Over the last few weeks I've figured out a few things that I'm not so good at. Things like: painting, caulking, nailing, sanding and blogging. Actually, the only thing about this project I've been good about is the demolition part of it... mostly because I'm just good at screwing things up. And by "things" I don't mean sheetrock because I'm bad at that, too.
The good news is that we've made a lot of head way and I've been learning a lot. Just because I'm bad at it doesn't mean I'm not getting better. Think of a kid playing piano at his first recital. Deafening noise - but hey, it's cute cause he's trying, right??
It's been so long that I forgot where I left off. We installed the beams and took the temp walls down and it ended up looking like this:
After that we still had the minor issue of wires hanging down, which was fun because you never knew which one was live so it made walking through the house more interesting. Actually it wasn't that bad and I learned a ton about how all of that works when we relocated most everything through the attic.
We also had to move the location of the floor outlet which required another 4 to 5 foot trench. I didn't get pictures of that.
Here's a picture of the island frame which needed to be build around the cabinets to support the slab of granite on top. We also need it to run plumbing and electricity through the back of the cabinets.
In other news, we got gas run to the house, which was interesting to see. They bore a hole from the street directly to the house to the spot where we had the gas line installed into the house a few weeks ago.
I didn't get a picture of the actual boring. I told you, I'm bad at blogging.
We also picked out floors from iFloor.com. They were delivered by the next week by truck. The truck is too big to make it down the driveway for a front door drop off, so the plan to put all four pallets of floors on the trailer seemed like a good idea. It was a bad idea. First it took almost an hour for the driver to maneuver his pallet dolly to get the load onto the trailer. Second of all, we could only realistically fit one pallet on. So he ended up leaving one on the trailer and the rest on the street. It was about 98 degrees that day so moving 2,200 square feet of floors down the driveway was not fun.
Our neighbor was nice enough to come give us a hand.
Once the floors are in it's going to look great. With the electric relocated and the framing, plumbing and electric inspections complete, we were ready to start putting sheetrock up. Let me start out by saying that I'm not great at even hanging sheetrock. My father-in-law can hang, tape, float, sand, texture and paint... but he's one man so it would have taken a LOT of time. So we called a couple of sheetrock guys in to come do the job. After three days they still hadn't showed up and by the third day we had done much of the work ourselves.
WALLS! Speaking of walls, the last few weeks (even before I forgot to keep blogging) El has been working hard on picking a color. It started off innocently enough with a sample or two, you know, just to see how it looked on the walls. It ended with a rainbow of colors across every paintable surface in the house, combining to create a patchwork of art where ever the eye would turn.
She finally picked a color. And guess what? It was the FIRST color that she picked. At least the paint guy at the Home Depot wasn't bored.
Walls were actually painted today... I'll have those pictures up soon enough. El and her mom have been working hard on sanding, priming, painting and caulking all of the trim, door frames and doors. We're doing an off-white because the brown has to go. We removed the carpet from the master bedroom and it's size is perfect for rotating all 24 doors in the house to prepare them for painting. We call it the door shop...
I had to go to a week-long meeting at my company's headquarters in Phoenix last week - so I didn't get a chance to have any fun. I WANT TO GO BACK!
The only other big thing that we got done was the cabinets. We shopped a long time for cabinets and the options pretty much boiled down to Home Depot / Lowes cabinets, which were expensive and not 100% wood; Cabinets from a cabinet company which were solidly built, but not very customizable... still as expensive as the previous; or custom made cabinets by a guy who lives near us, also expensive - which I guess makes me the cheap guy who doesn't like to pay good money for a place to store our kitchen crap. Anyway, Jimmy the cabinet guy did a fantastic job making our cabinets exactly how we wanted them. One of the upper cabinets to the left of the stove wasn't painted - that should be done early next week, but you can do your best to imagine them there.
I'll try my hardest to keep this thing updated. Now that we're getting to the end of it the progress should be more visible.
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