Kitchens, Bathrooms and more

The house is SO close to done I can taste it. Tiling and painting will finish in the next day or two. Then waiting for the glass and the plumber to finish up the faucets and we are in soon!! Goal move in date is next Friday, but this weekend we'll be doing some initial wiping down of the inside kitchen cabinets and getting furniture and bookshelves set up. Follow the jump for pictures.

We have Floors!

The house has drastically changed since the last house post. Alan will post to fill in the missing time, but somehow we always seem to run out of time lately!

So I'm going to jump to present and tell you that we now have all our roof, amazing blue siding with beautiful white trim, a lovely back deck with a spot for a grill, air conditioning, heating, wiring, and plumbing. You won't believe it, but we also have drywall and hard wood floors!! Here's a picture from the basement door looking back through the den and kitchen.

Next week we will be banned from the house while they sand and stain the floors. Then installing cabinets, tile in the bathroom, counters, painting and trim and then we move in! Date we are shooting for right now is October 28. Just around the corner!!

More pictures after the jump.

Raise the Roof (May 3 - May 23)

I knew I was behind on posting pictures, but I just realized that even though I've posted some disaster shots from inside the house I haven't posted anything about the progress on the outside of the house since mid-April. 

By the end of the last post, we had the basement and kitchen framed out but nothing much done on the second floor yet.  The focus for the next couple of weeks was on the inside of the house so by May 3 they had only really finished up the sub-floor for the master bedroom but still no walls or roof.

More after the jump...

Breaking the fourth wall (5/3 - 5/12)

The reason the temperature and weather affected us so much this past week is because we're now getting to the point where they're tying in the new construction parts of the house into the existing original sections.  This means that areas that so far have been safe and untouched (the upstairs bathroom and the 1st floor living room in particular) are now starting to suffer some of the same violations that the master bedroom and kitchen already went through.

The start of the new second floor above the temp laundry room

Lots more pictures and details after the jump...

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in

This has been the toughest couple of days of the house renovation process for us so far .  When the work on the new roof started the forecast was for a day of light rain and then a warm weekend.  As soon as things were opened up that changed to something much wetter and colder.  It's been 10-15 degrees colder than normal for this time of year and we had almost constant heavy rain.  The worst part was Friday night, when it rained steadily from early evening until late Saturday morning.  Larry set up a drainage system in the kitchen to funnel the water from the leak back outside, and that caught most of it.  But there was just too much water so it spread out into more areas than the drain could handle.  So we ended up with buckets all over the kitchen to catch the drips, and had to keep adding new containers and emptying the old ones throughout the night.  This is what we ended up with around 3am:

The biggest leak was dripping off the vent pipe over the stove, but fortunately that space was exactly the right size to fit our trash barrel which you can see wedged in there in this pic

Pinhole Kitchen

With the wall full of holes covered by plastic sheeting in the temp kitchen, Emily and I noticed something pretty cool that happens on sunny days.  The size of the holes and the distance to the house next door make the perfect conditions for a sort of pinhole camera effect, where an image of the window from the house next door is projected onto the plastic inside our house in front of each of the holes in the wall. 

Changes in the Temp Kitchen (Mar 28-Apr 4)

Over the past few weeks the temp kitchen has been changed around a bit, with cabinets coming off and going back up, walls and ceilings being torn out, and temp drainage pipes being run through the open space.  Part of this has been to prepare for plumbing changes, both down in the basement and for the future new bathrooms upstairs, and part has been to start tying in the new back of the house into the existing house frame.

The same weekend the sisters were in town, we came home to find that the walls and ceilings in the temp kitchen had been torn out, and a new (temporary) drainage pipe had been installed alongside the big pantry cabinet

More pics after the jump...

Truss-worthy

The trusses to support the new kitchen floor were delivered today:

Kitchen Decisions (so far)

Emily and I are still trying to decide on our appliances, cabinets and fixtures for the kitchen.  I think at this point our oven and refrigerator are pretty definite but we're still up in the air for the other things. We're open to any comments or suggestions so please let us know what you think.

Our preferences so far are:

Gimme Shelter

I didn't realize that people were thinking Emily and I were toughing it out during the construction by living out of boxes and heating cans of beans over a camping stove with only sheets of plastic to cover up the missing walls.   That's actually pretty far from the truth.  It hasn't always been the most comfortable time but Contractor Larry has gone out of his way to make sure that we can have a semi-normal life as much as possible while the house is being torn down and rebuilt.