Having passed our final inspections the previous week, things really slowed down in week 41, as there was little left to do other than taking care of some finishing touches.

For example, there were still a few areas where the paint needed attention. The water closet in our master bathroom had a few easily repair glitches, and if you look very closely at the front view of the house, you can see that the trim between the siding and the shingles is yellow, matching the siding, rather than white, matching the shingles. These would all be cleaned up in the days leading up to our move.

We also used this week (and the fact that we finally had Julie’s car back) to take care of some projects we wanted to get out of the way before we moved in. We assembled William’s bed and topped it with a new mattress; and Joe and I re-painted the mirror that had hung over the laundry tub in our old garage for use in our new laundry room. Julie picked out the color, which we also plan to use on the backing board for coat hooks by the door.

Despite my marginal success hanging the living room mirror the week before, there were a some projects we weren’t completely comfortable taking on ourselves in the limited time we had before the move. With that in mind, we paid Enzo a little bit extra to have one of the guys from his crew take care of them. The crew member, Fernando, hung the wall-mounted bookshelf that we had saved from Joe’s old bedroom in his new bedroom—the hardest part there was making sure there would be enough room for his bed—as well as the small bookshelf that used to sit over our microwave cart in the kitchen; it fulfills the same role in the new setup.

We also asked him to put up the overhead shelves we’d salvaged from our old garage. These were custom-built to match the old garage’s dimensions, so they’re not an perfect fit, but we found a configuration that works pretty well. I was happy that they were still intact, seing as they sat outside in the back yard for the last few months of the project. Since we lost the built-in storage for large items we used to have over the workbench, we bought some additional overhead storage and asked him to install it, as well.

To commemorate the completion of the remodel, Julia graciously agreed to record a brief walking tour of the house; the gallery also contains a considerably less interesting video clip of our garage door going up.

With work wrapping up and our move-in date fast approaching, the coming week presented us with one of the most arduous tasks of all: packing up for the move.

Gallery: Week 41: Projects

Week 40 of the remodel was a big one: after just over nine months of construction, the house passed the city’s final inspections, marking the completion of the project, at least as far as the city of San José was concerned. We still weren’t completely done: we were still waiting on a few fixes from Enzo, as well as some plumbing, cleaning, and other odd jobs before we’d be ready to move back in. Nevertheless, this was a big step.

Julie and the kids happened to be in Nebraska this week, as well, which gave me an opportunity to spend some time in the house alone for the first time; if the photos are somewhat lacking this week, that’s probably why. The entire experience felt a bit surreal, especially since the window treatments weren’t installed, which made it feel as though my every move was on display for the neighbors.

Externally, the most visible change was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things: Enzo and his team painted the front porch gray. This was necessary because, out of a combination of frugality and sentimentality, we decided to keep the original porch and sidewalk. Both were in reasonable condition, so there wasn’t a compelling need to replace them, but there was a small hangup: there was an unfinished gap at the back of the porch that used to be covered by the brickwork under the dining room window. With the front door now occupying that wall, the bricks were gone, leaving the gap exposed.

Enzo was able to fill and seal the gap without difficulty, but there was no way he was going to be able to match the color of the original porch. Even if he had known the specific shade it was painted back in the day, the porch’s finish had been weathered by decades of sun, wind, and rain. Instead, we opted to paint the porch a neutral gray and leave the front walk unchanged. I was a little worried that the contrast between the two would be jarring, but it worked out well.

Enzo managed a couple other tricks this week. The temporary power pole, which was no longer needed after the house was connected to the grid the previous week, disappeared overnight. And our garbage and recycling bins, which vanished at some point very early in the project, reappeared out of nowhere after we casually mentioned that we needed to figure out how to get new ones. Are these the same trash containers we had before construction started? Had they been stored somewhere offsite? Did one of our neighbors borrow them for the duration of the project and return them in the dead of night? We have no idea! But they were back, and that was one less thing for us to worry about.

Around this time, I was very happy to discover some fresh shoots from the rose that used to sit in front of the house, outside the kitchen. The entire bush had been removed down to the ground during construction, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that some part of it survived. Of course—as Julie warned me—it’s very likely that these are Dr. Huey canes coming up from the root stock under the original plant’s graft, so the resulting growth will almost certainly look nothing like our old rose, but it was still exciting to see some signs of life.

Inside the house, the plumbers installed new toilets in the downstairs bathrooms: the internal hardware in the old toilets needed to be replaced, and the cost to do so, including labor, was almost the same as the cost to replace them. So, we now have brand-new toilets with fancy bidet seats that I still haven’t figured out how to use.

In what seemed to me to be something of a minor miracle, we also have a full complement of can lights in the garage. Fully half the lights had been covered up by the drywall team during construction, and I was skeptical that Enzo would be able to find them without punching a bunch of extra holes in the ceiling. He reassured us that he had accurate measurements, but I was still a bit dubious—wrongly so, as it turns out. Both banks of lights are exposed and fully operational.

While the rest of the family was out of town, I took the opportunity to work on setting a few things up for our move-in date. To start, I hung our living room mirror back in its old spot above the fireplace. It’s a bit higher than it had been, to accommodate the higher mantel, and it’s almost level. It took a few hours, and there was a false start or two, but it was gratifying to get it done.

I also started the process of hooking up connectors for speakers in the family room. I didn’t make as much progress here as I’d hoped—in fact, some of the speakers are still not connected—but at least I was able to get a sense for the scope of the project. The connectors I’d chosen, Neutrik SpeakOn connectors, turned out to be a bit bigger than I anticipated and are undoubtedly overkill for our application, so I actually checked in with Julie in Nebraska via FaceTime to make sure they wouldn’t be too obtrusive.

We were very close to the end now: just one more week of work, and then we’d be set to move in. The movers were scheduled to arrive at the rental bright and early the morning of July 9, and if everything went according to plan, that would be our first night in the new house.

Gallery: Week 40: Inspections

Progress continued to slow in week 39 of our remodel as the project began to draw to a close. At this point, construction was pretty much complete aside from cleaning up a few minor issues, some of which you can see in the gallery. We kept the painters busy right up to the last minute fixing various mistakes. For example, if you look closely at this photo, you can see that the horizontal trim between the shingles and the siding on the two front gables is the wrong color: it’s yellow instead of white. There were a number of small issues along those lines, and the team was, for the most part, really good about addressing even very minor concerns.

There were a few notable developments in week 39, however, and the most significant by far was the connection of the house wiring to the PG&E pole behind our shed: for the first time in nearly a year, we had consistent power inside the house! This let us see our hallway chandelier lit for the first time and gave us a chance to try to figure out which the many light switches in the great room (twelve, if I’m counting correctly) controlled which fixtures. Three months later, I still don’t have it down.

Having power was a prerequisite for getting another critical piece of infrastructure up and running: the Internet. We made an appointment to have an installer come by on a Saturday and, in contrast to the debacle we went through trying to get the Internet hooked up at the rental last year, he showed up on time and had a good handle on what needed to be done. He ran a fiber optic line from the pole in the backyard to the communications box on the side of the house and pulled it from there to the office closet through the crawlspace, feeding it up through the smurf tube the electrician left behind for precisely this purpose.

After that, he mounted AT&T’s hardware on the back wall of the closet next to where our network gear will sit, and we were done. It was a little strange having Internet access in the house two weeks before we planned to move in, but given the experience we had in the rental, we didn’t want to take any chances.

Utilities aside, the construction crew also put in a new heating vent under the cabinets in our master bathroom, replacing the ceiling vent that was removed to make room for Julia’s bedroom. This addition came late in the process because we didn’t realize that there wasn’t a vent in that room until quite a while after the initial HVAC work was complete. I’m glad we noticed, even belatedly, however: the tile floor can get very cold in the winter.

With all the major work complete, Enzo gave us the OK to start bringing things over, and that’s exactly what we did. Julie landed a couple great finds on the neighborhood Buy Nothing group, including a couple comfy chairs for the family room and a free refrigerator for the garage.

We got the refrigerator from a very nice couple that was clearing out their long-term rental for a move to Minnesota, and they gave us a couple bookshelves for the boys’ bedrooms, as well. All they asked in return was that we get the stuff out of their house. So, we repeated the process from May: we rented a U-Haul, loaded it up, and drove it back to our place. Things went a little more smoothly this time, the fact that we were parked illegally on a narrow little street for almost an hour as we loaded the truck notwithstanding; if nothing else, Joe and I had more experience pulling things up and down the truck’s ramp, and there was never any real risk of the refrigerator falling off the dolly this time around.

The couple even gave Joe a pair of convincing-looking katanas that they didn’t want to take with them. As weapons go, I’m not sure they’re serious enough that you could use them in an actual fight, but I am sure they’re serious enough that you could hurt yourself with them if you’re careless, so we asked Joe to put them on a high shelf well out of William’s reach.

The refrigerator itself had been used as a wine and beer fridge in the couple’s not especially weatherproof garage for quite a while, so cleaning it up, inside and out, was a project in and of itself. It ended up taking most of a weekend afternoon, but it worked out wonderfully in the end: for the price of a little manual labor (and a moving van), we got a perfectly functional refrigerator (not to mention a pair of bookshelves and some swords).

You may recall from our week 36 update that Enzo expected to be finished the week of June 14, which would have been this week. We didn’t hit that target, but we were close, and the path seemed clear for the final inspection the following week.

Gallery: Week 39: Power, Internet, and Free Stuff

Week 38 of our remodel brought minor changes inside and out, but the overall pace of progress slowed dramatically as the project neared completion. Enzo told us that the carpet would be one of the last things to go in, and he was true to his word: there wasn’t much left to do inside the house at this point.

As we guessed in the previous week’s post, the gutter crew was back this week to install downspouts, so now all the rain that we’re hoping will fall this winter—we are in the middle of a very severe drought, after all—will have somewhere to go.

Looking back as I write this in the middle of September, one thing I wish we’d considered during construction is leaf guards for the gutters. It’s still more or less summer here: the high today was around 90 degrees. But there’s a chill in the air in the evenings, and we know that in a few weeks the leaves will start to turn and fall, particularly from the large Platanus acerifolia next door. When they do, we’ll have to figure out how to get up on the roof to clear the gutters or pay someone else to take care of it. We haven’t even bought a ladder tall enough to get us up there yet, so we clearly have some serious thinking to do.

The construction crew also put some finishing touches on the pergola over the garage this week—we’re hoping to train a bougainvillea to climb it once we get started on landscaping—and installed towel racks and other hardware in the kids’ bathrooms. That was pretty much it in terms of visible changes, though. After all the time we spent planning and preparing for this project (my notes go all the way back to September 2017, when Julia was starting eighth grade), it was a strange feeling to be so close to the end.

Gallery: Week 38: Pergola, Bathroom Fixtures, and Downspouts