Well another week has gone by and a lot of the finishing work has happened. Rob from Ideal Building is the one that is here on a regular basis now. He finished up the tiling in the bathroom and put up some yellow pine as a transition from the shower tile to the wall. We chose a charcoal grout to accent the black shower pan and then the black Anticado granite vanity counter and black granite vessel sinks. And now that we have done that, we are thinking of switching out our toilet to a black one to complete the look. We will do this ourselves.

How do you like our new Vanity lighting? It is a light bar made to look like branches tied together with strips of leather and then powered with 4 globes facing downward illuminating out vanity... Wha?!? There is no light bar in the picture???? Yep! that's right there is no light bar in the picture and that is because we had YET ANOTHER problem with what we bought at Seattle Lighting. This time around, one of the four light bases was bent and would not hang straight down. So after the eletrician was here to install it, Gary and I took it down and returned it to Seattle Lighting yesterday. The replacement will be expedited, but in Seattle Lighting terms, 'expedited' means 3 to 4 weeks! Ugh!

Outside, Rob finished triming all of the windows on the East side of the house so they match the trim from the new kitchen and garage windows. Rob had to cut out siding around the windows and then installed nice thick pieces of trim around them. These will be painted on Monday to match the existing trim around the house. We also put an order in for all new gutters at the house. We are going with the Leaf Guard system and found a color that we accent the house nicely. We are thinking 'PINK!'... kidding! We are going with an Ivory color for the gutters. These should be installed soon.

This past Thursday, Seattle City Light was out to (finally) switch over the power from our old circuit box to the new one. With that done, the electrician and his team of people were here to do a lot of the outstanding electrical around the house. I arrived home from work to find them still here. One guy was hooking up the new air-conditioning unit, while another worked on the new circuit for the hot-tub. Yet another guy was working on the lighting in our garage (which is very cool and VERY bright). Lastly, all the electrical in the kitchen was fixed. We had some switch issues, where some switches would only turn off lights, but not on and etc. So that was nice to finally have corrected.

All the wires from the old circuit box have been cut back and then tied to the new circuit box. Not many people (other than my sister's husband Dave) will find a picture of the circuit box exciting, so this is manly for him.



With the electrical completed in the kitchen, our trim kit for the microwave was installed. And now this wall is FINALLY complete! I am hoping that Ryan from Superior Cabinets will be out next week to work on the drawers as they are not moving out or in very smoothly at this time. Once that is done, we will start moving back into the kitchen.

Did you notice the backsplash in the above picture? Gary and I worked on the backsplah on Saturday and got the whole thing completed by 11:30 last night. We spent some time in the afternoon and then again after we got home from dinner. We took fifteen 12x12 slate tiles and cut them into 2" stips. We then stacked them 6" high in a brick pattern all the way around the kitchen. Cutting around outlets and making sure that we do not use the same tiles in large chunks was like putting together a puzzle. Near the end of the night, I was trying to thin out a piece of tile to fit under an outlet and had to cut 4 of them to get it right. I used the whole 'Measure Twice, Cut Once' philosophy but it still didn't work. Looking at it this morning, we are really happy with the overall look.

This coming week, the painters will be back to do some interior touch up painting and also finish up the painting of the garage exterior. They will return once more after the new garage door is installed (which is scheduled for Wednesday, January 31st). I am hoping for the fixtures to our shower will be installed, but not sure when we can expect a new shower door as we have yet to order anything. A new mirror for the vanity will need to be installed as well, but the whole place is slowly coming together.