Week 56: 17 - 23 July

Jul. 19, 2023

It has been 3 weeks since I posted and while it seemed like not much happened, as I looked through these photos, I actually realise that it did. We also had some extra activity last week as the puppy got spayed and required a lot more attention than usual. (More on that below.)

We got the lighting and electricity finished in the basement which means that we now have a working garage door opener and lights throughout the house, even though all but the basement are temporary.

As mentioned before, one of the biggest blockers to getting things moving again has been the heat pump. (Also more on that below!) We decided that we would paint the garage, technical room and cellar ourselves (i.e. Lauren wanted to get her hands dirty and feel like she was contributing to the project!). Lauren started that 2 weeks ago with the primary goal of having the wall that the heat pump goes on painted before it got installed. Of course, it’s weeks later now and it’s still not installed the rush was unnecessary.

Either way, we also decided along the way that we’re going to paint the walls something other than white so we decided to get some paint samples. Cue an interesting discovery that paint samples really don’t exist here. People pick from a paint book, buy the paint and that’s what they use - for good or for bad. The smallest size “sample” you can get is 1 kg, which will cover about 10 sq m of wall with 2 coats. And that’s assuming that the colour is saturated enough…we had one sample that had a minimum size of 3 kg! Another interesting discovery is that here, you have to add water to your paint before actually painting. So, in that 1 kg example above, you need to actually add 100ml of water and stir it up before using. Paint sheens like matte, eggshell, satin or glossy also aren’t a thing here. For interiors, there are two types to choose from based on whether you want it to be washable or not. The non-washable, “normal” type is as matte finish as they come and the washable type is somewhere between matte and glossy but really a sheen of its own.

Getting the paint samples has been absolutely fascinating just because generally speaking, people seem to either do white or a bright colour, like an accent wall. This is because coloured paint is so expensive. And “whites” barely exist. Unlike in US where you can get an entire book of white’s, they just don’t exist here. So. It’s going to be interesting to see how this turns out.

Next post, I will include some photos of the paints and mixing process. I feel like a mad scientist when I’m measuring out weights of paint and ml of water.

Lighting and Electricity

It was a very happy day when we were able to use our new garage door opener and have permanent lighting in the garage. We weren’t too concerned about the looks of the lights in the basement garage and so let the electrician choose them based on his experience with how much lighting we would need and where to place them. He did a fantastic job and the basement lighting is fantastic.

Upon entering the garage, there are lights on both the right and left sides with a small light on the opener itself.

The garage door unit is tiny compared to what I’m used to in US and much slower and more quiet. It’s a reputable German brand, Hörmann. German engineering is well respected here and the best electronics and appliances tend to be German.

The garage is much longer than the car so we will be putting shelving units in the back for extra storage. The area is well-lit with three overhead and you can see in the back left corner the area for our workbench. We’ve picked that out (another German brand) and will get that after we move in.

The two lights dangling from the ceiling will be more normal ceiling fixtures. One of the things that we are doing this week (no photos yet) is meeting with 3 different light shops/studios to get our lighting situation sorted out. We’ll probably use a combination of services between all of them since Lauren has already picked out some tentative lighting ideas and not all lighting studios carry all of the lights.

The first “before painting” shot with ceiling lights. The pipes will eventually be “wrapped”, or have sort of boxes built around so the room looks more finished.

I think these are all parts of the heat pump. The tall box is the unit that will go inside the technical room.

The cellar also has great lighting which will be even better when the walls are painted. As you can see, we’ve already started moving some of our gardening equipment into the cellar.

The basement stairs also has a temporary light which will be replaced with a nicer wall light.

The same light from the main floor.

Painting

We mentioned before that Lauren started painting the technical room so that it had paint before the heat pump was installed. This is the “before” photo…

After one coat…

Two coats! Note that she only did half of the room because the heat pump boxes were too big and heavy to move away from the wall. After the heat pump is installed, she’ll finish and add some additional colour to the walls.

She also didn’t paint around the pipes properly since they’ll soon be enclosed and then those will need to be painted.

Heat Pump

As ridiculous as it sounds…this little shelf on the side of the house has been the cause of all the delays with getting the heat pump installed. There have been endless disagreements about how it should be built and whether it has been built properly or not. I won’t go into the details but the current news is that the heat pump will be installed by Friday. We will see…we’ve heard that one before.

The indoor unit was at least partially unboxed today so there’s a chance that it really will get installed this week.

The front of the unit. (Another piece of German equipment.)

Minor Repairs

There were some minor repairs that we needed and were happy to see that they started working on some of them.

This is a fix of the join between the first and second floors. In the right (or wrong, depending on your perspective) lighting, you could see the uneven spackle and the lines between the floors. This has been redone and when the painters return, it will be sanded and repainted.

The wall between the basement and main floor needed some tweaks, so they’ve added more drywall and have started working on that.

When they set the walls down on the foundation, they were off by a few inches which meant that the main floor wall hung out over the basement steps. They have started the repair but shortening the wall and will drywall and repaint it.

Cladding

One of the fun things about where we are in the build process right now is that we’re at the point where we get to start doing some fun things like choosing the design elements that ultimately we’ll get to see every day. We debated a fair amount over the options but ultimately, we’ll need to cover the exterior of the front staircase and garage level with something. We had options like just painting it the same colour as the house, using “marmolite” which is a sort of decorative stucco that people here often use around the base of their houses. It comes in about 50 colours or multicoloured and is probably the most commonly used product in this situation. We finally decided on cladding, which then led us to narrow down the choices to natural stone or imitation made of concrete. Stano had his heart set on natural stone since we have some on an accent wall in our apartment and so we set out on a road trip to Zlín on Monday to visit a stone showroom. We narrowed it down to 8 samples - 6 natural stone and 2 concrete. We took some samples, headed back to the property and made our choice!

Five of the natural stone options that we narrowed it down to, leaning against the facade to see how they look.

The two imitation stone options.

Our final pick, next to the front door to see how it looks next to the doorframe. We opted for a cream travertine. It’s fairly one note in terms of colour and is so close to the facade colour but that was by design. The different textures make it interesting and when all is said and done, we’re going to have planters with ivy hanging down in front of it and plants on the ground it front of it to break up the cream colour. We worried that if the stone coloring was too busy, then the plants wouldn’t be as obvious.

Stano holding up the cladding to see how it looks next to the garage door.

Railings

The windows here are typically European and open in a variety of ways. There are two ways to “vent”, and they can be opened at the top or at the side like a door. Due to the fact that the three upstairs windows are full height, there needed to be something to keep people (and wily puppies) from falling out of the window when it was fully open.

We were happy to see when we arrived at the property today that the railings have been installed and they look really nice. Here’s the railing for the master bedroom window.

The guest bedroom.

Lauren’s sewing room.

The master bedroom from outside.

Guest bedroom and sewing room.

Dirt Removal

The original plan was to install the rain water retention tank a few weeks ago when our builder realised that as soon as we installed it, we would have trouble getting the extra piles of dirt out of the backyard. The retention tank install was delayed and instead they started removing dirt.

Sasha is filling up the truck with dirt.

The dirt is gone! The pile behind it is all top soil that we are keeping. It will be spread out after everything is done.

From the master bedroom you can start to see how the backyard is going to look.

With that pile of dirt gone, the backyard feels enormous.

Our neighbors have also been getting their excess dirt piles removed and having the ground evened out. This is the view to the north of a few recently cleared back yards.

And the view to the south. Sasha is also working for our neighbor to remove the dirt from his yard.

An awesome Tatra truck. This is a well known old brand from the area of Slovakia that Stano is from. It is named after the High and Low Tatra mountain ranges in Slovakia. Lauren loves these trucks.

Trees

With all the photos of the house, we have been neglecting updates on the trees.

One of our apple trees is finally producing apples this year.

The same for one of the peach trees.

And our pears are again being productive.

The New Bed

Our first piece of furniture has arrived and is ready for us! Of course it hasn’t been delivered yet but the store that we ordered it from set it up in their showroom and let us see it. We absolutely love it and can’t wait to sleep on it.

Puppy Updates

So, as previously mentioned, this week has been a little bit chaotic because last week the puppy got spayed and had her rear dewclaws removed (they were sort of mangled and causing problems). So last Monday, she had the surgery and then the fun began. She’s not a very good patient and unfortunately, she’s very determined and very smart.

We ended up going through 4 different types of cones and collars in an attempt to keep her from getting to her belly and foot stitches. We started out with a normal for her size cone which was 10cm long…then moved onto an inflatable collar. Within 2 minutes, she had ripped the bandages off of her rear legs. We moved up to a 15cm collar…and she discovered that if she leaned over and choked herself with her collar, then she could JUST get to the edge of her bandages and rip them off…we were able to keep her from them during the day when we were awake but she was completely untrustworthy if we wanted to do something as silly as sleep. So we finally pulled out the big guns. A THIRTY cm long collar meant for a GREAT DANE. And this is what we had to put on her at night so she couldn’t get to her tiny feet and lick! We were fairly certain that she was going to murder us in our sleep but the problem was solved…in the most ridiculous manner possible.

She got her stitches removed today - it only took 4 people holding her and talking to her to get them out but she was super. Totally relaxed and didn’t make a noise. Afterwards, she had a fun game of chase with the vets and we were thrilled to see that she’s not scared of them which we were worried about after her surgery.

The already oversized 15cm cone at lunch one day.

The ridiculous 30cm cone. It looks like it’s one of those weird fake perspective photos but no. This is really how long it was.

The cone was as big as she is.

She continued to be an excellent supervisor puppy despite being in recovery.