Building our house in the woods: Summer Work

A lot of things have happened this year. After wrapping up insulation and the initial stab at the landscaping (still ongoing, but at least stable for now), the tasks turned to siding, final electric, some finish work, and getting the driveway in better shape.

Still it feels miles away from completion (probably because it is...), but the progress when looking back one year is pretty nice to see. It just isn't always easy to feel that way when everything is still swirling at a 100 mph around you.

After drywall fully wrapped up, and the subfloor was in, the next big item was interior paint. That sucked up over a month total. We started by spraying the interior walls and ceiling with a coat of primer. That took something like 45 gal of primer, and was mostly knocked out in a day or two. The next item was the walls. Since this is a very open plan, the thought was to spray the walls with the final color (2 coats) since it covers a lot of area and then mask the walls and paint the ceilings. The ceilings are a good item to spray as it goes fast and covers well on the textured surface. We had the drywall guy do knock-down texture on the ceilings. The walls were a little trickier as we found we really needed to back roll after spraying to make it more uniform. This was not an issue on the ceilings due to the texture, but it cost time on the walls Basically this means you spray the walls first, then come back with a paint-moistened paint roller and go over it again. This helps even things out, and gives it a little texture. It takes a little extra time, but not too much as you can lay a lot of paint with a sprayer and then just smoothing it out with the roller goes reasonably fast.

So here are some interior photos of the painting. We covered all the windows first.

Main level:

Lower level:

The lower level BR is getting a suspended ceiling for better access to the mechanicals above it, which you can partly see the framing for that going in here.

Lower level bathroom. Still need tile in the shower.

Great room after getting the color settled. Our designer had told us to use a light green for the ceiling as it would look great, but we really did not like it, so she ended up changing it to a cream color. We like that a lot better, so that is what we have. Would have been nice to save the time and only do it once, but it worked out in the end. You can see the Big Beam has the plastic off it finally here, too.

The office is a medium green color that we really like, and you can barely see the powder room on the right which is a dark brown/maroon color, which we also really like. Our designer was big help on this stuff as we are awful with picking colors.