Saturday, December 29, 2007
Post Christmas catch-up
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
temporary counters on the island!
Sunday, December 16, 2007
We have flooring!
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
There's a hole in the kitchen!
After Todd worked all day, the kitchen now looks like this:
The cat fell through the insulation that was under the plywood into the crawl space. She had a fine time chasing the mouse smells.
Belle hates the gangplank that is her only route to the outside. She point blank refuses to walk on it and has to be carried. When she wants to come in, she scratches at the door and when someone opens it and tries to pick her up to carry her in, she runs away. Daft dog.
No kids have fallen in. No grownups that I know of have either.
More substandard construction will be fixed here as Todd adds diagonal steel things (like my technical term?) to stabilize the joists in relation to each other. He is planning to be done with the replacement of the subfloor today (Wednesday). Tomorrow will be bamboo flooring time for Todd and Jeremy working together, then it's time for drywall and then cabinets. I guess at some point we need to make a decision on counters.
Other work being done/scheduled . . . septic tank has been pumped out (first time since we bought the house), gutters are going to be replaced on the front of the house, and I don't know what else. I am sure there is something. Cheers to all!
Monday, December 10, 2007
Monday's update, week 3
Sunday, December 9, 2007
another week, more pics!
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
mid-week update
Jeremy has been hard at work on the electrical, hoping to schedule an inspector to come for the rough electrical on Friday or Monday. His evenings are spent rerouting wire, looking at the puzzle that comes when you are removing soffits (in terms of wire runs), and drilling holes through ceiling joists. It is turning into a house-wide project as he discovers where wires connect together.
Todd meanwhile has been busy under the house, shoring up posts that support the beam we now have in place of a load-bearing wall. His back will be extremely thankful when that work is over. His back suffered a bit of a relapse when he hefted more than his share of the cabinets when they arrived on Tuesday, but today he removed the old door from the garage into the kitchen and cut the hole that will house the new door from the garage into the mudroom.
We keep running into problems caused by substandard construction. The latest is the subfloor in the kitchen. We ripped up one layer of plywood last wekeend, intending to be able to lay bamboo floor this weekend, taking care of the squeaks by screwing down the remaining layer of ply. Well, the ply that is there, the original subfloor, is supposed to be tongue and groove plywood so as to reduce any movement. Fat chance. It is regular ply, butted together. No wonder we have serious squeaking. This, combined with a seriously unlevel floor, has us deciding between gallons of floor leveler (will do nothing for squeaks) or taking out the other layer of ply and replacing it with the real tongue and groove stuff AFTER spending time in the crawl space leveling the joists. In one other shake-your-head twist, the old entry door was put on backwards, leaving the outside open to easy credit-card style surreptitious lock picking. We will replace that for a model that opens the correct way!
But progress is being made! 1) The rats nest of wires is slowly disappearing from the old soffit area. 2) The old garage door is sheetrocked in, so we can begin to imagine life coming in another way. 3) Appliances are mostly ordered, with only the range hood to go on that front. 4) The cabinets are HERE!!! and they look wonderful. 5) We have an appointment to look at countertops tomorrow.
Hope to post pics of all that is getting accomplished over the weekend. For now, send good thoughts about wire and junction boxes to Jeremy, and send healing thoughts to Todd's back. Me, I just try to feed everyone and make sure there is enough coffee.
All the best to all,
Nica (for the crew)
Saturday, December 1, 2007
We have an open space!
More demolition - making progress!
DEMOLITION!
Initial pictures
The starting point . . .
After months of talking about it on and off, we finally decided to go ahead and remodel the house. We started with this:
Picture 1: (the original layout of the house) - note, if you can, the view upon immediately entering the house - it was of the hall closet and bathroom.
To the “AHA!” moment of “what if we moved the bathroom and hall closet . . .