Tile Floors

I discovered that we have an allowance in our contract to outfit the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, so I went over to the house this afternoon to measure the space. Dane said he'd set up an appointment with a closet designer they work with, so I wanted to be prepared. Josh and I will be sharing this closet, so we'll need to make efficient use of the space to fit all of our clothes (and shoes) in there without getting in each other's way.

Josh and I discovered another problem over the weekend. The pull-down ladder to access the A/C in the ceiling is too close to the light fixture in the back bedroom. It may look like there's plenty of room for a light, but we were planning to install a ceiling fan there. I pointed this out to Rob yesterday, and he agreed that it was a problematic. He said he wouldn't want to relocate the ceiling fan, since it is currently centered in the room, so he'd try to find a different style of pull-down ladder with a smaller profile. Unfortunately, today he told me that they couldn't swap out the ladder for a smaller one because there wouldn't be enough room to service the A/C, so we'll just have to remove the blades of the ceiling fan whenever we need to get up there. Let's hope that doesn't happen very often.
Ian and his crew were hard at work installing tile in the bathrooms. Romero and Juan were laying down the river rock floor in the shower in the master bath.
The grout in the laundry room was dry, and looked pretty sharp.
And Ian had laid out the Spanish tile floor in the downstairs bathroom.
Here's the river rock in the shower. It doesn't look so great with the hot pink walls, but once the white subway tile goes it, I'm sure it will look fabulous.
Ian had installed some of the blue mosaic accent tile in the upstairs bathroom
And started laying out the floor. (The blue circles go in the little holes between the white squares.)
However, Ian discovered that some of the tiles were off-white while others were white, so he had Romero go through all the remaining tile and sort them out. It turned out that nearly ALL the other tiles were off-white, so we dug the boxes out of the trash to see if they'd given us two different colors by mistake. As far as we could tell, all the boxes said "SNOW WHITE" (except for one that said "SNOM WHITE"), but the color was noticeably different. After he and I both made calls to Architectural Ceramics, it sounds like we will be able to exchange the off-white tile for white-white tile, but we won't know for sure until someone goes to the warehouse tomorrow with samples of both. I hope it works out, because it's going to be a real pain for Ian to pull up all the work he's already done and start over -- and the off-white isn't going to match the white subway tile in the shower.

Meanwhile, John made more progress on the stairs, installing the oak risers and treads on the steps between the landing and the second floor.
That made things a little tricky, since John and his tools were blocking most of the stairs and everyone else was working upstairs as well. Rob kept having to step over John while carrying long pieces of baseboard trim, and Ian and his crew had their tile saw set up outside, so they had to keep going up and down to cut pieces as needed. Miraculously, no one tripped over or bumped into anyone else -- at least not while I was there.

I left around 3:30 to meet with an LED lighting specialist at Dominion Electric. She confirmed that the Philips undercabinet lighting we looked at over the weekend was probably the best bet for our kitchen, both in terms of price and logistics, and helped me determine exactly what components we'd need for our kitchen layout. Apart from the closet design, I think that was the last major decision/purchase we had left, so we can finally see the (energy-efficient LED) light at the end of the tunnel.