Finishing Touches

We're here!  We took some time off from house-building to travel up north and celebrate Thanksgiving with family and now that we're home, we've been wrapping up what I think of as Phase II of construction, e.g., the garage and backyard.  Brian has been running the electric and installing the final trim around the garage door and other various and sundry places and I think we can officially now call the garage complete with one caveat.  We had a hiccup with the garage door opener when the automatic stop malfunctioned on the first run and, sadly, warped the top panel of the garage door in the process.  Fortunately, the manufacturer, Genie, has so far been great about remedying the problem.  They sent a guy out to look at it, he confirmed that it was a problem with the unit (and not, happily, with the DIY installation!), and they're sending us a new unit and replacing the top panel of the door.  So we will have a little more work to do once those supplies arrive and, for now, we're manually opening and closing the door but with frosty nights now, we're very glad to have the cars housed indoors.

We've also been doing a fair bit of indoor work over the past two weeks, cleaning and organizing in preparation for Phase III - the demo and reconstruction of the first floor.  Even though we have paint patches all over the house and piles of trim and flooring underfoot, we've had a bit of a respite from living in a true construction zone these last few months as most of the work - and the mess - occurred outdoors.  But, those days are soon to be over.  It'll probably be another couple of weeks before we start taking the house apart but we're using the time to figure out a plan...and stealing ourselves to start living with the construction dust again!