Accomplished but not done

After fighting us tooth and nail for two plus years, the great city of San Francisco finally relented and gave us a certificate of occupancy for the house. To share this news with everyone, and to save a bit of money, I found an absolutely incredible deal on a great banner to hang on the house -- here is the only time the banner was used and it is still in absolutely pristine shape:



I think it would look pretty good on the house:



Just like the last time this banner was used, our mission is nowhere near done. In fact, in most construction projects it takes a while to work out all the details that are left over from construction. For example, here is the contractor working on the punch list on this famous project (he claims they are only a couple of weeks away from getting the last couple of items off the list and that the Pharaoh could not be more pleased with the progress):



We don't have that kind of time and to move things along, in addition to banner shopping, we have been attending to lot of details that will turn this house into a home:

For example, the window coverings were installed this week. These are the high tech vertical drapes for the front windows. Here's how they look when they are open:



Press a button on this remote control ....



And they close off automatically:



The master bedroom and master bath got somewhat less high tech Roman shades:





The master closet skylights got cellular shades that let in the light but keep out the UV rays.





To compensate for the loss of direct natural light, we added a little extra lighting:





Some bits of furniture also got here:




All that work made me a little tired and I decided to take a nap in our recently-delivered bed (a tad uncomfortable, at least until the mattress gets here):



Some of our high-tech communication gear was also installed:




Despite all of these accomplishments, bits of green tape remind us that the mission is far from done:



Let's hope the post "mission accomplished" work is nowhere as arduous or as dangerous as it was for the original owner of the banner. We have some work ahead of us, but I am not planning on a surge any time soon.

Crawling to the finish

In regular life, crossing a finish line usually evokes this sort of image:



When it comes to construction, this is what crossing the finish line looks like:



Some of the three loyal readers of this blog may think that this is merely another excuse by your correspondent for not posting for a couple of weeks, but those of you who have been lucky enough to have experienced the time warp of construction first hand will recognize the dilation of the space time continuum that occurs near the end of a construction project that causes even fairly minor things to take days and week to happen. So here's a compendium of all that has happened in the last two weeks:

One of the most symbolically important changes in the house is that the front door is now fully operational:





Even more symbolic, and just as important, was the addition of the house number above the door -- now the house knows its own address.



One of the last items to be actually installed is this stainless steel veterinary examination table that will be serving as a folding work table outside the laundry room. Let me assure our concerned readers that no animals will be hurt, or even annoyed, on this table, unless they interfere with the folding of the laundry:







Speaking of stainless steel, the refrigerator was finally turned on and it proceeded to refrigerate its interior spaces; no food yet, but you have to start somewhere:




Another harbinger of civilization, the ice maker, was also cranking away:





In order to protect all that ice, the alarm system was wired in and activated:




Another finishing touch was putting the finishing touch on the dining room chandelier. This started with a single metal rod suspended from the ceiling, more abstract metal art than lighting:



Then we added the lights:



Next we had to unpack each of these paper-wrapped packets



to find two pieces of crystal connected by a very very thin filament



and then draped each of these in one of the grooves in the metal rod.



The end result looked like this:





As sparkly as this chandelier may be, we still need other things to stare at from time to time, which is why the house got a couple of Televisions this week:




And a few other pieces of hardware to connect to the new TVs:





Finally, in keeping with the overall green concept, rather than throwing away the leftover steel decking and ipe wood, we asked the crew to fashion them into benches we can use on the front deck:





Not a whole lot of progress to show for two weeks of work, but at least we are progressing towards the finish line, one agonizing slow step at a time.

Next week: More of the same.