Week 37 of the remodel made the house feel much closer to being finished, thanks to the installation of carpet upstairs and in our master bedroom. Going with carpet was perhaps not the most modern choice, but both Julie and I had carpet in our childhood homes growing up, and no one has ever accused me of being stylish anyway.

We went with a very neutral shade upstairs; it has a fancy name, but it’s really just beige. Because the kids each have different color schemes in their rooms, we wanted something that would work well for each of them. This color certainly fits the bill, even if it does remind me of pretty much every apartment I rented in the ’90s.

Downstairs, we went with a gray-ish green, incorporating a few subtle hints of blue. I wanted something similar to our old carpet, but Julie put her foot down: to her, the old color was ridiculously dated. She would have preferred something closer to turquoise, but ultimately we compromised on this color. It’s near enough to the old shade that it still feels like home, without looking like it was pulled straight out of 1986.

This week also brought the addition of screen doors to our patio entrance. Julie has looked forward to these since the start of the project: for many years, she has wanted a screen door at the front of the house to allow air to circulate more freely and make sitting in the living room more comfortable in the evening after hot summer days. I had reservations and failed to act, so we were stuck in a bit of a stalemate. In the end, all it took to break the deadlock was tearing down half the house and moving the primary living space to the rear.

I’m under no illusions that this gets me off the hook for a front screen door, however.

Finally, though we’re unlikely to need them for another four or five months, the crew installed gutters on the house this week. There are no downspouts yet, but I imagine they’ll show up sometime next week.

Gallery: Week 37: Carpet

Work continued in week 36 of the remodel, with small changes apparent throughout the house and more behind the scenes. And, for the first time, we have a somewhat firm completion date: external dependencies notwithstanding, Enzo expects to be finished the week of June 14. With that in mind, we’ve scheduled a move date of July 1, a few days after Julie and the kids return from Nebraska. After that, I’ll have to find something new to write about.

One outside factor that could gum up the works is our energy utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, which you may be familiar with for their part in killing eight people in the San Bruno pipeline explosion in 2010 and eighty-four in 2018’s Camp Fire. We need them to move our circuit from the temporary power pole in the back yard to the actual house wiring via the weatherhead on the roof. At the same time, they’ll need to install a new meter (the old one was removed when they disconnected our original service).

Enzo gave PG&E a call, hoping that the process would be straightforward. Unfortunately, however, they told him that we would have to submit an application for new service. We took care of that, which was exactly as much fun as it sounds, and waited a day or so for a response.

At that point, we were connected with a rep whose job it was to make sure our application was complete before assigning it to a Project Coordinator. He went back and forth a few times with Enzo via email—he needed to see pictures of the site to assess the overall situation, and once he had the information he needed, he dropped a bombshell on us: depending on how things went with the Project Coordinator, we might be facing a sixteen-week lead time in the Engineering / Estimation department.

Obviously, this didn’t line up with Enzo’s or our expectations, as it obviousy won’t be feasible for us to move in without electrical power; Enzo groused that all he needed was an hour with a lineman to wrap this up. Nevertheless, the representative told us there was nothing we could do except wait to hear from our assigned Project Coordinator.

Fortunately, we heard from our Project Coordinator after a few days—we lost a couple of extra days because he reached out by phone, rather than email, and my default assumption is that any phone call I receive from a number I don’t recognize is spam—and it turns out that our project is eligible for the “Express Connect” program, which will allow us to bypass the sixteen-week queue. He needed a bit more information from Enzo—they would need to send out different numbers of people depending on whether they’d cut the original service line when they moved it to the temporary pole or simply coiled up the slack—but things went relatively smoothly from there. Happily, in the end, the Project Coordinator promised to get back to us early next week with an install date.

The most visible external change this week was the removal of the big, green construction fence that had surrounded the house since last fall; now that the house is secure and construction is superficially complete, it’s no longer necessary. After almost nine months, it feels very strange to be able to see the house from the street, but I’m sure the neighbors are happy the fence is gone.

One minor consequence of the fence’s removal is that it makes the porta potty in the front yard that much more prominent. You could always see its white roof sticking up over the top of the fence, but now it’s just sitting there in the open. This isn’t unusual for projects at this stage of completion, but it does make things a little awkward when you need to use the bathroom while you’re on-site: you can wave to all the neighbors before you go in to do your business.

Week 36 also brought a couple design elements that made the house feel a little more like home. First, Enzo and his team installed the original hardware for our mail slot in its new location, including a cute custom door on the inside. It’s far from the most practical receptacle for mail, but it’s nice to have it back.

Second, the bricklayer was back at work over the weekend, finishing up the trim on the front of the house and the border surrounding the back patio in the rear. As with the mail slot, these are probably not the most modern looks we could have chosen, but they’re subtle callbacks to the way the house looked before.

This week also brought, at long last, the beginning of construction of an actual banister for the stairs. This was a tremendous relief, as I’ve been plagued by mental images of one of the kids (or me) tripping and toppling into the open stairwell for a while now. We had originally planned to have a small, built-in bookshelf in place of a plain railing at the top of the stairs facing the play room, but that didn’t end up happening due to a breakdown in communications among Lesley, Enzo, and the two of us. Nonetheless, the banister is coming together nicely, and the wood finish complements the flooring downstairs.

The electrical team made minor progress this week. There are still a few items outstanding, including terminating the connections in the network closet and installing the doorbell, but they did find time to hang the chandelier over the stairs. We took a bit of a flyer on this fixture, and we’re not entirely sure how it’s going to look when the power is turned on, but it’s nothing if not striking.

Finally, the crew moved the appliances into place in the kitchen and laundry room. We can’t actually use them, seeing as there’s no power, but having them in their proper positions makes the whole room feel more finished. The new layout presents challenges, as well: the built-in look provided by the enclosure for the refrigerator looks neat and tidy, but it leaves us without a convenient place to hang artwork and mementos with magnets, since the front of the appliance is stainless steel, and the side is hidden by the enclosure. We’ll need to figure this out—along with a thousand other things—after we move in.

Gallery: Week 36: Fenceless