going to store 4 short pallets of tile???? Unfortunately, I had no choice as this was the 3rd time they called to ask - actually the 3rd time they demanded- we come and get it. I was a bit concerned about loading it all into our minivan, not so much volume-wise, but weight-wise, and actually thought we might have to make more than one run. In the end though, we managed to get the whole order into the van with a manageable amount of sagging on the back end. I just drove in the slow lane and avoided bumps. But here's the most amazing part of the story........HD actually got the tile order right! I counted all the boxes and they were all there. Although, I haven't actually opened some of the trim boxes to see if they really gave me 55 pieces of round black liner, etc. Hmmmm......
More discouraging news on the inspection front. I talked to Clint, the electrician, hoping that maybe next week we would be ready for the big inspection. Nope, wasn't going to happen. Still had another weekend's worth of work. I'm wondering now if we'll even get inspected before Xmas. Oh well, what can you do? As I've said, fortunately for us, time is not really costing us additional money, since we're living rent free with the parents. But it would be nice to be back in our house, so the kids don't have the long commute to school.
Tristan made a big run to the dump this weekend. Our neighbor, Bob, jokes that we're the only people to have ever done this big a remodel without a dumpster. Well, we couldn't do it without Bob! He let's us borrow his pickup truck for these dump runs!
