The pace seemed to quicken subtly in week 27 of the remodel. It’s not that any one part of the project was completed; very little is actually done at this point. Rather, many different things seem to be happening at all at once, producing the impression that we’ve started to enter the home stretch.

One tangible sign of the activity is the fact that there are different people working on different parts of the house all at the same time—including on Saturday, when we stopped by to visit. There’s so much happening all at once that Enzo very nicely let us know that we’d need to find somewhere else to store all the stuff we’d been keeping in the master bedroom, as there was no place inside the house where it wouldn’t be in the way.

We had stashed a number of larger items from the attic and the garage in our bedroom under the assumption (clearly mistaken in hindsight) that that area would be largely untouched by construction. Enzo’s team moved it all out to the backyard during the week, so we scrambled to relocate it over the weekend in anticipation of rain that never actually came. Some of it is still in the back of Julie’s car; we’re hoping to find room for it in our storage unit the next time we make a trip over there.

During the proceedings, I managed to step on a nail while ducking under scaffolding on the side of the house; I had to use a claw hammer to pull it out of my shoe when we got home. Fortunately, I was wearing a pair of thick-soled gym shoes, so it didn’t break the skin. If that’s the worst injury that befalls one of us on on site during this project, I’ll be happy.

The biggest areas of visible progress this week seemed to center around preparing for painting: a crew applied an initial layer of stucco to the exterior of the house, and a different team went to work applying primer to the interior walls. Neither effort is complete, as you can see in the photos, but the rooms that got an initial coat, like the great room, feel a lot more finished.

We answered and queued up some interesting design questions during the week, as well. One notable decision we made was the type of window trim to install inside of the house. I’d never given window trim much thought in the past, but on reflection, it occurred to me that I’ve lived with two very different styles at different points in my life. In the house in Elk Grove Village that I grew up in, we had trim around the windows but no window sills; and in the house in San Jose, we had window sills but no trim. For the new windows, we opted to do both—at extra cost, of course—as we didn’t think we would be happy without sills, and the designer we’ve been working with thought that trim would give the windows a more finished look.

In the coming week, we have to figure out what we want to do in terms of closet organization systems. We’re deciding among a number of different options, including a simple shelf-and-pole setup, which is what I grew up with; fixed, painted shelves built by Enzo and his team; or an off-the-shelf system that would give us a little more flexibility by adding adjustable shelves. According to Enzo, the price of lumber is very high right now, so the materials cost for him to build shelves makes that option more or less a wash, price-wise, compared to buying a store-bought system, so we’ll most likely end up doing different things in different closets based on what we think our needs will be.

Gallery: Week 27: Primer and Stucco