Jim Dabrowski

More walls coming down and beams going up.

So, I missed Day 4. That was last Friday. I got home from work that day, took a couple of pics and then headed to the airport to go to Vegas to watch my older brother get married. That was fun, but no time for writing blog posts. So, today is a two-fer.

Recall, prior to Friday, the kitchen looked like this:

When I came home, it looked like this:

We’re opening up the wall to the family room to make the whole thing more open. To do that, they built a temp-wall to hold up the ceiling while they removed the old wall and put in a new beam to hold up the second floor. Like such:

and such:

That was about it from Friday.

Then today I come home and things are looking a bit more open.

A big improvement. Our family room is hidden behind that wall of plastic. A good look.

Then they turned their sights to soffits. Remember, way back when, when the one wall looked like this?

Well, now it looks like this:

We’re still gonna put cabinets in that opening. But for that, you’ll have to wait a while. I don’t want there to be any spoilers.

Take care all.

JIm

And the walls come tumbling down—well, sort of.

Continue to make slow but steady progress I guess. That whole wall, for the most part, is coming down and will then be open to the family room. Looks like they’ll need to move some plumbing I’m thinking.

Then in the foyer they got that top layer of tile off.

Maybe we should just leave it? Kinda trendy and plaid-looking with the old tile and the left-over grout. OK, maybe not.

That’s it for today.

JIm

I’m shocked. I honestly think never before in the history of home remodeling projects has a project been reduced in scope and price. But yet, that is exactly what happened to me today.

I generally approach this project with the thought that if the project lead ever calls me in the middle of the day, it’s gonna be bad news. Why else would they need to call, right? So today I get a call from Jerry and I’m thinking, “oh shit.”

phone rings

Jim: Hello.

Jerry: Hi Jim, this is Jerry, how you doing today?

Jim: Fine ’til you called. (Yes, I really said that, I know, I’m a jerk.)

But then he goes on to tell me that he actually had good news. Remember that tile over tile over concrete thing in the foyer? Well, turns out, he decided if he removed it all the way down, he would have to rebuild up the subfloor by 2–3” which seemed silly to him. So he had the bright idea to only remove the top layer of tile and then tile right back over the old layer. This means no jackhammering, no rebuilding up the subfloor which saves both time and money from the original quote! Yay me! So, all he has to do is fix up that area they already dug into and they’re good.

Will wonders never cease? Let’s hope so.

As for the rest of the kitchen, they basically got all the tile off. That was about it for the day. I’ll leave you with one glorious picture of a plywood floor and talk to you later.

JIm

Here it is! Day 1! The start of our kitchen remodel. I hope to post every day about how the changes went so everyone can share with me the joys of a full kitchen remodel.

First a reminder.

Before:

And after:

And I must say, this is going to be interesting:

They mentioned there being concrete below the tile in the foyer but they didn’t quite notice the layer of tile below the current tile, and then concrete below that. No word yet on if this’ll cost us extra. They were already anticipating having to jack-hammer all the concrete out—maybe that extra layer of tile won’t matter.

That’s it for day 1. Stay tuned!

JIm

Almost ready to start!

So we had our “final walkthrough” a couple of weeks ago, which really wasn’t final, cause we’re gonna have yet another “final walkthrough” just before they actually start – which is Tuesday, May 1. They wanted to start Monday, April 30 but Dena and I will be travelling back from Idyllwild, CA and we didn’t want them to start when no one was here. We figure someone should be here to let them in.

So, what have we been doing in the meanwhile? Cleaning out the kitchen! We have to get everything moved out so they can start demoing.

First we had to get everything out and our kitchen looked a bit like this.

Then today, Greta, Tom & Traigh came by to take our appliances. Turns out, they’re remodeling their kitchen as well and our appliances would go just fine in their new kitchen. So what the heck. They also took some of our countertop since they’re building a peninsula as well. Who knew you can just saw through a countertop with a circular saw? So our kitchen looks a bit different now.

The smart reader out there is asking, “What are you doing for eating?” Well, we moved into the basement!

We have this beautiful bar with a mini-fridge and a nice room behind it so we decked it out and we’re basically gonna live down here for the two months while our kitchen is being redone. It’s a bit cozy, but it’ll work.

That’s it for now. The next step is we meet with them this Thursday for our final-final-walkthrough and then they begin the following Tuesday. Once that happens, I plan to blog every day showing the progress and adding some pithy commentary (I hope). Keep coming back, should be fun!

JIm

Eh. Had our “final walk-through” with the builders. The lead guy came here with the lead builder-guy who will be doing most of the work. They pretty much agreed that, yep, work needed to be done. About the only new thing that came out of this meeting was our start date: May 1.

sigh

So hopefully we’ll have our new kitchen in place by July 1.

That’s it. See ya next time!

JIm

Signed the contract today. Sent off 25% downpayment. We’ll see what happens next!

JIm

Today we met with our project manager, Jerry, for our kitchen remodel. We went over the final estimates and the contract. He gave us a nice overview of how the process will work and what they’ll do. He says to be ready for some stressful times. I think we are.

Here is a picture of the new floor plan I talked about in the previous post.

Ignore the way the seating is drawn in there — otherwise its all correct. One big island, fridge built into the wall where we currently have pantry-style cabinets. Take out most of the wall between the kitchen and the family room. Gonna be messy around here for a while (9 weeks!) and Dena and I will be living in the basement that whole time. Should be “fun”.

We actually had a few questions about the contract after we read it over and sent off an email asking for clarification on a few issues. Mostly minor, we’ll see what they say. I’m not too worried. Next step is to get the revised contract signed, give them a bunch of money to start and off we go!

JIm

We decided to remodel our kitchen. Mind you, our kitchen looks fine the way it is…

but there are some problems. Mostly they stem from the fact that all the cabinet doors are falling off. You see, the previous owners seem to have had all the doors removed, stripped and restained to the color you see here. While that worked fine, one problem we’re finding is that the side walls of the cabinets are that cheap particle board and when you remove screws from it and then try to re-screw the hinges back into the same place, they just don’t stay. So we end up with a number of them looking like this.

To make matters worse in one place, they wanted a big cabinet, so they just cut out the center partition that holds things up and we now have this happening.

So we want a change.

Having watched plenty of HGTV over the years, we knew we wanted a design-build company to come in and help us decide on how it should look and then actually do the work and subcontracting.

We first found a local company who seemed interested, but after getting some preliminary renderings from them they went dark. No responses to our “We like this. We want to hire you. Please contact us.” emails so we gave up on them.

Then we went to Property Revival. They’ve been pretty good so far. We started with them almost a year ago. We’ve spent that time going over every little detail about what we want. Most of that time is Dena and I changing our minds on countertops, cabinets, faucets, sinks, etc. But we’re finally done picking things out and should be ready to start soon.

Here is how the kitchen is laid out now.

We’re going to remove the peninsula and replace it with a big island. We’re also going to remove the wall between the kitchen and the family room to go with a more open concept.

Soon we should be signing the contract and having our final walk though and then getting on the calendar. I plan to keep blogging our progress as we go. So stay tuned. More to come (and soon I hope).

JIm