Progress, but it ain't pretty

I feel guilty about the light posting.  I keep hoping that if I hold off, I'll have something pretty to show you.  But it ain't pretty, so I'm giving you a few glimpses of what we've got going on inside the building.

Most exciting to me this week is the fact that we finally have the steel post installed between the master bathroom/bedroom.  This is the structural support we need to put in a massive glass wall (9 feet tall and about 10 feet long) between the two rooms and not have the garden and garden room come crashing through our ceiling.  Voila, the much-anticipated post:

The last photo shows the view from the far corner of the bedroom back towards the walk-in closet/alcove.  The opening is oversized.  It's actually going to have 2 pocket doors front and center that slide open to reveal the alcove and then slide closed to meet in the middle of the opening.  The closet feels wonderfully huge at this point, but I'm sure that will change when the drywall and shelves go in.

In other news, the HVAC installation continues, with ducts and equipment running pretty much everywhere now.  Here's the compressor that's in the wall/closet space between the two guest bedrooms, plus pics of its intake openings in the hallway on the third floor and in the ceiling of the second floor.

The last photo I have to share is one showing the framing for the concrete hearth that will form the base for the fireplace in our living room.

We're still torn between the wood mantel and the marble mantel.  Since both are beautiful, it's coming down to a question of size.  The wood one needs 6 inches of non-combustible material lining each side of the opening, which reduces the space for firewood to pretty puny dimensions (24 inches).  The marble fireplace, on the other hand, whose opening is 35 inches, carries no such requirements and might actually be able to be enlarge by a couple of inches at the top.  Our master mason (my boyfriend's godsend nephew from Milwaukee) is coming to town for two weeks on Sunday night, so we've got to make a decision stat.

Room framing continues in the basement.  Our poor crew spent the early part of the week sawing out the 3 foot deep granite foundation so that we could run the plumbing pipes closer to the outer wall of the building.  The work looked brutally hard (I dropped by during the sawing and fled the building in a cloud of dust, plus there were rueful comments about soreness the next day).  We're so glad we had it done, though, since it's going to make the bathrooms a much more respectable 8 feet by about 6.5 feet.  Since we were tweaking the size of the bathrooms anyway, I decided to put in really nice soaker tubs.  My priority was to get the deepest model available, with the cleanest inside shape.  It's shockingly difficult to find a deep tub with otherwise relatively small proportions!  (Ahem, bathtub manufacturers, you might want to make a note.)  The best I found was the Kohler Underscore (66" long x 36" wide x 22"deep).

Two have been delivered and are sitting in their boxes in the basement.  We're going to tile around them with our 3x6 Carrera subway tile.  Do I even need to say that I'm very excited to see how it looks?