Problems fixed and more choices faced

As I write, there is an electrician in the dining room staring at the light. It was flickering a lot this morning, and Achilles didn't like it so he sent the sparky in.

We had our site meeting - another two hours. First we met with the windows guy. A lot of it fairly incomprehensible, except for the point at which I asked "Why does it say 'Forest Green' for the frame color?" Er, yeah, it should be white. No one else had spotted that, so the lay person has her uses.

Next we met with the cabinet guys. More detailed drawings to pour over. We had further dicussion on the microwave and appliance garage location and sizing, inconclusive. We will need to look at another microwave option to see if we can get the cabinet set further back from the edge of the counter top, else the appliance garage will be a vast cavern horizontally but too cramped vertically. Alternatively I suggested getting rid of the appliance garage altogether, but that seemed to shock everyone else present and they are determined to find a way to keep it. They all like the way we keep our bread in it instead of our toaster, kettle etc. It's an education, this remodel lark.

The counter top subcontractors are still not committing on how much it would cost to reuse the Corian counter top. The cabinet guy suspects its a liability issue: If they take it out, and it breaks, then they will be liable for the replacement cost. In which case I wish they'd just say they can't do it and we can move on to the next thing, a replacement. January is coming up fast and we all need to know what the next step will be. The cabinet guys say they'll start making the kitchen cabinets next week. The cabinet guys left us with a swatch of 200 color samples for staining the cabinets, plus 15 types of mesh for the TV cabinet. The Architect says that next week she'll bring along her samples of off-white paint for us to choose from for the cabinet painting.

Then we had a quick run down of all the outstanding points. Kitchen demolition is scheduled for January 13 and 14 (assuming the new cabinets are ready to be installed). We need to get the new washer and dryer for February so probably need to order that soon.

Achilles says that the fix on the not-perpendicular-house-and-addition is working out well. He says that the foundations' relationship to the house looks like we've recently experienced a large earthquake...which will be put right by the foundations guys coming back to build the foundations up in the necessary places. OK, I said, just make sure that if we had a real earthquake the house wouldn't fall down. He said we've lost a couple of days in the schedule because of that issue, but the subcontractors have sent along extra men and that is helping with the catch up.

In the back yard the pool is now about half drained. I have a document to read about alternative shapes of pool coping - it's all about the edge, apparently - and much of the front yard is decorated with pink paint splodges, indicating what is to be ripped out/demolished. Given that we have had a bit of rain this week (and it has only been a sprinkle so far today) I'm not sorry that the hardscape guy has not returned to demo the back yard. It would all be a mud bath very quickly and it's quite nice not having to tramp through the mud to take a look at the work in progress.