Well the sad part is that he IS a professional, or at least what I'd call a semi-pro.! He's a housing inspector and has a side contracting business for like 30 years. I always joke that he's the kind of contractor you wouldn't want to hire. He's pretty knowledgeable when it comes to all that stuff and I remember when he and my husband were discussing it he was explaining the process and the importance of making sure it's all waterproof. So I'm probably about 90% confident that we're set on that. He says he ran out of bullnose tile and this was just the quickest, easiest solution which is typical of him. Nice, right? So, what my husband was thinking is to start grinding down the grout and remove the tiles around the window. We'd put the bullnose tile on the side and just cut a smaller tile to fill in the gap (like it is on the wall edge). I measured the top tiles and amazingly they're measuring 2" which appears to be the same exact width of the bullnose tile so we thought we could just pop those out and substitute without it affecting the seams of the surrounding tile. Does that sound doable?

I got an email back from builder today saying he is coming back to do more work, so to not 'jump the gun'. Some of the above though I don't think are due to 'jumping the gun' ....Funnily enough when we met the painting guy on the first day of his job here he was saying he didn't need to plastic the windows....I checked out the main floor and amongst the haze, was a haze of overspray setting on my brand new windows....and the next day window plastic magically appeared.... :P We are using eggshell paint. The texture and overspray are what is bugging me the most.

How are these installed? What I'm not see are expansion gaps at the wall. You showed a box that has 3/4" written as the thickness. That means the expansion gap at ALL vertical obstacles (walls, door jams, stair risers, etc) should be 3/4". I'm sorry but you have more issues than the transition strips. Your transition strips are the least of your worries. How long were the floors allowed to acclimate in the house BEFORE they were installed? PLEASE tell me these floors were allowed a week at least? May be 2 wks. If you think they were NOT in the home for that length of time, ask the GC where the document for the MOISTURE READINGS is. It should make him look like a doofus when he asks YOU what that is. If you want the GC (who is YOUR employee) to stop saying, "It's supposed to be like this" then you better get your floor inspected. www.nwfa.org They have inspectors listed in both the USA and Canada. I did a quick search for a small area in T.O. and it showed 8 inspectors. If I give it a wider radius I'll get as many as 15 inspectors inside of 50 miles (80 km). While you are there, go ahead and see who is a certified INSTALLER. Your GC has 1 attempt to correct all of these issues. Once he gives it the good ol' college try, you get to find your OWN professional and have the GC pay for it....see where I'm going with this? Confront the GC and find out WHO installed the floor (the name of the person on the crew). If it was himself, then he is going to find out how costly it is to have a bad install with a wood floor. Again, if you are not happy with the work, you are welcome to get the flooring inspected. Most GC's understand how BAD it looks when a homeowner pays for an inspection. Because most GC's are smart enough to realize a bad report means MONEY of of their pocket AND they have to spend more TIME fixing the issues.

I would go for black... and large black numbers for your address. Nice house!