Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

No time to type right now. We got the room painted on Sat and the floor mostly down, but discovered on Sunday that I hadn't ordered enough floor tiles, ugh, and that I was coming down with a nasty bug, double ugh. So Sunday and today I mostly lay in bed and shivered and came downstairs when Jon needed help with eyeballing something and then crawled back upstairs and collapsed again.

Jon did get a lot done though and I will order more tile tomorrow, hopefully if I can't get the same color lots, the difference won't be too obvious. The kids watched a lot of tv and Simon spent most of today naked since I managed to get him to take off his pjs before I collapsed, but he resisted putting on any clothes by himself. It was a little bit Lord of the Flies in the playroom. Still Jon has to get back to work tomorrow and therefore so do I.

Wish we had a sink first, but them's the breaks.

We have a room again!

For an entire day two very dedicated men hung sheetrock, taped, mudded, and did wonderful things and we have a room again!




Tomorrow morning while we are at the Camelot Graduation they will come back and finish sanding. Then when we get back we will prime and paint and if we are very very quick we might have a floor laid by the time we go to bed. I think that is a bit of a stretch. I will settle for primed and painted and ready to go on Sunday.

Actually Moving forward

The plumbers finally came!!


Then they left all of their trash, except for the copper pipes. That definitely gets filed under very very irritating. We moved all the trash out onto the driveway and called the boss plumber man about it. He said it would get taken care of. Two days and counting waiting for them to show up (all while heading into a holiday weekend), but it's all okay because we haven't paid them yet. Payment will occur upon trash pickup....

In the meantime, during those two days, the electrician came and took down more sheetrock and moved all the wiring we needed moved. We will now be able to turn the kitchen lights on and off from the hall!

We now have two guys in there hanging sheetrock at lightning speeds. They say they will be done with the mudding and everything by tonight, so tomorrow after swim lessons and Camelot graduation, we will be able to paint and maybe even begin laying the floor. Sunday (only a week behind schedule!) we should have the floor laid and be ready to actually start installing the kitchen. It can't come fast enough.

I am a little scared of how much all this extra sheetrock hanging is going to cost us. We have the plumbing price already and it could still come within the extras budget, but fingers are definitely crossed.

La La La and some thumb twiddling

So here we are, almost a full week in and we are pretty much no further along than we were Friday morning. The ceiling is mostly scraped and the mudding of the existing sheetrock has begun, but that is about it.

With all that time on our hands, Jon was starting to go a bit nutty so I looked up installation of our floors and discovered that we do have some work to do there. So Jon was under the house this afternoon shimming the underflooring and getting rid of the big sag in the middle. It's almost all flat now! Next we are going to sand and lay some thicker roofing felt down on the low spot we couldn't raise and then use thinner roofing felt as an underlayment for the whole thing and (fingers crossed) by the time we have done all that, the plumber will have rerouted the pesky pipes and John the friendly ceiling guy will have fixed up all the sheet rock and we will be ready to paint and lay the floor.

The plumber never called today so I guess he couldn't make it. Really hoping he can get it all done tomorrow. The fridge is being delivered Friday and I would so love to have the floor down by then, or at the very least have finished painting!

On the funnier side, we noticed on Sat that the dryer was venting into the kitchen ceiling space. Turns out that the vent wasn't attached to the pipe in the ceiling space, which was correspondingly FULL of dryer lint. All fixed now and for the first time you can smell the laundry outside when the dryer is on. Who knows how long that has been going on.

So there are two postives to everything moving so slowly. We have found and fixed a dryer problem and had time to figure out how to flatten the floor in the kitchen pretty cheaply. Whoo Hoo.

I'm done with the delays now though thanks. Time to move forward.

And the delays begin.

The plumber came around today and there is a financially feasible fix to our pipe problem. It does involve Jon doing some reframing in the load bearing wall, but nothing he can't handle. The bigger problem is that we can't get started on the main kitchen fun stuff until we lay the floor.

We can't lay the floor until we paint the ceiling.

We can't paint the ceiling until it is all sheetrocked and mudded and sanded.

The ceiling, sheetrocking, mudding guy can't do his thing until the plumber is done messing with the walls.

And the plumber can't begin work until Tuesday next week...............

So now instead of a weekend beavering away, we have a weekend with no plans and a big empty room that we can't work on. Talk about antsy making.

Still the pool is open. There is a Fiber Festival on this weekend. There is much dishwashing to do. I'm sure we will fill the time. And I will post more pictures as soon as there is a change to document. At least the flooring arrived today. It is gorgeous! I can't wait to get it installed.

We frogged the Kitchen!

Rip it! Rip it!

Yes the kitchen is looking a lot emptier now. The tile is gone. The fridge is out on the deck. All the horrible useless cabinets have been hauled away. Whoo Hoo!

There must, of course, in every complete redo, be a large problem that can't be seen until you really get going. We found ours.
















Here you can see that the boxed in top 10-15 inches of the kitchen was not boxed in for cosmetic purposes. So we are having a plumber come out tomorrow to hopefully tell us how we can put these pipes back where they belong, in the ceiling space or the wall cavity and OUT of my kitchen!!!


The other pipe that must be moved is the drain by the hood vent. Sadly the new hood needs to have a vent right where that drain goes. So we might have to rip out the sheet rock below so we can move that pipe a little to the left or right. Hopefully the plumber will have a good idea (and price!) and we can get quickly back to getting the kitchen ready to install into.

In the meantime we ate yummy crockpot chicken with rice cooker rice and peas. Cooking is easy. I'm not so convinced about the crampground style dishwashing using the outdoor tap. We might switch to compostable plates in a day or two. Certainly if the plumbing delays cause more than a week without a sink, I will need to find a happier way to do the dishes.

Simon's Bike Makes a Picture

We had a couple of days of hard rain which floods our front path. Simon had left his bike in front of the house for the duration and apparently it protected the dirt underneath it from washing away. When we emerged after the rains had gone and moved the bike, look what we found!
What should we call it? A dirt shadow? Rain portrait? Certainly cool.

Tomorrow is the big day.

Men are coming to rip out our old kitchen. I am hoping so very much that my plan for the new kitchen is as much more space efficient than the old one as I planned it to be. How nice it would be to have less crap forced to hang out on the counters all the time.

So to kick us off here are some pictures of the old not so functioning kitchen as I started to pack it up and some pictures of it ready to be destroyed and carted out the back door. Enjoy.