Renovation, week kajillion: colors, trim, and hardware

We’ve gotten to a point in the job we’re all the fussy stuff has to get tackled, and where it takes a lot of work to see a little progress. We’re also starting to see little fit-and-finish issues, consequences of bad planning, etc. Nothing too serious.

One mistake I made in our electrical plan was that the ceiling fans all have light-kits, but I didn’t reflect separate wiring for both fan and light in the plans. I just figured that out last night, and correcting that problem will be a little sticky. We’ll have to compromise in a couple spots. I can live with that. As much work as I put into trying to figure that out, I could have put in more.

Karl noticed that, now that the cabinets are installed in the bedroom, the ceiling fan looks poorly positioned. I didn’t think it was a problem, but he said “we’ve feng-shui’d the heck out of this room, and it would be a shame for it to be out of place.” Another problem with this room—one which we could only detect under the harsh glare of flashlights at night—is that there had been some sketchy taping and floating at some point in the past (I think), and so the new paint was forming bubbles over those spots. We’d caught a couple spots previously, but found more last night.

The brown color we had chosen for the bedroom just didn’t quite look like we expected. Karl pointed out that the color chip we had used is flat, but the paint we had selected is eggshell, which has a little sheen to it; he said the sheen changes the way you perceive the color. He went and recovered the room with flatter paint (and perhaps a tiny bit blacker) and it looks very close to what we were expecting. The paint in the other rooms looks great, though. Karl repainted the oven hood, and annoyingly, hairs got caught in the wet paint as it dried.

One of the two sets of double-doors for the office closets are up, and they don’t quite line up with each other. Not hard to fix, Karl tells me.

I’m thinking/hoping that by catching all these little things as we go along, our punchlist at the end will be very short.

Although the process has been moving along quickly, we’re getting impatient to move in, mostly because we’re fed up with the place we’re in now. It’s not a bad place (hey, we’re trying to get it rented out), but the new place will be a lot better.