While it remains on the colder side here, we have been able to make some good progress on the house project. The scenery is magnificent as is the snow removal.
West Swan Valley; Mt. Baldy left and Sheep Mountain right.
More west Swan Valley looking east.
Crossing the Rt 26 bridge over the Snake River and coming into west Swan Valley.
Dropping down into the valley that is carved by the Snake River, on the way home from IF, that is Idaho Falls. We were hauling all the vinyl plank flooring that we could buy off the shelf, and some interior door casing lumber for the closet doors that we will have to build up ourselves.
Little Moose at the Swan Valley Post Office.
This little fella and his larger friend, have been hanging around this area which is downtown Swan Valley for a week or so. Reports are that the little fella is very friendly and even came up and licked a neighbor's hand.
We have lights in the house! We installed small flush mount LED lights around the wrap porch. They all come on with one switch.
More lights! Very exciting for us.
From the front porch looking southeast. The mountain to the right behind our neighbor's new house build is Red Mountain; at the roof eave line see the white line going farther frame left, that is Palisades Dam; the tall mountain towering over the dam in the distance is Stewart Mountain at 10,103 ft elevation near Alpine, Wyoming about 30 miles away from us.
Local neighbors pulling the sled with their horse past our house.
Our corner snow banks. The snow plow operator is very reliable here.
A clear and sunny February day. Sheep Mountain in the distance.
The snow slides off our roof and piles up. We add to the pile near the garage from the snow we remove from the driveway. We have been trying to keep most of the driveway clear for delivery truck access. Seems we have some building materials or item coming at least once a week.
Sampling plank vinyl floor options. We ended up going with the foreground option, a narrower oak plank model.
Gari places the oak sample by the front door and seems to be OK with it. We may have a winner!
Inside lights. We are not so great at decorating we think, and availability of items seem horrible, so we end up going with things we think we can stand. In this picture you can see a modern-ish range hood, and an art deco-ish main light, and an antique style dining chandelier. We since have obtained and installed a light for over the kitchen sink that we think is also art deco-ish.
Modern fan with light in the sitting room. Yep. we are all over the chronological timeline here! Modern, check, art deco, check, early American, check!
The drywall crew gave us a swirl texture ceiling. We were concerned that we were not going to like it, but it turns out we love it! A shot below next to the sitting room fan. We painted the ceilings ultra white and got the white fan thinking it would just disappear into the ceiling and be less conspicuous.
A closer view of the ceiling texture. The drywall guys did a great job for us, we couldn't be happier with the results.
Gari has been busy staining interior doors and windows, below is some of her materials on that job.
One of the first interior doors set up in the garage. We since have moved the staining operation into the guest bedroom, because we are making sawdust in the garage with the table-saw, router and miter saw, plus the jigsaw, oscillating saw, drill, files, etc. The master bedroom was full of the flooring boxes.
We are now running the ceiling fan in the garage, it's the same model as the sitting room fan. It really helps mix the air and make the room temperature much more even.
We have started the first rows of plank vinyl flooring. We measured and layed out for a couple of days before we started. We started measuring for lay out in the hallway and ended up selecting the centerline of the hallway as the anchor point of the floor. That worked out so there were no super narrow strips of vinyl at any outermost wall, including the hall walls. We projected from the hallway center line back into the kitchen and established a starting location at the kitchen counter. We have more lights on, those are accent lights above the kitchen cabinets, and you can see the over sink light in this shot below.
Under cabinet work space lights are on below. We do have a light under the far left cabinet, but we put that on a separate switch and I neglected to turn it on for this shot. What we did to live upthe power in the house, was connect the 50A extension line we have running from the Shop into the distribution panel in the house. This way we are able to check out all the circuits and then select the circuits that we can use as we work and now eliminate all the extension cords running everywhere. You can see one big black electric cord in these shots, that is our RV 50A extension cord we are using to run the 30A heater we use to keep the temperature around 65⁰ in the house. We have that cord plugged into the oven outlet in the kitchen and is our main power drawing item in the house for now. That little electric heater is a 30A, 240V unit and it pretty well heats the entire house including the garage. In final configuration we will install the heater permanently the garage tokeep things above freezing in there during the wintertime.
The shot below is that of a crawling adventure through the attic eaves to hook up the porch lights. I had to duck walk on the trusses the length of the house about 3 or 4 times to complete this task. We installed the lights from below on the porch, but had to hook them up in a parallel circuit from above in the attic eaves. Glad to have that task checked off!
Below is what the porch ceiling light hook ups looked like before I started. Didn't think to get an after shot.
We received and mounted our triple 4.5"x20" Pentek water filter system. We elected to go this route to eliminate a bit of iron we have in the well water here. The other option we saw back flushed around 100 gallons of water each day through the filter media. We just didn't want to run that much water into our drain field so we went with filter cartridges. With as little iron as we see I think we will need to change the iron filter out once, maybe twice per year. In the other two filter housings we will probably use one as a sand filter (5 micron), and maybe put a carbon block as a brightener in the third housing or even leave it empty. We will see how it works. The cartridge filters output will feed an ion exchange water softener, which we have not yet selected. We bought a cheapie water softener and have it installed in the Shop, and it works very well softening the water, but many of its parts are plastic and not as reliable. The little counter wheel has seized which makes the unit lose its automated function. So we manually regenerate every couple of weeks. The water is pretty hard here so a softener makes it much nicer. We will also install a reverse osmosis system under the kitchen sink and put a drinking spout at the sink, plus plumb the RO output to the refrigerator for RO ice and water through the door. We started to layout the plumbing header for the garage filter system in the shot below. That is a job for another day.
Must be another day because there is the plumbing header complete in dry fit phase. We will connect the water softener from the top two lines once we select the softener and see where it will fit and where the connections are located. We think we will put the softener and brine tank over to the right in the corner where Gari currently has a stack of completed interior doors. In the meantime we can run with the header in bypass configuration and still have water service to the house.
OK now were are installing some flooring. It took a while to gain momentum on this job. At this point in the photo below, we are floor installation technicians, but the previous rows were definitely on the learning curve. The first three rows were really painful. We have two planks in those first few rows that didn't seat properly. At the time of installation, we thought they were OK, but they were not. We didn't know the best techniques for seating the locking edges, nor what to look for to confirm failure or success. We think we will disassemble the first two or three rows once we finish the room going south, and reinstall those planks that didn't lock properly. Now we know how best to lock them in and what to look for to confirm success. Steve lines up a short end joint below.
Steve prepares to lock in the end joint with the pull bar tool.
Steve uses the tapping block below on the long side joints.
The hallway finished... except for the two closets on the left. We will run the planks into those two closets without any transition strips.
After the hallway was complete, we continued on into the sitting room. Gari cleans up construction debris to aid in successful plank joint locking. We found that the tiniest bit of debris in the joint can prevent the joint from seating properly.
We installed the foundation for a little corner tile work that will support a gas log. We fashioned an oak border from 1x3s and installed cement-board with mastic and cement-board screws in the field of the area. Again, Gari cleans up the construction debris to aid the remainder of the vinyl plank install job.
Gari made a cardboard cutout of the footprint of the gas log that we selected. It should fit well, the cardboard model fits nicely... we will see....
Below you can see where we hooked the 50A extension cord run over from the Shop and into the house distribution panel. No more extension cords everywhere in the house, hooray! The big thing at frame left is our replacement window sash for the shot out front window.
Maybe we will finish all the vinyl flooring by the end of this month... Also, hopefully the tile for the gas log corner will arrive. Should get the plumbing header glued together, and maybe half or more of the interior doors hung. We have to build up three doors so they will take us a little longer. For March, we hope for countertops for kitchen and bathrooms, then we can install finished plumbing fixtures. We have one toilet in hand already and can set that as soon as we complete the flooring in the bathrooms, which is also plank vinyl.... that looks like tile/stone in a 12"x24" configuration. The second toilet we are having trouble locating for a reasonable price. We wanted an off white toilet for the master bath to match the off white shower, think it is called Biscuit. What we found out is that we like all the stuff that is "dated" according to suppliers. That is part of our availability problem, we want stuff that is no longer in style. I told you we aren't decorators. Never in style, never out of style, as longs as it works reliably, that's the way we roll!
