Finally, final finishes

Welcome back. It seems that I take longer breaks from the blog than Bill Maher takes from Real Time.

Last I wrote we had received permission to insulate and close the walls, and that process got underway. Since then, we’ve made some serious headway, as you’ll see from the images below. Once the walls were closed we started looking for a final finish carpenter to take the house through the doors, floors, trim, cabinets and tile phase – and of course started buying the parts to finish things up. Our finish carpenter is Steve Lenghel - referred by our Mason, actually. Steve’s a great guy, hard working and reasonable. He’s willing to bend over backwards and, as you’ll see in this post and future posts, his work is darn good.

This post will focus on the finish selections we’ve made, and the progress towards what could be a Thanksgiving completion (or darn near one).

Kitchen cabinetry came from Home Depot. We got a killer deal on KraftMaid’s better cabinets with funky little features like slow-closing drawers and plywood sides that should do a bit better under the weight of granite countertops. There’s a fair amount of glass in the cabinets too, which is in keeping with our intent to keep things as light and open as possible.

Flooring came from Lumber Liquidators. Not bad, but I’m not sure I’d go that route again. 1st floor is mahogany, 2nd and 3rd are tigerwood (no relation to the golfer). All the flooring is prefinished solid 3/4″ x 5″ wide plank – but they sell wood with “microbevels” on each edge. Although the bevels certainly make for a more forgiving installation on a pre-finished product, they also create the illusion of a floor install that’s not as tight as one where the raw wood is installed, and then sanded and finished in place. Of course this issue disappears the first time the floors are refinished, though hopefully that’s years away.

Railings and metalwork came from Security Iron Works. Yes, seriously. A few years have passed since Joe the Iron Guy made his way from his native Italy to his workshop in South Philly. In those years, he’s clearly gotten pretty darn good at his craft. At first I was a bit concerned about using someone who I perceived as being accustomed to doing more traditional railings. Any hesitations I had, however, went away with his installation. The railings speak for themselves. Designed in concept by Dave (with some input from me), Joe took the principles of a more modern look that we gave him and hit it out of the park. Again, plenty of pics below.

Tile selections all came from Avalon Carpet and Tile. Again, with tile there’s really no good option for someone like me who wants to see everything in person and can’t pick tile from a book. Avalon has an enormous showroom, but they’re pretty much the only game in town so they have you over a barrel. They were willing to negotiate pricing and ended up giving us their “level 4″ rate, which is generally reserved for volume contractors. The formula seems to be (a) we show up (b) the sales folks fall in love with Dave (c) I move in for the price adjustments and (d) they look at Dave, sigh and say “okay.” It’s a cool effect. Everyone should have a Dave.

You’ll also see the bar area cabinets (the single sink base and a few wall cabinets). They came from Ikea. This was a budget call, but in fact was a great choice I think. The cabinets are very well built compared to the typical Ikea product. They have the slow close feature and solid wood fronts – in fact they have better hinge systems, in my opinion, than the more expensive Kraft Maid kitchen cabinets.

One final note about the various parts not mentioned above. It is amazing how much of this house was ordered online and delivered for free. I would highly recommend anyone going through this process spend lots of time shopping online. An incredible timesaver, it provides more choice than you could ever hope for. As I mentioned before, some things (like tile) just need to be seen in person first. Light fixtures, door handles, bath cabinets, faucets, recessed lighting trims, sinks, toilets and other less critical and more mass manufactured items are easy to get online and usually the best price comes with free shipping.

Anyway, those of you who have been following along definitely deserve some pictures after all this waiting. Here ya go.