This weekend our daughter Beatrice 6,5 years had a performance with her dance group. She's the kitty with the white scarf in the back to the right!

Today I visited our house and got a nice picture of our "window balcony".

I also had the curage to go upstairs and look at the view. I realised that when we open this window our cats will be able to enter the roof effortlessly, and as we had a small escapee the other day, through an upstairs window, this is going to worry me alot .

A next door neighbour came back with our cat and asked if we were missing something...

We are sooooo grateful that they found her, we didn't even have a clue that she had run away!

Dan the builder is busy doing the finishing touches so the painters will be able to start their work next week.

I told the painters today what colours we wanted, mostly orange and bright purple.

Just kidding!

We are going egg shell white on most walls for a start and then we will brighten it up with curtains and pillows and perhaps a quilt where it will look good.

I wandered around downstairs a bit as well and it really feels good, it feels that we will enjoy living in this house!

A lot of planning hopefully ends up in a nice house.

Can't wait until it is time to move in!

Wiring up the house

The last two weeks the electrician has been busy wiring up the house. So there’s now a lot of conduit (soft plastic tubes) being run, crisscrossing the entire house. It looks more chaotic than ever.

One side of each wall has already been drywalled, but the other is open for easy access, including most of the ceilings. When everything has been wired up correctly, everything will then be drywalled (expected this week or the next).

Of course, most of the wiring it has to end up somewhere near the wiring cabinet, which looks awfully messy right now. But I’ve seen (in another house) how neat and tidy the cabinet looks like when done, so I’m not worried.

In some central locations we need a lot of light-switches. These four is for controlling the kitchen and hallway. And there’s three more boxes on the other side of the entrance to the kitchen.

Here we can see that we are going to have outlets installed near the outer beams in the living room. The roof-frames prevents us from placing them dead center above each beam. We are planning to have dimmable spotlights shining upwards on the ceiling high above the living room, creating a sky-effect of sorts. Or so I hope.

The hole near the middle beam is for the exterior lights, I think, and will probably be more or less invisible from the inside.

The next picture shows the second floor ceiling being wired. Some of the conduit is for the upstairs TV-outlet; there is a "TV-network” being run from each TV-location terminating in the attic, so we have the possibility of distributing a satellite TV-signal from the attic, for example.

One can see see some of the cabling going up to the attic through the insulation (near the guy’s elbow).

This also includes a parallel run of empty conduit. Bert from Sesame Street would ask us why on earth anyone would want empty conduit, and Ernie might say it would be great for when it starts to rain candy instead of water... or was that an empty box?

In reality it’s for the possibility of installing, say, a small data network, if we feel the need later.

However, we expect to mainly use a wireless network. We use one at home today, which works great. It would’ve been quite expensive to fully network the house, and since we could get really fancy with wireless equipment without coming close to that sum, we cut that out (leaving only the empty conduit as a backup).

All rooms have walls

For the first time in weeks we visited the house yesterday afternoon, and took some pictures.

We have been busy with the children being ill and home from school, and at the same time deciding a million details for the house, such as electricity (number and placement of outlets, switches, dimmers, spotlights, indoor and outdoor lamps etc.), plumbing (placement of the upstairs radiators, type of faucets etc.), tiling for bathrooms and kitchen, finalizing the layout and design of the kitchen (number and placement of drawers and cabinets) and so on…

All rooms now have their walls. They are still open to one side, so the electrician can do his job next week, putting wires in the walls.

The most fun was seeing the rooms on the second floor. One can now walk around safely upstairs, because there is now a floor. Still no stairway though. It will be one of the last things installed, because it will stand on the parquet flooring, which is not to be installed for months.

This is the upstairs bathroom (to the left) and one of the bedrooms.

Here a few pictures turning left in the upstairs hall.

We decided on much larger windows facing south, and they really do let in a lot of light!

The only one who didn’t like these windows was Dan the Builder, but that was just because the window balcony were complicated to install, with lots of parts.

As a comparison, here are the normally sized windows on the opposite wall.

Here is a better view of the two side-by-side bedrooms.

This is how one of the three upstairs bedrooms look, they are all the same.

The Late Mr. Beam

Those of you who read this post know that there was a small problem with an unfortunate placement of a beam that obstructed the view out of the upper living room windows.

This situation has now been resolved, as you can see!

I’m not entirely sure what the did beside simply removing it, but we’re really happy they did. From the outside, sitting on top of my shoulders, this is what the upper windows now look.

And this is the one taking the picture above ;-)

Painting is virtually done

As you can see, not much remains to be done to the outside – the drain pipes, some exterior lights and the tile edges in the concave corner of the roof, and – of course - some paint.

Below I’ve played around in some painting software trying to show you the color we are planning to give our house, a very faint yellowish tint. I’m sure Angelica would have explained that better, I’m hopeless naming colors.

Let just hope it will be less spotted after the actual painting. :-)

No more scaffolding

Now all scaffolding have been removed, and as a result the house looks much more finished from the outside.

And this is from the small (dead end) street outside, across the rubble still left from the garage and the remaining tree trunks.

Have we mentioned that the buyers have now taken the remaining useful pieces of the garage, such as the door? There’s still a pile of old insulation though, that we’ll have to take to the dump some day.