Day 49: Sauna, Doors, and Final Paint

On Monday and Tuesday (Days 48 & 49, 18th–19th March) a lot of work happened again. Following up from the arrival of the sauna stove, the sauna benches are now installed. The stove will come later since it needs to be wired in by an electrician.

Also the doors are now installed. The photo above shows the door separating the vestibule from the hallway and the rest of the house. The cable above the door is probably for the door bell. Let's hope it's not going to be a totally horrible sound – we didn't get to choose that!

Also the door to the shower room (above) and the clear-glass door between shower and sauna are now installed.

Finally, the last bit of unpainted space got its finishing: the small bathroom's rear wall is now painted in an intense green ("Lime").

Day 47: Final Paint for Fireplace

On Day 46 (16th March), it was time for the final coats of paint for the fire place. First the whole thing was painted in an off-white colour ("Damasti"). This had to be applied twice, some three hours apart. The photo above shows the first coat of paint.

Finally, in the evening, the firewall part above the fireplace was painted in the same brown tone as the wall on the other side of the chimney ("Etruski"), and this was repeated by a second coat of brown on Sunday morning (Day 47, 17th March). The photo shows the final product, the fireplace stands out nicely against the contrast of the dark wall.

Since the weather was just brilliant, there was a chance and time to play with the extreme wide-angle GoPro camera. Above is a shot that would be hard to achieve with other cameras, a view that shows all kitchen/living room windows and the terrace door at once.

No, our windows are actually perfectly straight, but when going very close to the window with the GoPro, the extreme wide angle distorts the window frame. A nice view in any case.

Day 45a: Walls Painted

On Day 45 (14th March), the remaining walls were painted, and thus the final colour combination became apparent. The only thing remaining to be painted is the fireplace, which remains our responsibility. The photo above shows the wall behind the fireplace, which is painted in a nice, chocolaty brown (left: "Etruski", right: "Angora"). The same colour we chose for the wall behind the kitchen. Both kitchen and fireplace will be have the same colour and create a nice contrast against the dark brown.

Our daughter was extremely delighted to see her future room in her dream colours of pink and purple. Also here, white furniture will look fantastic on these background colours (left: "Pioni", right: "Hyasintti").

Fresh, and hopefully never tiring is the office room, with a wall in green. Also the white wall isn't really white, it is just a bit greenish (left: "Wasabi", right: "Seljankukka").

Finally the colours of our bedroom. Here we noticed that the computer screens are really not calibrated well enough to reproduce colours properly. On my screen the wall looks red, but in fact it's a much more brown tone, something like deep rust (left: "Inka", right: "Cashew").

Day 43a: More Walls Reveal Their Final Colour

On Day 43 (12th March), more walls received their paint, at least two coats for every wall. Apparently our choice of accentuating one wall in every room causes a lot of extra work, because the main paint can be applied rather fast, but then this needs to dry before the remaining wall can be painted. The photo above shows the eastern wall of the sitting room ("Angora").

You can probably guess, whose room this will be. We encountered this paint bucket previously ("Pioni"). The remaining two walls will be in purple.

The final photo for Day 43 is of our future bedroom ("Cashew"). The remaining walls will be painted tomorrow, and we are very excited to see the colour combinations we chose.

All in all it is very interesting to see the walls painted. When choosing colours on the basis of small paint samples, it is very hard to imagine what a whole wall might look like. As a general rule, choose the colour you like, and then take one shade brighter than that, since a whole wall will always appear darker than the sample. Fortunately we did know this rule beforehand, and we decided to make some bold choices of colour. However, the final feel of every room will become apparent once they are furnished.

Day 42: Paint, Tiles, and Sealant

This is a weird coincidence: It's Day 42 (11th March) of the construction of Our House, and it's Douglas Adams' 61st birthday! And, no, I wasn't tweaking the counting to match it, it just happened. Fantastic.

A lot of amazing things happened today. The shower room received three coats of sealant paint, which makes walls and floor watertight. Then the tiles were put on the walls. The photo above shows the area, where the shower will be, highlighted by one column of dark tiles. The funny strings everywhere are the spacers between the tiles, they will be removed later when the seams will be filled with grouting.

Here's a view of the utility room just after the first layer of sealant paint had been applied. Before, the walls were painted with a first coat in their final colour ("Soft Ice"), a very light beige.

Also three walls of the toilet were already painted in a light green shade ("Chablis"). The remaining wall opposite of the door will receiver a much stronger green ("Lime") later on. Here the floor had only received some sort of primer, and the same grey sealant paint was applied just after I took the photo.

Finally, the area where all the valves for the floor heating are, also had received the sealant paint, and then the lower end part of the hoses had been encased in plaster. The valves will eventually be hidden behind a panel screwed in front of this recessed area, which will then end up behind the wardrobe of the entrance area.

Day 41: First Coat of Primer for Fireplace

On Saturday, 9th March, it was our turn to work on Our House. The weather was just the best possible March weather with stunningly bright sunshine after a very cold night.

The fireplace needed the first coat of primer paint. We made it a family event and everyone helped sanding down the layer of plaster, using brushes to get rid of all the dust, mask the tiles, and then paint the whole fireplace with white primer. Above is a photo of the result, and it looks almost like the finished product. A final layer of plaster with a special rough finish will be applied next, followed by primer and the final paint.

Day 39: Fireplace Tiles and Paints

On Thursday, 7th March (Day 39), more stuff had arrived. Maybe you've been wondering what kind of colours we selected for all the walls since we posted a photo of all the possibly options we were considering over Christmas and New Year. It took us a couple of weeks to debate, and finally we submitted our choices to the house company. Now that the paints have arrived, there's no turning back. Here are a lot of buckets, but you can maybe guess whose room will be painted using the buckets marked "Pioni" and "Hyasintti."

The fireplace has had a very subtle change, which we almost missed completely: the mason must've been back, and he installed the small black tiles around the hatch for the fireplace.

Here's a better view of the same feature. These tiles are maybe 1.5 cm x 1.5 cm or so. The glass door of the fireplace will be installed afterwards, on top of the tiles and the plaster.

Here's a close-up of the oven door, which is recessed into the wall, and the bricks have not been covered with plaster yet. I wonder, how they will be sealed later on.

Colouring the Future

Today nothing happened on the land, due to low temperatures (–20°C) and lack of chain saws. Instead I went through all the paper work, sorted all the gazillion technical drawings into some sensible order, and checked the finances. In Finland, the value-added tax was increased from 23% to 24% at the beginning of the year, and we were happy to learn that Muurametalot will swallow the additional per cent, i.e. the price in our contract stands. Nice touch!

In the evening we finally finished a job, which – on and off – took some three weeks: we finalised our plan on which paint to use for which wall. We decided against wallpaper, because we think one can grow tired of any design, and it's tricky to change, while painted walls can simply be painted over. Therefore, we can also be a bit more bold in the choice of colour. The photo shows all the paint samples we were looking at – a subset of twelve different tones were chosen in the end. Happy guessing, which these will be... :-)