Domestic Activities

 Now that I look back on the end of that summer, I am amazed at the progress on the house! But at the time it seemed to take forever! It was hard to keep to a temporary camping-style life, so out came some domestic anchors... the sewing machine, for instance.

 Laundry, always there. Will be there all of our lives.

 You can see at the bottom of the photo there were some stamps and ink pads sneaking in under the laundry....

 

RV chores. 

 

Speaking of RV chores, sometimes construction had to be RV focused. Here you see a thickly insulated box/mini shed that kept our water and plumbing hookup from freezing in the winter. Sort of a miniature well house.

The one big event of the year... taking fiddle classes at the fairgrounds. We were constantly cutting out social events, holidays, and vacations to focus every chunk of free time on construction, but the fiddle workshop qualified as "school!"

Rafters

Just beautiful:)
 

Double Columns

 

Double porch columns, made from 2x6 and 2x4 lumber, will be "wrapped" with something like a veneer... at least that is as close to the plan as I can explain. 

(Don't say anything, but it has been so long since this "wrap the columns" plan has not been done, that I am cleaning my paint brushes on the columns whenever they are loaded with white paint... shh...)

Scaffolding came in handy in more ways than one. With the builder gone during the day, I could take advantage of solar dryer...

Windows: Pros & Cons 2

 Part 2: complaint close-ups!

 This part of the window was very disappointing. We knew that these were not real "panes" and that some sort of spacer had to be put in to these windows, but we thought for the price this was a very low quality spacer. It is essentially a piece of thin plastic.

 If you are sitting at certain angles to the window, you can see right through the spacer. If you are not seeing through it, you are seeing the dark plastic (at least they could have made it white to match the rest of the material of the windows).

I don't know why we didn't notice this on the samples at the supply company, but possibly it was that we were looking at completely different windows because of course these were custom designs. But on the Milgard Website, their drawing of this particular detail showed a thick block, as in solid-looking, not a thin piece, so I felt it was false advertising. For these kinds of windows, and between the glass, I understand why it has to be this way, but we were still disappointed.

We had to swallow that disappointment, because there was nothing anyone could do about it.  But the next thing did get fixed!

This was unacceptable! And sort of the "last straw" for us.Many a night's sleep was lost because of thinking about all the money spent on windows that might just be no better than low-quality ones after all!

I complained to Milgard and they sent a repairman out who filled in all these gaps at the tops of all the windows. He even said he would get us some missing handles, and he adjusted some of the window hardware so that they would not be so loose to crank. He looked at some screens that appeared damaged. We felt like it was great customer service! 

However, he stopped answering texts about sending the handles (we still don't have them) and was never heard from again, at least by us! This post reminds me that we got so busy with the rest of the house, I never got to back to Milgard about those handles or the screens that needed replaced...

Overall, I think Milgard is very generous with their lifetime guarantee, and the windows are solid and after all we would probably say very good quality. We were disappointed at what we think is a design flaw of the inner piece, but were pleased that they came out to fix the manufacturing flaw.