Ready. Set. Go.

So the party has officially started! We closed on the house last Friday and put our first hole in the wall on Saturday morning. It's now Tuesday evening and I've been great about being at the house working every chance I get. I'm trying to set a routine so that I stop working (at home desk job) at 5pm and heading straight over to the house to start working (back breaking manual labor job). This entails starting working before 8am and eating lunches at my desk so that I can fit everything in. So far I've been doing great with this new schedule but it's only my second weekday so we'll see. 

So here's a quick recap of what we've done so far...

Saturday:

While we're confident of which walls are load-bearing, we still needed to meet with an architect to make sure we're putting in the correct sized beams and columns to support the structure where it needs to be supported. We met with the architect early on Saturday morning so that he could look at the plans, see what we want to do and take some measurements. Everything is good to go and we now know what size beam needs to be installed... I use the term "we" lightly here, because by "we" I mean my father-in-law; since I don't know anything about this.

(Saturday, June 22)

This is the wall between the kitchen and living room, and while it's not load bearing, we still need to support the ceiling with a smaller beam before removing the wall entirely. But the sheetrock, built-ins and fireplace can still go.

First hole of millions.

Which quickly turned into THIS:

Have you ever noticed on HGTV when the homeowners do demolition and they're having the time of their lives and think, "Is knocking holes in walls really that much fun?" YES IT IS. But what's more than fun is the fact that you're really seeing progress on your project. It's exciting because you actually get a glimpse of what it's going to look like when it's done and your ideas start to become real. 

Here's a picture of the other side of the wall, the kitchen, after we removed most of the cabinets....

Not all of the pictures are in the order that they

actually happened, but they're close.

Here's me opening up the pantry.

During demo you find things, especially in older

houses. We found this, a glass coke bottle, a dead
bird and a dead mouse.... so far.

Here's the kitchen a little later.

And the fireplace side of the wall. 

Sunday:

We were able to get our hands on an air chisel and a compressor, thanks to my brother-in-law. He also kindly let us use his shop-vac and HUGE trailer to move materials. I think he's jealous he can't be here to do some work so he's letting us use his stuff because technically that makes him here.. right?

Anyway, the chisel is coming in very handy for taking up the ceramic tile all over the house. It does leave the glue marks on the floor which we'll have to remove later with another machine we'll rent from Home Depot. It's slow progress but it's keeping us under budget in the long run. The cost to have someone come in and remove the tile was $2/sq. ft. At almost 1,000 square feet in tile it makes a ton of sense to this ourselves. Even renting a chisel is more cost effective (and time consuming) than hiring someone. If you do rent one, get one that allows you to stand and chisel. Not only are they more powerful and faster, but the one that we have (about the size and shape of a handgun) sends sharp fragments of ceramic tile flying at your face.

We also bought a first aid kit.

By the end of Sunday night we made some progress.

Half the floor in the living room is done.

 

It looks clean because it is. We didn't have a dumpster delivered until Tuesday morning so all of our debris was going out onto the carport. The carport filled up quickly. 

Monday consisted of removing the fir down from above where the kitchen cabinets used to be and removing the rest of the tile from the living room (which I don't have a picture of).

Fir downs are usually filled with a ton of
insulation. I found it was easiest to remove
some sheetrock little by little, vacuuming
as I go.

Gone.

Dumpster Tuesday:

We finally got our dumpster delivered... It was supposed to be delivered on Monday morning but it was a day late. A minor setback I was happy because the carport was starting to get pretty full. Tuesday was spent loading the dumpster up. We ordered a 30 cubic-yard dumpster that cost us about $430. 

El's brother and I also got ambitious and removed the tile from the kitchen as well (which I didn't get a picture of).

So far it's been a learning lesson. While I feel like we've made a lot of progress, I was quickly brought back to reality when my brother in law told me that 5 men could have easily done in a single day what we've taken 4 days to do. Thanks, dude.

Our Model Home

Home Renovation Lesson 1: Decisions are not easy to make. Ever. 

I'm getting the feeling that we're going to learn this lesson again and again throughout this whole process. We figured this out once before when we had plans of working with a homebuilder to "design" our home. The plan was to stop by the builder's office, pick out some cabinet colors, countertops, floor colors, etc. and be on our way. A one hour meeting quickly turned into what felt like two years of going back and forth putting samples next to samples of samples. The funny thing was, it all looked the same to me. All of the model homes looked similar in color scheme; even by different builders. The only thing that was always different was the layout - and now we're having a hard time deciding even that.

During inspections we found what looks to be the original plans for the house above the stove in the kitchen. Modern technology allowed me to scan the plans with my phone so that we can begin planning our renovation. Once I got the scanned image, I was able to trace the plans in Adobe Illustrator so that we could remove walls and see the plans how we want them. The finished product was my own masterpiece that would make any architect, engineer or my wife throw up a little.

So this is what we're thinking... of course without the crooked walls, broken windows and doors that open into each other. But you get the idea, BIG open floor plan. There's also some columns that need to go in there, but you get the idea, right? Ok it's terrible!

Luckily for us (or for me) El's parent's have been so helpful through this whole process... and we don't even own the house yet! Her dad has built many a house in his life and El and her mom are both really creative. So they decided to build us a model home so that we can see exactly what we're looking at. They stayed up too late one night with a bunch of foam board and glue and, using the plans, made a scale model of the living room, kitchen and dining room.

Excuse the picture quality here.

This is the view from the living room looking past what will be the kitchen and into the dining room. The wall that we took out is load bearing so we need to add columns. The model allows us to move columns around to where we would like to put them. 

Here's the same view, a bit better quality, that allows us place an island in the middle of the kitchen and help decide where the refrigerator goes.

Here's me coming home and realizing there's no ceiling.

Some people would use expensive computer software to draw up a model like this, but where's the fun in that? Plus, El's parent's had a great time designing it  and I think it's a lot more helpful.

Here we go again...

Apparently the headaches and troubles of renovating a post-Katrina home in Lakeview, less than a mile from where the Levees breached, wasn't a lesson learned. We're doing it all over again! Eleanore and I are closing on a house in Covington at the end of June. Check it out....

Nice 'eh? This baby comes with 2,370 square feet of space for living, an attached carport to keep dry, brand new roof, four bedrooms, two full baths, a separate dining room and breakfast room...that's right - two rooms for two separate meals! Apparently the builder didn't know that we eat most of our meals in the living room, which wasn't even designed for eating. Speaking of building, this home was built in 1986, but believe me she's solid. 

So that's all well and good; but because we're suckers for punishment and need a challenge we picked this house because it lacks certain appeal. Before going much further, you should know that it sat on the market for a few months longer than it should have which gave us the ability to negotiate a little bit more. So without further adieu, here are the projects we would LIKE to complete:

1: Replace all floors with wood floors. The tile is nice and installed very well, but we're fans of the wood floor look. It's pricey, but we're hoping a good engineered wood will do the trick. While we'd like to replace the floors of all rooms (including bedrooms) with wood, we're prepared to forget the bedrooms if the budget does not allow for it. There's new carpet in the rooms anyway.

I've always wanted my very own fireplace!!

2: Remove the fireplace. In fact, remove that whole wall. Nothing against this wall, or any wall for that matter, it's a nice wall. The problem with this wall is what's on the other side of it...

3: Open up the kitchen into the living room. This will require a good bit of demolition. It will also necessitate new cabinets, countertops and appliances. Want to know what's behind the camera in this picture??

4: Open the kitchen (and living room) up to the dining room. Now we're talking full on renovation, since apparently we found out THIS particular wall is load bearing. We'll need to install beams or columns or something - we'll figure it out, right? Plus we'll eliminate that whole problem have having multiple rooms for multiple meals since technically it's all the same room.

This is the majority of our project and will certainly cause us the same headaches, worries, budget concerns and other problems that my first renovation cost me. So why stop there?

5: Paint all trim / moulding white. It needs to be sanded first.

6: All doors should be painted white or replaced with white doors. Currently  
    they are brown. Hardware is brass - not anymore.

7: Light fixtures are nice but will certainly need to be moved and/or replaced to 

    compliment the new space.

8: Add a door to the master bathroom... currently it does not have a door or
    door frame. It never has... awkward, right?

9: The shower in the master bath doesn't have a door either. I'm getting cold
    just thinking about it.

10: Install gas into the home. Why? Because we have a gas dryer. Why not sell
    the gas dryer and buy an electric? Because that would be too easy... plus we
    love our gas dryer. Also I love to cook and hate cooking on electric stoves.
    I am primal...need fire cook.. fire cook meat... MEAT GOOD

11: Fix up the deck in the back. It needs some love. I'm thinking some deck
     boards need replacing and a good sanding refinishing wouldn't hurt. We also
     want to add a railing and some benches so that the baby P doesn't fall off.
     He can run now but, like his dad, doesn't think as much about where he's
     going than he does about how fast he's going.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few of the 2,342 ideas we've been throwing around with this house. I'll add them as I think of them. I'll also have more pictures, the very few I have don't tell the story. Here's a couple more for reference to the above if you're super curious:

Nice back yard with a deck that needssome TLC.

The bathroom sans doors. At least the toilet
has it's own door.

 

Often we ask ourselves if we're making the right decision by buying a house that needs so much work. Why not spend the money we're putting into the renovation on a new home with everything that we want? Not to mention the fact that I should have learned my lesson with the first renovation, which caused me years of headaches, even after I moved in. 

Well the fact is we almost did buy a brand new house. And even though you get to pick out everything from the shutters to the floors, from the cabinet color to the floors, you are extremely limited to what the builder has negotiated from a supplier. Want something other than what they're offering you? Be prepared to pay a lot for it. We're going this route because we want to make a house that is truly our home. 

And yes, I went through this before, and I was ripped off a few times, I can't count the number of times I went broke or how many times I paid for my A/C to be repaired and replaced. Stress levels were through the roof on several occasions. This time around will we be smarter? Maybe. Will we make mistakes? Probably. But when we ask ourselves if we're creating a home where our kids can grow up in and know that it's theirs as much as it's ours we know that we definitely are. 

Stay tuned for the next episode: "Jason's Sledge Hammer Concussion".