One thing is clear from the activity in week 34 of our project: we’re well past the point where each week’s progress fits into a coherent theme. Instead, there’s a sense of controlled chaos at the house, with a variety of different activities taking place every day as we careen toward the finish line.

The big story this week is that the skylights have finally been installed, bringing us one step closer to (or one kitchen window short of) a house that can actually be closed up and secured without the use of a hammer and nails. We—and especially Julie—had been eagerly waiting to see what the great room would look like with sunlight coming in through the skylights, and we weren’t disappointed. The whole room felt brighter and more alive, including the kitchen tile, which also benefitted from the addition of grout between the tiles to provide a bit of contrast.

There’s good news on the window front, as well: as we were snooping around the garage over the weekend, we noticed a large box from Marvin. At first, I thought it was one of the windows we’d been sent erroneously during the winter, but on closer inspection, we noticed that it bore a shipping date in early May. It looks as thought the kitchen window has finally arrived, and we’re looking forward to seeing it installed soon.

The timing of the window’s delivery seems fortuitous, as Enzo told us a few weeks ago that he couldn’t get started on painting the exterior of the house due to its absence. Either coincidentally or as the result of careful planning on Enzo’s part, the painters started work on the stucco this week. They seem to have covered most of the front of the house, though the eaves and trim aren’t done yet.

We’re doing our best to match the yellow color we had before, and the painter went so far as to put together some samples for Julie to pick from, as he thought that the color our designer had originally selected wasn’t a close enough match. We’re pleased with how things are turning out, and hope that the new color will work well with the larger elements of white trim we’ve added during construction.

As if that wasn’t enough, we were more than a bit surprised to see that our new garage door was installed during the week. We had picked out the model we wanted just a couple weeks ago, so it seemed logical to expect that it would be a few more weeks before it could be delivered, based in no small part on our experiences with other big ticket items. Happily, however, our expectations were confounded in this case.

Work continued in a number of other areas, as well: the bathroom tile seems to be more or less complete, including the floors, and the sink and faucet were installed in the laundry room. There was some question in my mind as to whether there was enough room for the broad base of the faucet to fit between the edge of the sink and the backsplash, but the crew made things work. On the electrical front, the doorbell, under-cabinet lights, and various switch plates were set up, but the interior and exterior lighting fixtures still await installation.

The week’s excitement wasn’t limited to the construction work, either. At the beginning of the week, Enzo mentioned that it would be a good idea for us to make sure our appliances were available on-site so that his team could install them when the time came. Sure enough, by the end of the week, the new dishwasher, which we’d had delivered directly to the house, was in set up in the kitchen.

That left us to figure out what to do with our old appliances, which have been sitting in the garage of our rental for the last eight months. In fact, we’ve been putting our refrigerator to good use throughout the project, using it to keep pop cool and to allow us to keep extra staples, like fruit and milk, on hand so that we could make fewer trips to the store during the pandemic. Living with a spare refrigerator has spoiled us: it’s going to be a real challenge to re-learn how to get by without the extra space, and I’ll miss the luxury of knowing that there’s always a chilled bottle of Diet Coke just a few feet away.

Faced with the task of getting these items over to the house—they wouldn’t fit in Julie’s van, even if it were available for use at the moment—Julie looked at the available options and their associated costs and decided to rent a truck from U-Haul. It wasn’t a small truck, either: because we were moving large, heavy appliances, we wanted a ramp, and the smallest truck U-Haul offers with a ramp is the fairly gargantuan 15-foot moving truck. We picked up the vehicle early on Saturday and planned to be finished with it by the next morning, so that we could get by with a one-day rental.

Getting the appliances into the van proved to be relatively straightforward, with help from Julie and Joe. We loaded the four items (washer, dryer, range, and refrigerator) around midday and planned to unload them at the house later in the afternoon, after William’s baseball game. We thought that the unloading process would most likely be easier, and that the hard part was finished. Reader, we were very, very wrong.

The plan had been for us to open up the front door of the house, carry the appliances up the front steps using the appliance dolly we’d rented along with the truck, and leave them in the laundry room and great room for Enzo and crew to deal with when they were ready. Unfortunately, things went off the rails more or less immediately. The temporary front door was secured to the frame using a piece of wood and some Torx screws. One of the workers mentioned to Julie on Friday that he could leave behind a screwdriver that would allow us to remove the wood and open the door, but there wasn’t a screwdriver anywhere to be found, and we didn’t think we had enough time to run to the store to buy one in time to finish up before dark. Instead, we were down to plan B.

Plan B was to wheel the appliances around the garage to the back of the house and take them in through the patio doors. Simple, right? Unfortunately, not as simple as we’d hoped. First, it’s important to remember that the house sits on a construction site. The yard, or what’s left of it, is not a smooth expanse of carefully maintained surfaces; it more closely resembles a rocky, pitted moonscape. Second, Enzo and his crew had just poured the concrete for the driveway and patio the previous week. In preparation, they’d dug out the areas around the locations to be paved to construct the wooden frame that would give the concrete shape. Those dug-out areas were still there, as as you can see in this photo, which meant that we’d have to get the appliances across no fewer than three miniature chasms to get to the patio from our front walk.

We scrounged around the shed to find a piece of plywood to use as a makeshift ramp between the front yard and the left side of the driveway, and got to work trying to move the refrigerator: we figured that if we got the biggest and heaviest appliance out of the way first, the others would be a comparative cinch. It did not go well. The plywood we’d found turned out to be neither wide enough nor long enough to make an effective ramp on its own. As soon as we started crossing over the the driveway, the refrigerator began to tip precariously to the right, and only with the help of Joe and our next-door neighbor, who happened to be walking by, were we able to prevent it from falling and and pull it onto the driveway.

Undaunted, we looked around the yard and found a second piece of plywood we could combine with the first to make a bigger, theoretically more stable, ramp to get us from the driveway over to the side yard. We placed the two pieces of wood side-by-side and began to move the refrigerator across, but quickly discovered that the still-unstable two-piece ramp, combined with the very small area in which we had to make a 90° turn, made the strategy fundamentally untenable, at least for amateurs like us. We weren’t at risk of losing the refrigerator on this attempt, but neither did we come close to making it across.

This left us in something of a bind. As I mentioned, we wanted to return the truck by morning so that we wouldn’t have to pay for another day, but we didn’t have a clear path to getting the appliances into the house before dark. Furthermore, we weren’t excited by the prospect of leaving our appliances inside the parked truck on the street overnight (and we definitely weren’t going to leave our refrigerator sitting in the driveway). That’s when Julie came up with a brilliant idea that was staring us right in the face all long.

If you’ve read this far, you may recall that one of the advances we were excited about this week was the installation of an actual garage door. We didn’t have the means to get the appliances safely into the house, Julie reasoned, and we didn’t want to leave them parked on the street overnight, so why not leave them in the garage? We could ask Enzo whether he wanted us to come back during the week to move them inside (with the front door unlocked this time), or, if he preferred, we could leave them for his crew to move when they were ready for them.

This left us with the relatively easy task of figuring out how to open the garage door without electrical power, which we managed without too much difficulty. We successfully transported the remaining appliances off the truck, over the ramp to the driveway, and into the garage, and were able to return the truck with time to spare the next morning. Somehow, after all that, we failed to take any pictures of the freshly unloaded appliances, but mostly I was happy I hadn’t dropped the refrigerator on Joe.

Gallery: Week 34: Skylights, Stucco, and Adventures in Moving