Renovation Update: Almost There!

It's been several days since my last real post ... but I'm pleased to report that we've moved in! It has been a crazy couple of days of moving boxes into the apartment while up to eight contractors and workers scrambled to put the final touches together. Unfortunately, our home laptop crashed last week, so I can't post or upload pictures from home. There's not much to see, either, as every corner of the apartment is filled with half-unpacked boxes and suitcases. It will be a long week putting our home back together.

The good stuff:

• the master bedroom is a cool, sophisticated color with a dynamite pendant light fixture;
• our master shower is awesome - a totally luxurious enclave with a strong, relaxing water flow and quiet, secluded feel to it;
• closets, closets, and more closets;
• the brand new floors look dynamite - no splinters, no buckling, just yards and yards of polished bamboo brilliance;
• I have a hallway! City residents will attest, a true hallway is a rare, rare feature in most NYC apartments. No matter how the rest of the renovation turns out, the hallways make me feel like a wealthy man.

The bad stuff (for now):

• a lot of the plumbing isn't in final form yet; they've jerry-rigged a few things until various valves and pipe fittings arrive sometime this week;
• those brand new floors are slip slip slippery;
• we've only now realized that the hallway and master bathroom have no air conditioning vents, so it is going to get pretty humid back there during the summer;
• our master tileworker mislaid the marble tile around the medicine cabinet in the secondary bathroom (this is the second time this guy bungled the job - running up expenses for materials and pushing back the whole renovation a couple of weeks); and
• in the rush to finish the job, our contractors obviously cut a few corners - they installed the bathroom door lock on the outside of the bathroom (not much good there), they seem to have glued the towel bars onto the walls instead of sinking mollies into the tile and screwing them in (our double towel rack has already fallen off), they re-wired certain lighting fixtures to make our dimmer switches useless; and
• we now have 2 extra rooms (the new bedroom and hallway) to fit the same furniture that we used to have, plus we've shed at least 3 big pieces of furniture in anticipation of the renovation (a coffee table, china cabinet and sofa). So we're not back to sitting on pillows on the floor of the living room until our new sofa and other pieces arrive (which isn't too soon, since we haven't bought everything yet ...).

So, all in all, it's great to be back home, but there's plenty of work to do. I'll try to get pictures up later this week.