In the last few days and weeks, things have really been coming together on the house. Our contractor gave us the first of many bills and was so shocked that we paid him the following day, he promised us that instead of finishing the job in January, he will be doing everything in his power to get everything finished by Christmas, even if it requires sleeping at the house himself. So what exactly has to be done still?

In the kitchen (but not necessarily in this order)

• Finish hanging drywall
• Run water lines
• Finish out walls & ceiling
  
• Put down estrich (insulation layer) on floor
• Lay floor tiles
• Assemble kitchen cabinets & mount as necessary
• Install appliances
• Install granite counter top
  

Upstairs bath

• Remove old flooring
• Cover over fachwerk (wood beam) wall
• Run plumbing lines
• Install toilet & shower
• Tile floor & shower walls
• Put in bathroom furniture & sink

Rest of house

• Lacquer floors (Dec 13)
• Sand stairs & lacquer

In addition, the entire inside of the house will be painted but that won’t be taking place until the week of January 1st. This means we can’t really move anything into the house until then unless it’s going into a room that won’t be painted again (kitchen, new baths or somewhere in one of the other buildings outside).

But before many of these things can be completed inside the house, we still need some of the components.

• Kitchen windows & doors – These have been ordered already and should be here sometime next week.
  
• Shower – Ordered from Hornbach & it should be here next week or the week after
• Bathroom cabinets & sink – Still need to be purchased from IKEA
• Kitchen cabinets – Hopefully coming December 19th. They called us yesterday to say that a couple of pieces were missing and wanted to know if we wanted to cancel the order then. NOOOO! But they are minor cosmetic items and should be on hand again in January so we’re just hoping they tell us today that the delivery is still good to go for the 19th.
  
• Granite counter top – Still needs to be ordered & brought from Italy. We’re guessing we won’t get this in before Christmas at this point but we decided to wait to see exactly how the kitchen cabinets will turn out and the size counter we want exactly since it’s not like we can just order a new one if it’s not perfect.
• Floor tiles – We have paid for these already but still need to go pick them up. It’s two pallets of tiles, 60cm x 60cm each and they literally weigh 3 tons altogether. We’re using the same tiles for the kitchen, new entry, my new office, the bathroom upstairs and also our covered patio outside. We were incredibly blessed when we went to this tile store because the guy was looking to get rid of 77 square meters of tile he ended up with when a customer of his changed his mind. He made us a VERY good offer on the tile if we’d take the whole lot of it…and amazingly enough, it seems to be exactly the amount we need for all these spaces.
  

Ok, so there is still quite a bit to be done in the next week and a half. Most of the delays on the materials would be our fault since we waited too long to order a few things…mostly because we weren’t sure what we needed and were debating things with the architect. But everything is well underway now and although it seems that they are only making baby steps on the house lately, we know that when they do get down to it and really start working, they are incredibly fast and clean and we have full faith that they can finish this up by Christmas…now if everything would just get here.