Building a home in the 21st Century

Future Honey Wagon contributor

saccoleone — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:41:26 +0000

Hasn’t anyone else ever seen the Honey Wagon? It’s a giant truck that comes to your house when your septic tank is full, and it sucks up all the poo. I actually just saw in on Rt 12 the other day.

I took one picture of the septic tank….after it was half covered. But to make up for all I missed, I also took a picture of the man moving the dirt.

I forgot I also took this picture of my beautiful plants and herbs. If you're ever in need of fresh basil, cilantro, parsley or lettuce, stop on by!

Wood floors

saccoleone — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:27:34 +0000

We decided to install quarter sawn hickory throughout the house. Here are some pics of the process and unfinished product (it’s being stained tonight).

Flooring going into the front bedroom.

Trivia question: which stain did we choose? You'll have to wait for the next post to find out, but the winner who comments with the correct guess will win all the leftover stain!

Front bedroom

Nice picture of the area where the hallway meets the guest bath.

Window work

saccoleone — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:14:49 +0000

And since I’ve been in the process of finishing the molding, Nick decided it would be a good idea for me to sand, condition and stain all of the windows, which I also did.

And then I had to do three coats of poly. However, Nick and I went to the mall, and I got him to go shopping in three different stores in exchange for helping him do all of the poly work on the window jambs.

Very exciting.

So, here are some pictures of our very impressive work:

One of the windows off so that I can stain the jambs.

Dining room bay windows. The small ones are my favorite.

A close up to show the contrast between the original wood color and the stain on the jambs.

Staining and Polying -or- My life for the last three+ months

saccoleone — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:05:33 +0000

The last three months or so have consisted of sanding, conditioning, staining, polying, sanding and then polying again.

Yes, I’ve been working on the molding for the ENTIRE house. I can’t say I did it alone. I had a lot of help from Nick’s mom and Aunt Mimi, but I have no pictures of us in action. However, I took a picture of the final result. Let this be proof that every time someone called or text me to hang out or do something fun, I really was working at the house.

P.S. – The pictures don’t do much justice, but just remember, this molding goes around the entire floor of the house AND all of the windows and doors.

I tried to take a picture that showed how much molding there is, but nothing seemed to do it justice.

Tile Floors

saccoleone — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 02:57:16 +0000

Our dear good friend Fred is doing our flooring and we are so lucky to have him doing them! He is beyond meticulous (which goes well with Nick’s case of OCD) and has given us some great advice on how to design our space. Check out the pictures of him putting in our kitchen floor.

More grout. We never took a final picture, but whatever. Let's just say it looks AMAZING.

The land is moving

saccoleone — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 04:02:25 +0000

Our excavator (I guess that’s what you’d call him) has started making appearances again. He has to finish grading the land and setting up our leech (sp?) field. Check out the backyard. No more giant hill of dirt in the way.

COLOR!!!

saccoleone — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:57:15 +0000

Kitchen walls -River Gorge Grey

More kitchen/dining room wall

Our guest bath in "Fennel Seed"

Two living room walls are "Hush."

The remaining walls in the central part of the house are all my favorite color, "Smokey Mountain Blue."

Love that blue

I hate to do this, but I don't remember this color. I want to say "Potter's Clay." This is the laundry room.

I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT ALL PAINTS ARE BENJAMIN MOORE. SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO MY LADY LINDA AT URBANICK’S IN UTICA. SHE HELPED US PICK EVERYTHING! SHE WAS AMAZING, AND I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND HER IF YOU’RE LOOKING TO MAKE A COLOR SPLASH IN YOUR HOME. DOES CAPS LOCK MAKE THIS SEEM LIKE I’M SHOUTING???

Wires, a hot water tank, and a furnace

saccoleone — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:41:38 +0000

But don’t ask me which is which. I confuse the hot water tank and furnace all the time….actually I might be confusing them right now. One might actually be a boiler? What’s the difference anyways? This is really terrible. But alright, here are some pictures. Figure it out yourselves!!!

All the wires that need to be WIRED into the circuit breaker box. If I knew how to do it myself, I would.

Some pipes and nobs. I really wanted to turn them all, but I held back.

Our robot, Ray.

I don't know what this is.

I told you those drywall guys used stilts! I snapped a pick on my tour of the house!

The beginnings of an interior

saccoleone — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:09:00 +0000

How cute is he? I love the drywall dust on the face look. Drywall is exciting, but I felt like this was NEVER going to be finished! Special drywall for the bathroom.: This picture gives you a good idea of what our textured ceilings look like.

That's a lot of drywall.

Fixtures, fixtures everywhere! I’m not even going to try and explain this photo.

I could show you more pictures, but they’re pretty much the same thing. Drywall. Lots of it. And lots of dust to go with it. The cleaning process consisted of:

1. Swiffering the walls.

2. Vacuuming every CREVICE along with the ENTIRE floor with a dryvac (Nick did this. Thank GOD!)

3. Mopping the entire house with a plain ‘ole bucket of water. (Nick forced me to do this against my will. I got blisters.)

I guess it was all worth it because when our painter (Nick’s cuzzie, Danny) arrived, he told us we saved him at least a half a day worth of cleaning.

Without further ado…

saccoleone — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:28:30 +0000

The moment some people have been waiting for (I mean, let’s be honest, not many people probably really care about our spray foam). Anyways, here are the pictures Nick took today. He spent something like 8 hours at the house today just staring at it. Not really, but I don’t know what he WAS doing, so that works for me.

This spray foaming was done by Upstate Spray foam from West Winfield, NY. They ate 12 donuts while they were there (I brought them a dozen).