FULL HOUSE Renovation, Part 1

After nearly 18 years of living in our house, we are doing some major renovations - some are much-needed, like new flooring and carpet (turns out builder-grade carpet is not meant to last for 18 years), some are more on the cosmetic side, like updating the hall bathrooms, and one - the kitchen - is to make it much more user-friendly.  While we could have potentially done some of this work ourselves, the truth is most of this is beyond our skill set, plus we wanted it completed in a reasonable time...which most definitely would not happen if we were doing it.  So we hired the same contractor that we used for our master bathroom update, and the fun began last Tuesday.

Day 1:  Jeremy, our contractor, arrived and we made a plan for where to put the rest of the furniture because I'd hit the despair point 24 hours earlier...I really didn't want to have to keep my car outside of the garage after our recent hail storm, but where else could the furniture go?  Turns out, my office made a great holding spot - his crew took out the carpet, pad, and tack strips (since tile would be going in there later) and everything got moved in, covered with plastic, and then the doors were closed and taped up to minimize the amount of dust:

Left:  piling all the furniture inside my office

Right:  wrapped up and sealed inside, somewhat akin to an episode of Breaking Bad

Then the demolition began - the crew started removing the kitchen cabinets, the bathtub and surround, the floor in the hall bathrooms, the mantle over the fireplace, and they even started jackhammering up the tile floor in the kitchen.  Paco and I stayed inside the master bedroom, away from most of the dust.  The crew closed down the A/C vents in the bedroom, closets, and bathroom so that the dust wouldn't get inside, and that helped somewhat.  Paco was only bothered once by the noise, and that's when they were really pounding to get the bathtub out.  But I put him in his crate, and he immediately stopped barking and settled down:

Oh man, I didn't notice that I'd parked his nemesis, the vacuum cleaner, right next to his crate.  Sorry, Paco!

The best surprise came late Tuesday afternoon, when the noise stopped and I decided it was safe to open up my bedroom door - the columns, which I have never liked, were gone!  And instantly, the room felt larger.  Check out the before and after:

Now you see them...

And now you don't!

Day 2:  Torrential rain made the entire house feel damp because the crew had a window open to vent the dust from the tile and floor removal.  This was a long, long day.  And because we got so much rain (a record-setting 4.5 inches for that day), they couldn't take the debris outside to the dump trailer, much less get the trailer to the dump as it would have gotten stuck in mud.  So this is how the house looked at the end of the day:

Goodbye, glued-down wood floor...

Goodbye, kitchen.

The kitchen looks so big without anything in it!  The ventilation machine is in the bottom right of the picture - this is what was pushing a lot of the dust outside.

Day 3:  Clear and sunshine, yay!  I think this was the worst, dust-wise.  They had to sand the paint off of the concrete floors, as well as remove the rest of the wood and tile, and all the adhesives.  I met with the electrician and went over where we were moving outlets, etc, and then I put Paco in his crate and left him to go to my volunteer gig at the hospital.  When I came home, I had something visibly done toward the renovation, instead of only seeing the demolition - our light switch just inside the kitchen changed from a single to a triple (or a 3 gang, as I learned in electrician-speak):

This will control the overhead lights, the pendant lights over the sink area, and the new under-cabinet lights, which you can see the wiring for in yellow.

Day 4:  This was nice and short - the plumber came and installed the new bathtub and valve for it.  Here's Inspector Paco checking everything:

Dis where baftub was.  Glad to see it gone, rilly.

Wat?!  Oh no.  Thot I waz safe from bafs.

Day 5:  Drywall repair.  Believe me, there is a lot of that needed, but the crew got quite a bit done in about half a day.  They will need to return to do more, but here's some of what they did:

Ceiling where one of the columns was, plus the drywall where mantle over the fireplace was repaired.  We are going to mount our TV on the wall, so we had to lose the mantle so it wouldn't be too high.

Inspector Paco approves of the pantry wall repair.

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This was our first week, and it was a doozy.  I was warned about the dust and general upheaval, but you really have to experience it to see how bad it is.  After seeing how hard the crew of 3 - 5 people worked each day on the floor removal, I'm really glad we went with paying for demolition instead of doing it ourselves.  Chip Gaines makes it look easy and fun, but the truth is, it's not.  This was worth every single cent to not have to tackle ourselves...shoot, I think it would take us a month to get everything removed!

As I did when I wrote about our master bathroom redo five years ago, I'll also write about what isn't going smooth - I'm not going to say what went wrong, because I have every confidence that whatever happens will be taken care of...as was the case when the valve where the water line from the refrigerator started leaking hours after the fridge had been moved.  A phone call was made and shortly afterward Jeremy appeared with parts and he fixed that valve.

Another thing that happened with almost every plumbing fixture that was removed was that the valves ended up leaking.  Again - not my problem, thankfully.  Jeff and I have done some home repairs over the years, and this kind of stuff always happens to us, which causes stress and consternation - did we break it due to our non-professional skills?  Nope, it happens to the pros, too.   Good to know, and it was so nice that we weren't the ones rushing around to fix everything.

Stay tuned - the saga of the house renovation is ongoing...