Construction Update January 15-21

What a week!

The week started with warm sunshine and soon turned to snow and cold.

Sunday I glued all the pantry tiles in place with thin set.

This is the crawl space access hatch.  It is about 22 inches square and if using 12" x 12" tiles it would take 4 tiles.  This photo shows how I used 30 pieces of tile... several with angles.  It's more like a piece of art.

This pantry is about 10 feet by 5.8 feet... 58 square feet... and it has 304 pieces of tile.  Every tile has been cut on at least two sides... several on three sides... for an estimated total of 760 cuts.  That is what one does for a piece of art.

When I was all done fitting the tiles here are the scraps of waste beside the saw.  Next to nothing left over.

Shirley helped me with mixing and washing up the grout.  Doesn't this look somewhat like chocolate?

We mixed up the total 25 pound bag of Mocha coloured grout... and we had to really stretch it to get this whole room finished.  I had hoped to also fix a grout joint between the tile and hardwood at my office door... but there was nothing left for me to do it.

No one was happier to see this job done.  Once the grout dries the colour will be a perfect match.

Since we had the access hatch cover off for the grouting process...

I decided that I would crawl under to insulate this crawl space.   The access would never be easier.

I also custom friction fit a piece of styrofoam for this access, since there is no easy way to do the fibreglass insulation for this hatch door.

Telus came this week and moved the phone lines over to the new service location on the back of the garage.  Very soon we will be able to push over that ugly pole that used to have the meter base... and this green pole will get removed by BC Hydro any day now.

Meanwhile it snowed several days in a row and with the blowing wind there was snow on everything in the carport.

So I had to sweep the snow off the table saw so that I could customize the boards to make the drawers for the pantry cabinet.

This week I finished the two drawers for the pantry cabinet... and installed them with full extension glide tracks.  I used the Kreg Jig tool to make the drawer boxes.  I would have had the doors installed by now... they are stained and lacquered ready to go... but I didn't realize that there is a mounting plate that didn't come with the European hinges.  It will take another trip to Home Depot to get the missing part.

I  believe this coming week we will have this room 100% completed.  As soon as we connect the power to the appliance plugs I will move the new freezer and refrigerator in to place.  The doors should go on easily enough... and I need another length of base board to stain and lacquer.  The counter top may also be ready and it will be pretty easy to set into place.

This past week I had a very interesting session with James Robertson, the building inspector in Victoria. He taught me about Blue Skin... which I will have to put around the bottom of the window rough opening.  He encouraged me to go look at some new houses under construction to see first hand how the builders were using Blue Skin and putting trim around the windows and doors... so we went to a new subdivision in Langford and a little walk around with my iPhone.

When I talked to him about the window detail for the trim boards I wanted to install around the windows, he taught me about several things to meet building code and emphasized making sure the flashing above the windows had an end dam.