Week 3: Demo Continues

WEEK 3: DEMO CONTINUES.....

Before I can start on what took place this week I have to share a special moment that happen on Monday. So Matt and I are woke up early by our GC letting us know he is going to start on the basement gut that day. Of course this was planned to not happen until Wednesday so for me not to be present when this went down made me quite nervous. But we trust our GC and know he is making the right decisions for us. Matt and I were getting phone calls left and right about this and that all day and when I finally leave from work at the end of the day to head over to the construction zone needless to say I was stressing a little. I am looking around inspecting and see a small piece of paper just sitting on the bar in the basement among some tools and materials. I glance at it thinking it might have been another found surprise in the walls, and boy was it. I immediately asked Lonnie where he got it and answered 'in the crawl space when we were clearing it out to line it, it was in there'. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

For those of you who had the great pleasure of knowing Steve you probably have a cold chill running down your back just like I did when I saw it. Steve was one of my dad & mom's dear friend who was taken away from this earth way to soon. I know I was in grade school, probably 4th grade. Nothing else was left, just this card and you can believe in whatever you want to believe in but this was a sign straight from the man upstairs saying this is right, this is were you are supposed to be and I will be watching over to make sure of it. God bless you Steve and please continue to shine your smile down to all of us!

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Nothing ever goes as planned when you remodel so always be sure to add a buffer few days or weeks to your timeline. Especially if you are on a time constraint due to a living situation, traveling or money. We are blessed to be living with my mother-in-law so luckily we do have time on our side. Enter new phase to our remodel plan... we decided with the push from our GC to go ahead and gut out the basement now versus down the road. Discovering we had plaster instead of drywall was a huge factor in this because it is such a mess. If we waited and did it down the road a few years from now we would have to live through a remodel, cover the first floor in protective plastic and have our hvac cleaned out afterwards, yadda yadda. We have to cut holes in the basement ceiling anyways to re-route the plumbing for the kitchen so might as well take it all out instead of recovering these areas then have to rip it out all over again.

Her are some before and after shots of the basement. We are in love with the brick bar, did I mention we bought this house from the owner of Dutch's? So we are pretty sure that the bar top and doors came from there so we have a little piece of history since Dutch's closed a few years back. We also found more windows underneath the lovely laminate wood paneling. Which really brightened it up and brought the bedroom up to proper code.

Here are some snap shots of the basement gut. We enlarged the bathroom by adding in a stand up shower and linen closet. I decided to change the door orientation of the bedroom so it would be better accessible to the bathroom and more private from the public areas. Lastly we enclosed the hvac room from the laundry area so we can bring that more up to date with some great shelving and storage.

 The Builders left their mark

 

  Main Room to the left of stairs

 

 Main Room to the left of stairs

 

 New bathroom off the main room

 

 Area to the right of the stairs

 New framed bedroom & bathroom

 Area to the right of the stairs, new framed bedroom & bathroom


This second half of this week was fairly calm in the demo world but we made a lot of technical progress. Our plumber, Jeff, started the planning work for rerouting the  kitchen. We only had to move a few things a pretty small distance so not too much damage. The water lines for the sink and washer were scotched over a couple feet and we had to move the vent pipe to go under the floor, through the wall, up and out to the roof. The water line for the refrigerator has to be move to the adjacent wall. We need to roughed-in the upstairs washer/dryer and the basement bathroom so when those projects are ready to go all we will have to do is put in the floor, vanity, appliances and of course all of the finishing touches.

We brought in our drywall wall guy to inspect and quote. Once the guts of the walls and ceilings (pipes, wires, lighting, insulation) are complete he can go to work. I would hope for this to be started in the next 2-3 weeks days. Lets just see if I am on track here.

We also had our first appointments dealing with the kitchen. Both flooring, cabinets and granite specialist came out to do some measuring and work up some numbers for us based on the drawings I have been working up. I do already know what types of materials I want and the color schemes I am going for so hopefully what I am envisioning can become a reality and within budget. You will have to wait for the finishing product before I can share :)