Paint, tiles and heatpump

After successfully getting a good start on the paint primer last week, NDPro not only finished priming but managed to get most of the house painted with the first coat of colour. It really makes a huge difference to how the house looks - the patchiness that the bare drywall and mudding produces is all covered up and the timbers really stand out. Much of the upper floor is a soft - though alarmingly stridently named - green, with a stronger green for backup. Other areas pair a couple of tan-based colours. It all looks very calming and homey and goes well with our furniture.

Looks almost like home

On tuesday Mike Gervais started on laying the tiles for us. We chose some very black, quite textured, 12” by 24” porcelain tiles, which were a bit of a brave leap but already we can see it was correct. They look fabulous; although very black they somehow manage to reflect a lot of light back onto the walls. It is probably something to do with the tiny sparkly particles embedded in the surface

Master bathroom floor tiled

Kitchen tiled

As of today the kitchen, hallway, mudroom and both bathrooms are done, with just the laundry and closets left to do - plus all the grouting of course. Which, obviously, will be black. So far it seems that I managed to get the amount of tiles just about right, though the batch of 12” by 12” tiles I got to save time when cutting half-tiles at ends and edges turned out to be a bust. They aren’t actually the seam 12” as the main tiles - which are actually 11¾” by 23½”. This is yet another example of the total insanity that haunts the building industry - nothing is actually the size it is labelled for.

Ken Johnston finished the commissioning of the heating system on wednesday and hooked up the fairly intimidating remote for it. One neat capability is that the fans can be set to run for a few minutes per hour just to stir the air up and even out the temperatures. I haven’t found the latté making button yet.