Last November we hired a couple of friends of friends to tile our bathroom shower. With my Sandri Solar hot water job I simply didn’t have time to do it myself. We are really happy with the results. I love being able to just walk right into the shower; no big step; no shower curtain or door. Adam came up with a nice design for the colored tiles we got. The tiles are all seconds from the now defunct Dakor Center. As a result the white tiles are a mix of a few different shade–I actually think it looks better than if they were all one shade of white. I really wish we had curved tiles for all of the inside corners.

Custom tile walk in shower

If I designed another shower with entrance opposite the shower head, I would put the valving near the entrance. With it right below the shower, one has to cock the head to the side and stand to the other side to avoid the initial cold water.

Although I didn’t have time to do the shower, I did make time to tile the bathroom floor. Amazingly, we retrieved enough slate squares from the same outfit where we got the granite counter top scrap for the first floor floor. The slates are all showroom samples; they had recently decided to stop carrying slate. You can also see the marble sink that we got from Renew before we even broke ground. The base was a Home Depot damaged model so it needed some minor repair. I cut a back splash from some of our 3/4″ granite.

Slate bathroom floor

I never did put up any pictures up of the finish carpentry that happened last winter.

Adam and I built this railing out for the loft entirely out of red oak milled up from our own trees. The railing was built on the ground and installed as a unit. Adam’s measurements were, once again, spot on. With a few minor scrapes on the wall, it fit right in.

Our hired finish carpenter Bill D.

Bill hung all of our interior doors. This one is the master bedroom door. The doors are a mix and match of showroom models that were resold through Renew in Brattleboro.

The finish stairs to the third floor were also installed by Bill.

Along with hundreds of other homes and businesses we will be participating in the NESEA (Northeast Sustainable Energy Association) Green Homes Open House tours on October 13th from 10-3. You can find out more at NESEA‘s website.

A couple of weeks ago we had water bubbling up from the ground where our water line connects to the city line… not a good sign. Luckily this is the town’s responsibility–and as we found out it wasn’t even the connection we put in. The leak was further up the line by a couple of feet. Incidentally this shot shows some of the progress on our front walk. I bought 2 tons of Goshen stone ($75/ton) from http://www.goshenstone.com, and have been slowly piecing it together. Even if the walk had been finished the DPW was able to dig without disturbing the walk.

Greenfield DPW at work fixing the leak

So for those who have followed the blog you know that we inoculated oak logs from the trees we cut down with shiitake mushroom spore (see post from 2010/05/28. What a bumper crop this year! I have been encouraging them to flush by soaking them in lots of water. We inoculated some logs with chicken of the woods and maitake, but neither seems to have taken. The log pictured below is our prize winner. I counted 33 mushrooms on it!

Shiitake mushrooms!