Great room and kitchen progress

The Maple flooring in the great room is now complete! This will be a living, dining, and kitchen area. 

The garage has had the lighting installed which makes it a much better work area.

Finally, good progress has been made in the kitchen:

Upper cabinets are being built in the bedroom. Make use of all that space!

Window trim and retaining wall completion

Because ICF house exterior walls are unusually thick (over 11 inches finished on the main floor, 13 inches in the basement), the way that windows are installed poses a unique challenge for doing window trim. With the help of some experts though, we found a nice vinyl product at Menards which made the job quite easy to complete. Here we are, preparing to rip the 10 foot long trim pieces down to size.

 The finished product:

 After gluing, some wood gives the pressure needed to hold things in place:

 A close-up shows how well this white vinyl trim product matches the white vinyl windows and the white painted drywall returns.

Outside, the retaining walls have been completed. The largest walls are a segmental block design.

The smaller walls on the side of the house are natural boulders. Nearly all of these were found on site during house excavation.

Interior tiling and flooring progress

I've been too busy to post lately, so there is quite a bit of catching up to do! For starters, the ceiling of the master shower has been tiled (save one piece - ran out of adhesive!).

We're using a combination of Loctite PL-375 and Loctite Power Grab All-Purpose Construction Adhesive rather than thinset to attach these to the ceiling. Much easier!

Next, we started laying out the hardwood flooring. It is 3/4 inch thick solid Maple.

 We got about two thirds of the room nailed down in a weekend. The first rows take quite a while to get perfectly straight. Once you're past that though, things go much quicker with the tongue nailer.

The wood has a nice variety to it: