Grout

Since Rob and I didn't get to discuss everything we needed to yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon, I was planning to meet with him today (Wednesday), but he called me this morning to tell me that he was currently driving a 25-foot U-Haul through DC and would probably be out all day. Apparently he contacted the company that was supposed to deliver our cabinets and the soonest they could do it was next Tuesday, even though they received them on Monday. Since we can't order the countertops or finish the tile until they are installed, Steve W sent Rob to Baltimore to pick them up himself. Rob still needed me to drop some things off at the house and take a look at some more stain samples, so I told him I'd stop by in the afternoon.

The house was pretty quiet, but it looked like there had been some activity earlier in the day. There were some huge sheets of beadboard and a new pile of trim in the dining room.
And Ian and Juan were still there grouting the tile floors. Here's the main level bathroom.
And the upstairs bathroom. The blue dots really pop now that the grout is in. Ian did a great job on this floor!
And Juan had just finished grouting the floors in the master bath. The river rocks in the shower look so cool! I had a nice chat with Ian and he seems really pleased with how everything is coming together.
Rob made it back from Baltimore while I was there. Since the rest of the SAI crew had already left for the day, he parked the U-Haul in the driveway so they could unload the cabinets in the morning. After discussing some more options for the tub filler, he went down to the basement and retrieved one of our leftover doors so we could test out the stain colors and find a match. First, he sanded some of the original stain off the door in two spots and applied a different color to each side. Both stains blended in pretty well, but since we will need to stain the new oak doors and pine windows to match, I suggested we test them out on scraps of both kinds of wood.The skinny piece is pine, and the wider one is a scrap of our oak hardwood flooring. You can see that the stain colors look a bit different on each kind of wood -- and neither of them quite matches the color of the door. Rob said he'd pick up a couple more stain samples at Home Depot so we can test them out tomorrow.
Rob had to hit the road, but Ian had some questions about the tile, so I stuck around to go over the details with him. While we were discussing the tile for the little Juliet balcony, we noticed that they had trimmed out the arched window and balcony doors and signed everyone's name on one of the trim pieces. I found it odd that they chose to autograph this particular spot, since it's the one place in the whole house where the trim does not look quite right. The window must be slightly wider than the door, because the trim is clearly off by about an inch between the two.
All our cabinets are sitting inside this truck. I hope it doesn't leak, because we had another torrential thunderstorm later in the evening.
We went to a concert at Wolf Trap with some friends, but fortunately we had in-house seats in the covered pavilion. It was quite dramatic with all the lightning. The hardy souls sitting out on the lawn were absolutely drenched. On our way out, we saw several groups of people wringing water out of sopping wet blankets and folding up tarps.

It looks like we have another week of thunderstorms ahead of us. I hope it lets up eventually so the stucco guys can come back and finish the job.