It did not take long (less than a week) but the framing is in place in the back lower part of the house and the Structural FX crew made good progress in preparing the front foundation for the single story that will extend all the way to the back over the downstairs part. Next week should be more dirt moving to fill in the foundation in front and finish digging the last of the foundation for the front garage.
We made another trip with our interior designer to a local hardware showroom to check out cabinet hardware, doors and crown moulding. It took about an hour to pick it all out. We spent another couple of evening hours searching on the web for cheap prices. There are tons of sites out there to choose from. The key is in marking down the model you want or manufacturer and checking their web site for the exact model, then entering that into a shopper site like shopping.com or froogle.com. Prices were about half of our local showroom.
The front door has been proving to be a little challenging. We want a simple shaker type panel door with squares at the top for light, 8 in all (not 6 like most of them come in). We ideally wanted to go fiberglass and Jeld-Wen had a nice model - Aurora, Craftman, priced around $2,600 but only 6 light squares. If the door faces south and is exposed to the sun (i.e., the porch should be as deep as the door is high to avoid light hitting it), a wood door will need re-finishing every 2-3 years, costly and a pain to do. Fiberglass is amazingly similar to wood grain and lasts much longer. Too bad we can't find the model we want!
Jeld-Wen has a Mahogany door with 8 windows but it's a little steep around $4K. We found a few web sites with Brazilian Mahogany (fabricated in Indonesia) with 6 panel doors selling around $1,300 delivered. We're having Wholesaledoorsource.com take out the 6 panel top and swap in an 8 panel beveled clear glass for about $2,000. Not bad!
We're just about done shopping for our granite. Some great deals to be had splitting the material order up to take advantage of best pricing by stone across the Bay Area. We'll consolidate the shipments at our house and found an installer who will just do install and doesn't care where we buy the materials from (New Art Stone in Stockton). We called a few of his references to check out there work and all looks good. By shopping around this way, we're finding our granite cost should be half of what some of the other single source Bay Area locals charge!
We're also just about done ordering tile after our blitz visit with the designer last week. This is probably not worth shopping around for. You could spend tons of time and end up saving very little. Better to focus elsewhere.
A friend pointed me to an excellent interior door supplier in Ohio - www.interiordoors.com Great prices on hardwood doors and the construction is really nice. We're not sure we'll ultimately go with them as I think we're settling on a paint grade MDF door.
We placed the order for all our windows. Pella provided our contractor with some nice pricing and they should be beautiful. They will be here in about 4 weeks.
Thomasville and Kraftmaid called to confirm our cabinet orders are being built. They will both be ready in 4 weeks, quite a bit faster than I thought. I'll have to make some serious room in our garage and outdoor gazebo now!
Last but not least - the fireplace mantel. We're now leaning towards doing a custom slate mantel in black and dark grey. My father designed and built his 14 years ago and it still looks superb. We think it will fit in well with our contemporary style interior and be a "piece de resistance". It's just one of those great warm reminders of home and we'd like to replicate it. I've been researching and calling some of the slate quarries in Vermont and NY to get quotes on custom cutting. More on this to come later as I sort out best pricing.
