Parental Approval Required

My parents and sister came down today to see the house and drop off my mom's minivan so we can use it when we start moving. It was great to see them. With all the house craziness we haven't gotten to visit them in Winston-Salem for a long time. Since it's been a month or more since their last visit, there have been lots of changes they've only read about on the blog. And now they're reading this blog post (Hi Mom!). How very meta. It's come full circle.

Parental approval was achieved on basically all levels. They seem very excited about the progress and love seeing the house IRL ("in real life" for you non-nerds out there).

The tall order for today (and the next few days) is getting the house finished to the point that we can get our Certificate of Occupancy or "CO" for hip contractors in the know. One thing we need for the CO is having the plumbing installed and running. That means getting the vanities in. The master bathroom vanity doesn't quite fit because measurements didn't account for the width of the molding around the door. Above, you can seem Miles working on said vanity to make it fit. He cut off about 3 inches on the back to make it shallow enough to fit in the space. Now we just have to find a sink that fits and fixtures to install while we get our CO. Problems come up and we solve them, folks. That's how we roll at the Petty Home.

Here's the vanity dropped in. Because we thought the vanity was going to be larger than it now is in it's modified form, we'll have to get a new top to fit. It's sort of a non-standard size so there will bit of jury rigging involved in meeting the requirements for the CO while we order the correct size for the vanity top. Lots of ideas thrown around today, but we'll make it work and get the correct top and make it look nice when it's all said and done.

This lead to measuring out other things that will be going in the bathroom like towel rods and toilet paper holders.

Kelly got involved in placement ideas for maximum dumping optimization.

And before you know it the whole family was involved.

While standing in the shower taking photos I snapped one of the new drain that will be in the shower. Nice choice Miles.

These shelves in the laundry closet will be great for storage and still give us lots of room for storing things like vacuums and brooms underneath. The washer and dryer will be stacked on the right.

Then the skies decided to open up, which was actually really helpful to see in action. With rain and dime sized hail coming down in buckets, we got to see first hand what kind of gutters and drainage we'll need in various parts of the yard. There are already some pipes buried in the back of the house to direct water away from the foundation, but after seeing today's downpour we'll likely be putting gutters on the front at some point down the road.

You can really see the water splashing down off the roof. I wish this was a better shot of Emon's son man-handling the compressor they had at the work site across the street. You can barely see the amazing feat of Herculean power in the bottom of the image.

Another shot of rain pouring off the roof. Please note the river of water running in the back yard. Hopefully the gutters and piping in the ground can handle these southern rain squalls that blow up. After seeing this downpour I'm very glad we're up on a hill. There was literally a small river running down the street and flooding some of the yards of neighbors in lower lying areas down the road.

While the weather was lashing buckets outside it looks like it's snowed in the attic. All the insulation has been blown in.

Since we don't have the attic light installed yet I had to take photos using the flash to see what it actually looks like. Cozy.