The last .01% of any project seems to take forever. We went up there Saturday (you will see why, in a moment), and the builder had finished replacing the baseboard in the laundry room, bolted the dishwasher and trash compactor into place (they were free to move front to rear--quite disconcerting), and put some wood spacers in to keep the microwave oven from moving in the cabinets. All that is left is to get three of the doors to stop trying to close themselves. I do not want to live in a house occupied by ghosts!
The builder is reluctant to mess with moving the door frames to solve this problem (which were probably caused by settling of the foundation), because it would require substantial repainting. He tried a solution that I found on the Internet--bending the hinge pin, so that it resists closing. He tried roughening the hinges with a file. Neither of these solutions fixed it--and our builder apparently has no other solution, short of moving the door frames. Any other ideas out there?
Anyway, there is so little left to be done on the inside--just the door hinges--that we started to packing up books to move them on Saturday. From now, we will try and move something up there, everytime we visit. We have a very large built-in bookshelf in our current family room, and that's part of why we had an enormous built-in bookshelf added to the office.
You can see it, with all the books removed.
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Unfortunately, we have no big boxes around the house, and no book boxes. So we ended up using plastic shopping bags. You know how libraries in rural areas have bookmobiles in which they take books to outlying areas? This looks like a bookmobile run by morons.
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Not every book gets to go. We are culling a few books that are outdated, unwanted, or that don't justify a second read. (But hey, if you want them, we can work out a deal.)
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Anyway, after moving this small load of books into the office, we started scouring the hillside for building debris (largely cardboard and paper scraps), and mounding up for the builder to haul away. This was a surprisingly demanding task, since we have more than eleven acres, and some of the scraps were astonishingly heavy, considering that the wind moved them where they were. Our feet were too muddy to go back into the carpeted office, so I had to settle for taking a picture through the window, giving this effect that reminds me of Disneyland's "The Haunted Mansion" ride.
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While talking to the builder, we found out that Friday, a co-worker and his wife had come on by. Since our builder had seen me with this co-worker at the site, he gave him a tour. The co-worker is thinking, "This might be a nice place to live." So perhaps I will have someone to carpool to work with in a few more months.
Last house project entry.
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