Still no ceiling

The electricians are done, and James claims he'll be giving us walls and maybe a ceiling tomorrow. We can actually see daylight through the vents in the roof, which reduces the efficiency of our furnace quite a bit. Fortunately, it doesn't get cold here...

WE HAVE A DOOR!!!!!!

Regaining the door between the kitchen and the dining room is roughly half the reason for doing the kitchen remodel (drawers is roughly the other half). Here it is! Of course, there are no appliances, cabinets, walls or even a ceiling. And there's a pantsless toddler with cupcake all over his face. And this crazy guy on the left in charge of it all. ;-)

Tomorrow: more wiring (you know, codes and stuff)

"As long as that wall is open..."

I'm sure there has never been a home remodel during which that phrase or something very similar hasn't been uttered. It first happened the other day while Nathan was staring into the attic, which is completely exposed to the kitchen. He was dreaming of the skylight he has dreamed about for years. Turns out that dream is dead (though we are still determined to put one in our living room some day -- we even made sure the solar panel installers left room....).

I said it again when looking around the living room and thinking about lighting and landing strips and realized the living wall opposite the kitchen could use a sconce or some other light fixture...

As it turns out, that's not going to happen either, thanks to budget constraints. But there's always room for dreams...

Schedule change

Remember in my last post I said the floor install would start next week! Just kidding!! Nathan talked to the tile place and they said our tile wasn't in stock yet! As it turns out, this makes James happy, because he decided to switch electricians and the new guys can start Monday. Nathan also was starting to think the walls should go in before the floors, so maybe that will all work out, with the floor tile install starting one week from Monday.

Tonight was a leftover night, and I think tomorrow may involve more cooking at the neighbors'.

Exile

I sent this email to a few people around 2 p.m.:

I tried to blog this from a restaurant with a big outdoor toy play area, but I can't write blog entries on my g phone, ironically. We're here because the house is basically uninhabitable because of dust. The demolition should be done this afternoon, but then the whole house will need to be scrubbed. This afternoon we'll probably hide out at our neighbors', since they're out of town. Who knows, we might just decide to sleep over there and tackle the cleanup tomorrow.

When I was home after school, around noon, the house looked like there had been a volcano eruption. That's when I hurried the boys back out the door and we rode to Main Street Coffee, which has the awesome toy area and no soda fountain. The boys chowed and played and we were there for about two hours. Then we went to the library and hung out for about an hour, then went home. James had had his cleaning service come through and things were back to being in a livable condition. There's still a lot of dust in some parts of the house, but that's to be expected.

We did cook dinner tonight at our friends' house; we have their keys and I knew they'd be out of town, so I called just after experiencing the dust storm and my friend, blissful on a ski lift, said, "no problem!"

The demolition is done.




Next up: the floor install starts next week.

Surprise!

In any remodel there are surprises -- any time you open walls, it's inevitable. This one was a doozy, though. After measuring for and purchasing and taking delivery of our cabinets, counting on an extra 8 inches of wall space after removing the drop ceiling, we find there are load bearing beams in the way. Oops. OK, after another look, James, our head guy, decides one of them is definitely not load bearing and will go to City Hall and find plans to determine if the other one is. So maybe we won't have to replace 30% of our cabinets...

Then there's the mold, which I don't really want to think too much about.

Also, there's supposed to be a separate circuit for the kitchen outlets, fridge, disposal, dishwasher and microwave; in ours all five of those are on one. So now we need a whole new box or something, and that's going to be expensive.

On a worse-things-could-happen note, the placement of the door between the kitchen and the dining room will probably force the departure of our dining room corner cabinet. This isn't horrible, but kind of a bummer because we looked a while for the perfect piece and ended up getting an unfinished cabinet, which we spent a lot of time staining a gorgeous red. It looks like it's part of the house. On the plus side, if we get another naked piece of furniture (very economical), we have the tools (sander) and the know-how to do it right and not have it take forever.

Demolition

Just getting started...

cabinets gone...

oh, there's a hole there!

bye-bye, wall...

James and Nathan, wondering what is up with the weird brick-ish walls?


almost done...


there's a lot of mold up there...

Adjustments

The coffee maker is in the hallway bathroom (the one I just painted purple!). Coffee and sugar are on a knick knack shelf in the hallway, so as not to be ruined by humidity.

I just figure out how to make hard boiled eggs in the microwave.

The train table and most of the toys have been moved from the back room to the living room, along with the microwave and eventually the fridge.

I am listening to some seriously loud banging right now.

Before...

So here's the deal with our kitchen: some chuckleheads who owned the house before us ruined it. There used to be a door between the dining room and the kitchen; who would want one of those? thought Mr. and Mrs. Chucklehead, apparently.

There are two drawers. TWO.

You need a head lamp and one of those grabber thingies to get items out of the back of the floor cabinets. See, drawers and high cabinets are difficult to make and install, and Mr. and Mrs. Chucklehead are lazy, in addition to being dim.

Pantry? Also superfluous.

I guess when we bought the house I didn't see all the problems with the kitchen because I didn't really cook. Today, of course, I have to cook, cause kids cost money that we used to spend on eating out. I won't go over the whole saga about why it took us seven years to finally get to this point, but happily, along came James, a stay-at-home dad for the past year who is looking to get back into construction and did a small job in our back room before we decided he could do the kitchen. He's giving us a good rate on the labor because, he says, we're helping him get back into the business.

The kitchen's only good points are it's large size and the fact that it's almost square, so no pricey custom cabinets are necessary. Still, this is all going to cost us more than I took home in a year as a reporter.




No, that isn't some kind of camera trick, the floor tiles really are that ugly.

And so it begins

Today is the first day of the rest of our kitchen's life. The real work begins: boxing up everything in anticipation of demolition starting in just two days! The official schedule calls for everything to be done by March 10 (our 10th wedding anniversary!) -- we'll see...

So many questions... what objects do we absolutely need in order to eat every day? How many coffee cups, sippy cups, glasses, cereal bowls, spoons, forks, plates?

I'm determined to keep from using tons of paper plates and eating out all the time. I've been cooking big meals with lots of leftovers that can be frozen and reheated. Will a hot plate, grill and slow-cooker get us through? (The microwave and full-size fridge will stay plugged in in the back room.) I'll need to plan some meals from the slow-cooker and grill cookbooks we have... slow-cooker on rainy days, grill on others...

My current purging strategy: throw out any food that's open if I can't remember when I opened it; take dry goods that aren't opened to the food bank.

Up next: some background on the project, plus BEFORE pics...