Slow week in house building, hence no updates. Our foreman visited us at the beginning of the week to apologize that the finishing date needs to be postponed a week because the guy making our furniture was sick. That sort of bottles things up for the end of February between work schedules, packing, moving, and cleaning up this place and getting it inspected by the real estate company, but we’re less than a month away from moving into our new house so I’m finding it hard to get too riled up about the delay.

As far as progress at the house is concerned, the electrician got a lot of work done at the beginning of the week, installing most of the sockets and switches, then he disappeared for the rest of week. I’m not sure if this was related to the completion date of the house being delayed — maybe the sent him somewhere else. I’m excited to see how all the lights we chose look once they’re installed, so the highlight of the electricians work for me was seeing some of the recessed lighting installed on the second floor.

The carpenter spent the weekend at the house, installing the railing on the stairs…

And lots of shelves that he had cut previously — in the pantry, which will be cramped but will have pretty ample storage…

And the shoe closet. If there isn’t enough room for all of our (my wife’s) shoes here, there’s something wrong with us (my wife).

The A/C man has also been around, installing the unit for living room, and this hideous thing in our bedroom. We went with the builder’s suggestion when choosing this A/C, and didn’t think too much about how big it actually is. Fortunately my eyes will be shut most of the time I’m around this thing.

We had all the plumbing done to eventually have A/Cs in every room, but had planned on leaving a few out initially to save money. When we realized that the places that didn’t have A/Cs would have this much hose sticking out of the wall…

…we started to consider buying some extra units, particularly for the tatami room which is pretty central to the living space. That led to eventually just buying A/Cs for all the places we had plumbing…the free space on the second floor as well as the second kid’s room, which is going to serve as my home gym for now and was going to be bare bones for the time being. So there goes another $1200 plus installation fees and the cost of the mounting racks outside!

Speaking of outside, the concrete apron behind our house is rapidly being filled with various equipment — the eco-cute water heater that will power both our heated floors and all the other hot water we need, plus a few A/Cs and racks for the other 20 we’re going to have 😉 So much for keeping my bike back there…

The A/C man came by our house today to remove the unit that we have here at this house, and will be installing all of the various A/Cs the day after tomorrow.

Finally, the carpenter was out in the rain and snow today getting started on our deck for the porch. I thought he would have been doing this yesterday, when it was about 60 degrees and not raining, saving all the indoor work for today, when it was forecast to be raining and snowing. The frame for the deck is made of plastic with a metal strip running through the middle. It looks like a complete pain in the ass to work with, but will probably look exactly the same in a thousand years. On top of that will go pressure treated 2 X 6 lumber (I think that’s how big it is), which I’m go to stain, but perhaps not before we move in. I’m kind of burnt out on painting.

A nice design feature is that the concrete surface of the porch is slightly inclined to allow any rainwater to run off, but the deck itself will be level.

Not sure what’s on the agenda for this week, but hopefully it will involve lots of lights being installed. If anything cool happens I’ll write about it. We have a few moving companies coming over the next few days to start the bidding process on moving all of our precious belongings. Until next time…