House Build Progress and Moroccan Fish Scale Tiles

Our home is the closest it's ever been to being finished but there is still so much to do—all installation of interior hard finishes like lighting, flooring, cabinets, built-ins, fixtures, and countertops. The deck is halfway installed and bathroom tile work has begun.

When we chose white as the backdrop color for our modern space, I had no idea how complicated the color white can be. I may have overthought this step, but after hours (and hours) of research and indecision we finally settled on Chantilly Lace by Benjamin Moore for every room and all trim, with exception for the kitchen. Chantilly Lace is a true neutral white, not too blue and not too yellow, which will work well with the cool toned vibe in the bathrooms, as well as with the warm wood furniture that we already own and tend to gravitate toward in living spaces. The kitchen cabinets we ordered were the whitest in the color line offered by Wolf at the time (though they've since added a whiter white) but it is still warm in comparison and would probably come off as dingy if we kept Chantilly Lace as the wall color there, so we matched the wall paint to the cabinets to ensure that the whole space reads as white.

As we near the final push Andy is more hands on and has been spending as much time as he can at the house, taking time off work and on the weekends to complete projects like sound proofing, electrical wiring, insulating the crawl space, and building the deck. He stained the floor of the guest bunks last weekend and will be laying the wood floors throughout the house soon.

The house takes up a lot of our mental space right now and the last four weeks have required a steady and near daily effort to chip away at final decisions to purchase the doors, doorknobs, light fixtures, and accessories for our outdoor space on the deck. We are figuring out how to pull off the concrete floors and vanity in the communal bath, and we still need a wood source for the open shelves in the kitchen. The todo list feels near endless and requires constant tweaks to accommodate design and logistical issues that inevitably pop up, as well as take into account the constraints of the budget.

Anticipation is high for a move sometime in October, but even that seems optimistic now. Packing continues slowly and I'm purging as I go, which feels good.

My Ode to the James backsplash tiles for the inset accent wall in the downstairs powder room arrived a few months ago and they are so pretty in person! I checked in with the folks at Mercury Mosaics to inquire about grout color suggestions, because they are really good at design and, as usual, they made my life easy and went above and beyond to carefully create and share a mood board with their grout recommendation: pewter.

Last week we taped off a 5' x 5'6" area then laid out and labeled the tiles to create a template for the mason. We started at 9:30pm and it only took 3 hours as we worked by the light of a rechargeable lamp that kept dying! I wouldn't recommend it, but I'm glad we got it done. We decided to go with the cozy and homey hillside up. I'm looking forward to seeing it go up on the wall next week!