What–no backsplash?

During the design phase of the house, we searched and searched for a good kitchen backsplash that was Mid-century Modern enough, easy to keep clean, and not sky-high expensive. What were our options? Well, the easiest and most popular was to just extend our quartz countertop up the wall another four inches. Meh. Had the …

Modern Christmas Tree

So one of these days I'll actually take photos of all the rooms of the house now that it's mostly done (I still need to do some interior design stuff in the basement, etc.). That takes a lot more time than you'd think, tho, and means a major disruption in the room I'm shooting, so …

Some Compaction Action

I've been itching to get all the rock that the excavator installed compacted, because it's a little wobbly to walk on right now. Also, when we turn our vehicles on it in the driveway, the tires dig up the rock and cause problems. But when the irrigation was up and running, we could finally see …

Irrigation

Yeah, it's that time. It's been that time forever, but we had to wait until the excavator was done to put in any landscape water lines. That's another reason that slow dirt mover had to go. We can't plant any trees or prairie grass until the water's in, and that really needs to happen this …

Remember that Door?

I wrote about our Front Door Story several months ago while we were building the house. You can read it here. I love that door. Here's the photo of Mom in front of it: I got it sanded and ready to finish before it was installed, but our builder said we should wait to finish …

Hiring Someone v. Doing It Ourselves: Dirt Version 2.0 (Three Days v. One Month and Counting)

Version 1.0 is in this post. Long story, short: We hired the first dirt guy on 14 July, expecting he'd get everything done within a couple weeks. We didn't know he was doing this job after his other, 12-hour-a-day job. Excuse after excuse after excuse later, he still hadn't finished by 16 August. The last …

Why We Need To Fix Our Excavation

We need to move dirt around mostly because our house is on a mini hill, but also because we have drainage issues. We've had a drought this summer in Cedar City, so it didn't rain for about three months. Then one day, it rained. And rained. A lot. We didn't have a culvert in the …

We Finally Got Our HERS Rating (and a Rocking Air Exchange Rate)

Waaaaaay back in the beginning of our building experience, our first builder suggested we obtain an eventual HERS rating. He uses that in his marketing, so I'm sure he was eager to have us foot that bill (and, of course, pay his profit margin on it as well). We sat down with the rater before …

Hiring Someone v. Doing it Ourselves: Dirt Version

The question we have had to revisit many, many times with our house: do it ourselves or hire it out? This question implies that hiring out means it will be done faster and better, and more expensively than if we did it ourselves. But we've found that that's not always the case. Sometimes it ends …

Master Plan

The final plan didn't look too much different from the preliminary, but I did fill in the grasses in the backyard a bit and added some outlying trees in the northwest area. I put the shade garden and the plant schedule on a different page, which looked better. Anyway, even though my class is finished, …