Stenciling Project

Sharon made pretty speedy progress on her At-Home Stencil class. She really only has one project left—stenciling a design onto the wall—before she finishes up her original objectives. Obviously, she set the expectations too low. =)
This small project went quite fast, as she just started the embroidered outlining on Sunday afternoon. This is actually a relief, as there will likely be miles of embroidery to do on the living room curtains.

Lots of Activity

There's usually 2 to 3 projects going on the house at one time. It's amazing how much is getting done right now.

The paint stripping has started; this is a once over with heat guns and no chemicals yet. The woodwork in the living room is stained very dark. There is likely to be some bleaching in our future.
The back door has been cut into the foundation and they're working on putting in the forms for the stairs into the yard.
The front steps into the house are gone.
There is still another team working on the fine demo of the kitchen, preparing for removing walls.

Chimney GONE!

Today they pulled the chimney. We now have a hole that runs all the way from the basement through the roof of the house.

Our furnace vented out of this old chimney, so we are now without heat. We hope it doesn't get too cold again.

We kept a lot of the bricks that we're too damaged from the removal to use for paths in the yard. We have quite a large pile on our driveway to deal with later.
















The hole in the backyard is huge now. They'll be cutting in the door on Monday and no doubt starting to build stairs soon.

Kitchen & Baths GONE!

The backyard is a disaster. We're having a door installed out the rear of our basement into the backyard and they brought in a tractor to dig the hole. They also pulled our fence. Luckily Jeff hasn't spent a lot of time on the garden in the last few months, like he had originally planned.

The kitchen is gone. Tomorrow the chimney will go too. The prior owner had finished the small attached porch into a breakfast nook—with scrap wood from Montgomery Ward shipping crates and cardboard.

This is the ceiling and refrigerator space from the original kitchen space. Looks much better structurally.

The half-bath on the main floor. We'll be moving this wall over about 6"; the bathroom is too small.

The basement bathroom space. The foundation is a mess; all this piping was run through channels dug into the foundation. We'll have to fix this before we close it back up.

Tomorrow the chimney is removed and they do the final excavation for the basement door. The basement doors are probably being cut open on Monday.

First Day

Today the Craftsman Design & Renovation (CDR) team prepared for the destruction that begins tomorrow. They sealed off doorways between living space and construction space.

Choosing Exterior Colors

We're getting down to the wire and we're having to make our final selections for our remodel. Jeff is pretty insistent about wanting a yellow color scheme, so we're planning to finish the exterior house along these lines.We've got our stain color (the yellow on the right in this set) and roofing lined up...













...but we're still not quite sure which third color (for the gables) to choose yet. It's going to depend on what would look good on our specific house shape. This house has a lot of gables on the front.
Our kitchen designer also reminded us that we have to get Jeff's range ordered; production time is 10 weeks for custom colors. So, off we went the other day to try and match the soapstone slab. Jeff and Sharon don't exactly agree on the color, but it's Jeff's stove so he gets first choice. This is the color Jeff wants to go with.

Sharon is trying to delay the decision a few days while we continue to wait for our tile sample order from New England Art Tile. She's hoping the tile will resolve the impasse.

Almost Ready for Demolition

Jeff and Sharon spent nearly 9 hours yesterday packing up the kitchen. It was amazing how much stuff we had crammed in those cabinets. We carefully labelled each box with most of the contents in case we need to retrieve stuff during the remodel. Here is the "temporary" kitchen storage box area. Our contractor is planning to hook up a temporary laundry room sink down in the basement for us for water supply. So, it will suck, but not as bad as it could. =)






Except for a couple unsealed boxes, the kitchen is empty.

Today we have to finish clearing out the center of the basement because that's where we'll be setting up the temporary "kitchen" (laundry sink and refrigerator) . We still have a lot of misc. boxes and stained glass supplies in that space.

Wednesday is when the real mess begins. They'll be starting the basement demolition and will be starting to cut doors into the basement foundation. This first week will probably be pretty unpleasant; it will surely be a good time to get familiar with our county library system.

Though, the rest of the house looks pretty messy, these are mostly empty boxes that need to be cleared out. Time to get them gathered up in one place and put an ad on craigslist.