Week 30: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Elisa
Dec 19, 2024
4 min read

Updated: May 12

Hi Friend,

A couple of days ago, my 4-year-old asked, "Mama, do you do your bwog posts anymore?" I guess it's been that long! Six weeks, in fact.

For weeks now, we've been chipping away at the electrical work [we hadn't planned on doing this ourselves, but when bids came back at over double our high-level estimates, this was our only choice]. But it hasn't been nearly as slow as the power company's speed in hooking us up to the grid. Apparently, their wires were crossed with the town, not realizing that we'd already gotten all of our required sign-offs. And without power, we couldn't turn on the boiler to heat the house. And this delayed so many other projects that required some amount of heat to be completed: painting the ceilings and walls, micro-cementing the wet walls, lime washing the floors, installing the plumbing fixtures (no burst pipes, thanks!). We were pulling our hair out!

But finally, the electric company got us temporary power on December 12th. Just in the nick of time. Because this Saturday, we'll be hosting 17 people (including the 8 in our family) over a portion of Christmas break, so we hoped this "new house" could be used for additional sleeping space.

We're not sure when the new telephone poles will be installed - we'd like it to be sooner than later so that we can also get cable internet to the house - but we're thankful that at least we have heat before the holidays. [As an aside, for the next house, we'll be requesting power at the very start of the project since it took us 4 months just to get temporary power. How did we manage without it? We used extension cords from our house for power tools and space heaters during that time.]

And speaking of delays, our weekend carpenters were really backed up, too. There were three consecutive weekends that we were expecting them to come that they had to cancel because of other more pressing jobs. Argh! We needed to finish the trim, get the corner cabinets built, and have the kitchen counters installed (so that the plumbers could show up to install the faucet).

And speaking of plumbers, you may notice that there's not a piece of tile in the bathrooms (or anywhere else in the house). I have a love/hate relationship with tile. Because I prefer a timeless look, there are a few styles and patterns that I love, but most of it I would not choose for my own projects. And while I want a timeless look, I'm not opposed to new products or methods. For the bathrooms in this house, I decided to try out the newest craze: micro-cement. It's a fine, decorative coating of cement and resins thinly troweled over a substrate. The look of it is really appealing to me because the finished product seems simple, elegant, timeless, like plaster or tadelakt ... and no tile or grout lines! The application of it was not so simple, but I'm so thankful that Judah and his mentor, David, were good sports about it. You need a clean, flat surface, a coat of primer, a couple of coats of micro-cement, followed by a couple of coats of water-based polyurethane to make it waterproof.

We went with cement board for the walls of the shower. — We went with cement board for the walls of the shower, but we could have used green board drywall.

Bathtub walls ready for some microcement.

I found a microcement kit for bathrooms from Epodex. They had limited colors to choose from - I chose Pebble Gray - but I didn't love the color in our windowless bathroom upstairs. I found a solution, though ...

Judah and his buddy, Henrick, trowel on a second coat of microcement in the bathroom lit with a spotlight (no power, remember?).

Now for the kitchen, I was so happy once the carpenters showed up to construct the corner cabinets (these should have come with my house kit, but I changed the kitchen layout too late to have them included in my order). Then he installed a secondhand cast iron farmhouse sink and the marble counters we took out of that soon-to-be-demolished house in Connecticut.

Oh happy day! The plumbers showed up in force.

Half-bath/laundry room. The placement of the sink should make more sense once washer and dryer are in.

When everything happens all at once, it's not unusual to have some hiccups. And because I like to reclaim materials whenever possible, sometimes things just don't work. Case in point: my master bath vanity project! I didn't realize that the vanity I bought (for $1 at a demo auction!) was too small to fit the Kohler undermount sink (bought new from a Habitat ReStore in Boston) and the faucet in its cavity. So the carpenter got creative and made it a drop-in sink so that it would all fit, and he botched the marble remnant I'd bought in the process. Bummer! So I'll have to go back to the drawing board on this one, but it will serve us temporarily.

Botched vanity project. But it works for now.

But the kids' bath upstairs is coming along nicely. Remember I said that I didn't like the color of the Pebble Gray micro-cement? Well, I did some research and discovered that it can be painted before applying polyurethane! So I had it painted Ben Moore's Simply White, like the rest of the bathroom.