Week 14: Plumbing Fixtures & a tiny bit of Framing

This week was pretty slow at the build. Last week I mentioned that the framers had to work on another job that they committed to prior to ours – so they were there all week. As it turns out though, a few of their guys actually snuck away to work on our house on Thursday and Friday. We visited the house this weekend and it didn’t look like much had changed except for a few more ‘barge boards’ were up on the front of the house. That was, until you actually went inside and then we noticed that the roof was put on the mudroom. This is the transition area that turns the house 45 degrees. As such, it looks like it took some time to build, and a bit trickier than the other areas of the house.

Here’s the progress from this week’s work. Not too much changed from last week.

The temporary construction ramp leads up to the mudroom door. The roof framing above the mudroom is what the guys worked on the couple of days that they were at our house this week.

Here’s what the framing looks like from inside the room!

Beside that, the guys also worked on a small area of the back deck which connects the mudroom to the outdoor BBQ area near the kitchen. Joel and I debated for a while over how much of the back deck should be covered. We ended up only covering a small spot for Joel to put his BBQ. The house that we’re renting now has a great covered BBQ area, so that’s now a must on our list.

The crew built a little part of the deck this week that has the covered BBQ area.

This is a straight-on look at the covered BBQ area. It’s right outside of the back door to the kitchen so it will be super close and handy!

Here’s the little trusses they used to frame the BBQ area.

This wall is missing a door – there should be one between the two windows (will get fixed later). That will be the back door from the mudroom which has a bit of a covered porch off the back to let our dog Bella out.

Check out the new view from the kitchen windows – you can see the roof line from behind the mudroom (on the right) and the BBQ area (on the left).

I climbed on top of the dirt stockpile to take this picture – it’s hard to fit the whole back of the house in one picture on my iphone!

This week, my mom and I also did some plumbing shopping. Actually, over the past 4 weeks my mom and I have been plumbing shopping 3 different times! I know – I’ve been holding out on you and not telling you this yet 🙂 There’s a few reasons for that actually… Our first plumbing shopping trip was at Rosen Plumbing in Kirkland. I really had no idea what I was getting into, but imagined that I’d be working with a sales associate, touring the showroom and picking out what I wanted. I was really a bit under-impressed with actuality though. We ended up standing around a showroom sink for 2 hours, flipping through manufacturer’s catalogs looking at tiny black & white pictures of different faucet options. It truly was less than desirable and unbelievably inefficient. In 2 hours, we didn’t even get through picking out the upstairs! I went home and decided that it’d be best if I did lots of shopping online to figure out what I really wanted. Two weeks later, we ended going back to Rosen, this time I was armed with a plan of the exact fixtures that I was looking to purchase. Now, I was all ready to tell her exactly what I was looking for…the only problem? They didn’t sell everything I was looking for. So annoying!!

So this week, my mom and I went to Ferguson to check out the items that I couldn’t order from Rosen. Ferguson was night and day different than Rosen! The showroom was GORGEOUS, filled with shimmering lighting fixtures and sparkling faucets. It was exactly what I was anticipating before we started our original search. We ended up having an appt with a sales associate there named Hannah and she was fantastic. She sat us down with us at her desk (novel idea, I know) and went through all of the plumbing fixtures we were looking for. Then we toured around the showroom looking at fixtures we were interested in and ones she suggested for us. They had hundreds for us to look at, and it does make it so much easier to see them in person, and they had ALL of the brands we were looking for. Over the next week, Hannah’s going to send us a quote for everything that was remaining on our list, as well as all the other fixtures that we previously picked out from Rosen. Her pricing may end up being better, and honestly, it’d be so nice to just deal with one place instead of two (plus Ferguson is conveniently close to where I work)!

Ferguson had HUNDREDS of faucets to choose from.

Loved all of their lighting too!

Do you see all of those light fixtures? I think I might just have to be back another day to look at those. And bonus, they also sell door hardware! So, I might have to be back a couple of times!

To give you an idea of what type of fixtures I’m looking at right now, here’s some idea boards I made for each room. Things are still in flux, but it should be pretty close to what we’ll end up with. And I haven’t picked out any sinks, but these were my initials after shopping online. I’m going to wait to order sinks until I have the counter tops and cabinetry all figured out.