Toady McToad came to visit

We've had the first toad on our kitchen floor. Addy found it in the yard and brought it in to show me. I'm sure it is the first of many.

Meanwhile the house is really looking like a home again. All ceilings are painted and all walls have one coat of paint. The girl's bedroom is finished except for electric, including final paint and carpet. The hallway and stairs are the same, except for railings. Our bedroom and closet need the final wall paint (trim is done), then the carpet being stored in the shed will be ready to install. Later Pat will put closet shelves and rods in both rooms.

The office has carpet, but not trim. The guest room has carpet and trim, but I need to paint the trim and the final wall coat. (I'm scared! I don't want to drip on the beautiful carpeting! I have drop cloths, but still.)

In the upstairs bathroom the cabinets are all in, flooring is installed, and tub and shower have been installed for awhile now. Yesterday the plumbers installed the shower door and it is as beautiful as I had hoped. Pat is finishing the tiling around the tub, and the Wisconsin artist will make the three maple leaf tiles to fill in the spaces Pat left for them. Once baseboard trim and trim around the window by the bathtub are done, I'll finish painting.

Most of the downstairs has farther to go. It needs all the trim, final paint and carpet. The vinyl is already installed from the mudroom through the bathroom, nook and kitchen.

Steve has been at the house the last two days. He's working on ceramic tile in the living room entryway. I found some nice boxes of remnant tile for $11 per box (99 cents per square foot), which was about a 90% savings from their original price. There was plenty to do the entry and we wouldn't have done it if we hadn't found such a good price. Hopefully it will protect the living room carpet when people come in with dirty shoes from the front porch.

Steve also worked more on painting the kitchen cabinet frames. Pat made the dishwasher opening, cut out the one small bin and matched the curve on the other side of the kitchen sink last week. He raised the countertop and got the countertops installed.

Bob brought back the kitchen cabinet doors and drawers last week that Steve had stripped and painted. Next they will be installed. Pat has to do some work to cut down the door that the dishwasher now replaces, make a new door to replace the large broken bin, etc.

I found a Rust-Oleum Hammered finish spray paint for the cabinet hardware and it looks great. We chose Copper, which looks really sharp. I put silicone spray on the backs of the turn knobs and they should be fine. Finding replacement screws was much harder than I expected. The originals are a #4 flathead brass screw, 5/8" long. And I needed 344 of them! Brass was a little harder to find than silver metals, #4 is a little less common than #6, and I never did find 5/8". I bought some 1/2" and some 3/4" inch and am hoping it works. I'm afraid the shorter will pull right out since the holes are established and that the longer will poke through the back. If that all fails, I have a source in Midland I can try for the exact right size.

Our other problem this week is so far off that it's almost funny. I ordered a U.S. Marble sink and countertop through Mortimer. It was supposed to have the one center faucet hole drilled, then a second hole off to the side for the soap dispenser. Despite Ashley's careful drawing and description, they managed to drill the hole wwwaaaaayyy off to the side, like at the edge of the countertop. So weird. I'd be mad if it weren't so crazy. They'll redo it, but it will be the beginning of July before we get the new one. A piece of paper was laying on the bad sink top when I saw it in our bathroom, so I only noticed that the soap dispenser hole was not by the sink area and thought they just missed it altogether. I was about to tell the plumber that I needed to have that taken care of when he told me my soap dispenser hole wouldn't work because it would be inside a drawer. That's when he lifted the paper and showed me the hole wasn't missing; it was just severely misplaced.

Oh, and we also need a new water pump. That's probably the most expensive news we've had in awhile, but neither Bob nor I was the least bit surprised given the age of everything.