Watching grass grow

The last little bits of a remodel are like watching grass grow. The house is getting polished, bit by bit, but the changes are small and not as evident. We have also had some trouble getting the electricians out to finish as they're completely booked solid, so the electrical finish work has been moving more slowly than expected.

Last week, the contractors installed the awning between the two floors. This was an expensive piece of decoration required by the city to break up the 22' vertical wall of windows. It's made of stainless and Trex (reconstituted garbage, just like the deck), and it turned out very nice! It did add something to the look of the building, even if the only people who can see it are in our back yard.

Our server room is now fully outfitted with the patch panel, and all the rooms are hooked up with ethernet, telephone and cable. Some of the rooms also have audio. This has come in real handy, as I was finally able to hook up my printer where I wanted it since we have ethernet everywhere in the house. (Two wireless routers as well.)

The office door got installed too. This is a sliding door on an exposed track, so it slides against the wall rather than into a pocket. It's made out of an acrylic by Knoll, and is essentially a piece of fabric pressed between two pieces of acrylic. It looks very nice.. it's very understated, but its opacity allows you to hide the (anticipated) clutter in the office, while its transparency lets natural light from the office into the hall.

Today on Labor Day, two of the electricians came out and worked all day, and now we finally have the track lighting in the living room and the Artemide Ventana lights in the kitchen. Judging from the grunting and swearing, they were every bit as much of a pain to install as well as they were to order correctly.

I spent a couple of hours assembling the track light fixtures, just to have something to do, and to hopefully save some of their very valuable and hard-to-come-by time. There is one more piece of track they need to install (over the stairs) which is going to take a bit of creative scaffolding and nerve to do.

So now, there are really just a few outside lights to install, and lights to test. They have to finish installing the GrafikEye system (I can never misspell it properly), but they might be finished as early as tomorrow. I suspect there will still be a few little things to do after they leave tomorrow.

Tomorrow the city planner comes and I'm hoping to convince him not to have us plant the additional tree we're required to plant before we get the final signoff.

The only things left to be done before we can final the project besides finishing the electrical are: installing the ever-so-important stair and deck railing and installing the air conditioning compressor. We have a small bit of custom cabinetry to be installed in the kitchen and then undercabinet lights to be installed, but that shouldn't hold up the final signoff (I hope).