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