Remodel: DONE!

I’ve been a little lazy about posting the final before and after pictures, but without further ado here they are (click on the images to see them full size):

The kitchen


The dining room and entry way


The living room


The office


And the bathroom (I never took a before picture, for reference there was carpet, ghastly wallpaper, and lots of open space for a former half bathroom)


We are very happy with the outcome, and we were happy with our contractor. The project moved along quickly, we were well informed along the way, and when there was a big snag at the end they came through and made everything right. Looking at the before and after pictures really allows us to see just how different our house is now. We love our house now, and we would never have said that before. Now to buy some furniture, hang things on the walls, and just get comfortable in the space again.

Remodel: Week 9

I just finished my morning workout, and everyone else is still asleep so I thought I would use this opportunity to post the latest remodel pictures. Word has it that they will be done next week! I plan to post the before and after pictures when it is completely done, but if you are itching to see what it was like before, just click here.

Some kitchen views, with a little help from The Girl:

The Bathroom (the grout was sealed yesterday so we aren’t allowed to walk on the floor)





The dining room

A break to pick her nose

The new slide in dual fuel range


So there you have it, some minor details remain, and carpet for the living room and office will go a long way to making it feel done I’m sure.

Remodling isn't all bad

We've been without a kitchen for 8 weeks now. You would think we would be going absolutely crazy, but I've got to say that we aren't. In fact, at the family reunion we attended yesterday I found myself telling other people how it was actually kind of nice not to have to do dishes. *gasp* Not only are we using all paper plates, but we have paper bowls, paper/plastic cups, and plastic utensils. Oh sure we have a wet bar sink to wash things in, and sometimes we have to use an avoidable reusable dish, but we can't even be bothered to wash silverware. We have taken this lack of kitchen thing to the extreme. I did breakdown and buy the "Earthware" paper plates the other day because the waste we are producing was starting to get to me a bit though.

Another unintended benefit is that you can't hear the kids screaming on the second floor if you hunker down in the office in the basement. Oh, of course we do have a baby monitor for such occasions, but what fun is it to hide in the office if you can hear the kids screaming? This way I can pretend that they are sleeping. Not that I am doing that right now or anything...

The bad part of this plan is that The Boy can get out of bed on his own and will wander around the house looking for me. He has also figured out that if he goes into The Girl's room and talks "to her" we can hear him on the monitor (assuming it is on). This of course makes The Girl scream, but at least we can't hear it.

Soon enough we will be back to living on the main floor, where it is almost impossible to avoid the screaming sounds that filter down from the second floor. At least we had a short reprieve.

Remodel: week 8

We are inching towards the two month mark with the big remodel. I won’t waste your time with a bunch of words, so without further ado here are some progress pictures:

The new hardwood floor


Dining room into the kitchen


Kitchen into dining room


The beginnings of a railing to make the basement stairs entrance a little safer


The new roll-in shower

Just a tiny curb to keep the water contained


Another kitchen view


Oh, and the basically complete playset


Countertops next week, electrical tomorrow…perhaps I can take some better pictures when we have lights again!

My weekend of P

I owe my darling boy a birthday tribute post, but I want to add pictures so it needs to wait for a few days. Instead I wanted to fill you in on my weekend of P.

The First P
The weekend started a little early as I left work a bit early to come home to help T Paint. Our contractor was itching to start installing the new trim throughout the main floor, and we wanted to get all of the walls painted before that happened. This resulted in a mad scramble to prime and paint all of the walls. The paint perfectionist himself even allowed me to paint, rolling no less, because he was too tired to do it all on his own. I wasn’t even the one to put a big roller mark of paint on the ceiling either, no I just managed to hit at least 5 edges of taped off trim. Still the finished result looks pretty darn good if I do say so myself. I’m sure it will look even better with trim up. We owe a great deal of thanks to T’s little brother T, and our Nephew for assisting with some taping and wall prep on Saturday. We also owe Buzz and Woody and Lightning McQueen a great deal of thanks for babysitting the kids for us.

The Second P
Not to be accused of living a sedentary life we also managed to throw a nice little birthday Party for The Boy on Saturday morning. The day started early, as I squeezed in a run, and then T made the playset suitable for the group of 3 year olds who would arrive at our house at 11 AM. This involved mounting the swings on the set. I set to work decorating and hiding the plastic bugs the kids were to find around the yard, and when we realized how squeezed for time we were we called in some reinforcements…sending T’s parents on a side trip to buy balloons. The guests soon arrived, the kids found their bugs, played on the playset, did a little craft, ate pizza, fruit, gummy worms, and finally some cake. After the little guests had departed we watched The Boy open his presents, the highlights being a bug/frog habitat (hey we can send away for a free tadpole!) and a remote control dinosaur that scares The Girl enough that we had to hide it with the other electronic dinosaur he got from my parents!

The Third P
After the party we went right back to painting, but if we fast forward to the end of the painting Sunday evening, there was a bit more work on the Playset. We managed to get the beginnings of the roof on the set, and finally rid ourselves of the last cardboard box of parts! We are in the home stretch now. I promise to post pictures of the completed set when we get there. Our stamina was running very low at this point though after a long day of painting so we called it quits pretty quickly.

The Fourth P
The scene, the kids’ bathroom, the crime: Poop in the tub. Enough said.

The Fifth P
The scene, the kids’ bathroom, the crime: a Potty accident all over the floor.

I was so very happy to come to work today to get a little bit of a break. I’m all P’d out!

Remodel: What, is this week 6?

Oh, you knew it would happen, you knew I started out with remodel day one, remodel day two, then would jump to day 8, then day 20 didn’t you? Now it has been more than a week since I last shared any house progress. Part of that is just being insanely busy with work and at home, but the other part is that there just wasn’t much to say. We’d come home each day and the house would look more or less the same as when we’d left that morning. Not too exciting to blog about, so I’ve spared you the details. Things are getting interesting around here now though, so for your viewing pleasure I give you:

Drywall and hardwood flooring

Coming up from the basement

From the living room into the kitchen

From the dining room into the kitchen

The new sliding glass door off of the dining room

Looking at the basement stairs...behold flooring!


Just one random picture of the stucco work (that is now done, so the scaffolding is gone, but well I’m too lazy to go out in the heat to take a new picture)


Oh, and because we didn’t have enough work to do we thought we would tackle building the Costco Sunray playset in time for The Boy’s birthday party next weekend. Surely T can fit that in along with painting the entire main floor of the house right?

The ground is not so level around here:

But the extra dirt is great for building “mountains”

Remodel: Day 20

Days are counted as actual contractor working days since the project began. Perhaps this is confusing for you since it is for me (technically it would be day 19 since there was a holiday on Monday). It has been 4 solid working weeks for our contractors, or nearly a month. I haven't updated lately because honestly it basically looks the same as it did when I last posted on day 8. Okay that isn't entirely true, some HVAC vents have been moved, some plumbing perhaps has been moved, oh and we did get the new windows installed and the new wonderful 3-panel sliding glass door. A big milestone occurred yesterday though, our new drywall was delivered. Just as The kids and I were leaving for daycare/work, the huge flatbed truck with A CRANE MOMMY!, parked in front of our driveway (blocking me in). They graciously moved so I could get out of the driveway after I learned that said delivery would take nearly an hour. Of course the drywall wasn't put up yesterday, but we can see the nice neat stacks up against our walls just waiting to be installed. I foresee new exciting pictures to share in the early part of next week.

Remodel: Day 8

I know you don’t really want to read about the remodel, you want to see pictures. I will come back to add pictures to this post when I get around to downloading them from our camera. You will just have to wait.

Significant progress this week is the installation of the new steel beam to replace the old header that essentially divided our living room into two spaces. It will be a huge space, and we will use it as two spaces eventually (an area by the front window with a couple of chairs and a table between them, will become somewhat of a “sitting room”), but it is nice to have the freedom to decide furniture placement not based on some arbitrary header beam on the ceiling.

In case you've forgotten, here is the beam before:


The dreadful entry way tile has been almost completely removed to make way for the new hardwood flooring that will be installed. Electrical rough ins are almost complete, as are plumbing rough ins, and HVAC rough ins. A few more city inspections need to be completed, but then they can begin adding new drywall. Perhaps by the end of next week we will see walls and ceilings starting to take shape?

On the disturbing end of things, we now have a portable toilet in our driveway. There is some plumbing issue with our brand new basement toilet (T had lots of fun cleaning out all that backed up into our brand new shower down there), that is supposedly being taken care of today. The portable toilet was mostly a response to that event, and frankly wasn’t the most welcome sight when I drove up to our house last night. Oh well. I’ll admit I wasn’t crazy about all of the workers using our bathrooms, but much prefer it to having a Biffy in our driveway!


So how are we coping with all of the chaos in our house? We are doing okay. We are using the wet bar, that isn’t very wet, as our temporary kitchen (the plumbers are supposed to give us a quote for hooking up actual plumbing to this sink…right now it has refrigerator tubing, and the flow is about one drop per minute). We have the old pantry cabinet in the basement so most of our food is stored there, and the refrigerator was moved to the basement to make things livable for us. We have the microwave, and the toaster oven, and of course the gas grill outside. Thankfully we purchased the grill with a side burner last summer because it definitely comes in handy for boiling pasta – a staple for our kids’ limited palates. We’ve altered our dinner menu choices to reflect the absence of a range, but have found that the toaster oven does quite well with small portions of frozen fries or chicken nuggets. I get a little grumpy about having to walk any dishes over to the utility room to wash them in the utility sink, but aside from that it works (as does using mostly paper plates/bowls/cups).

There are some minor annoyances that come with the territory, things like having the basement disturbed because plumbing, HVAC, or electrical needs to be run in the basement ceiling. There is also having the plumbing main shut off during the day which means when we turn on faucets they all sputter as the air escapes, and my stupid alarm clock that is always blinking when I go to bed at night because a circuit breaker was switched off.

See how nice and open our entry way is now?


Still it isn’t all bad. Living in the basement has given me a new appreciation for just how nice our back yard is. It isn’t a big back yard, but there is plenty of space for the kids to run and play. We’ve been outside a lot more than normal. It is hard to say if that is because we simply look outside the sliding glass door and see the deck/yard, because it has been so warm lately, or because the kids are finally old enough to request er demand to go outside. I’ve also been trying to keep up with the weeding for the first time since we moved in more than two years ago, which I’m sure pleases our neighbors. Of course now I’ve begun dreaming of removing all of the old rotting railroad ties that form our landscaping, and remember that we can’t spend money on landscaping this year. Anyway, a huge benefit this year is that there is absolutely no guilt on my part for ordering The Girl’s birthday cake, and ordering all of the food for her birthday party that will take place this weekend. I have an excuse not to cook this year (not that I would have made the cake anyway, but I’m rationalizing here).

Some backyard fun:
The Boy mowing (that is a bubble mower he's not even four!) - just a glimpse but you can see how nice our neighbors lawn is, in comparison to ours

The Girl just being cute:


And some swinging on Mother's Day - not our backyard!

Remodel: Day two

I managed to take and upload pictures yet again, so here are some day two photos:

The carpet is now gone, apparently the previous owners had pets…ick


The half bath now has the level of privacy the kids only dream of for the rest of the bathrooms (when T or I are using them that is):

A nice view from the kitchen


The office has been demolished:


The basement stairs are next, plastic sheeting installed in preparation:


Life isn’t all bad for us though; the new basement bathroom is really nice, just missing some molding and trim:

The shower:


This will all be worth it 3 months from now. This will all be worth it 3 months from now. This will all be worth it 3 months from now…