Moving Right Along

It seems they are moving so fast. They have until June to finish and they have told me they will be finished by March 1st. That's crazy but very welcome. It is, however, very hard to keep up. One of these days I will catch up to the progress or so I keep telling myself. I do have to go everyday to take pics or I'll miss something.

This is the "weird space." Because we only have a carport and not a garage (yet), we needed some storage space so we decided to wall this space off for that purpose.

This is the Master Bedroom. If you look closely, you can see a door framed in the center of the wall. I had to ask them to "fix" this because this is the only free wall in the whole room. We need to put furniture and tv's on it. So, they had to re-frame it and put a new door off to the side where it was originally supposed to go

Plumbing and framing going in for the new shower

Shower Head up there, way up there (yeah I can't reach it)

Future spot of new bathtub

More plumbing

Shopping

Before we started this project, before we even closed on our house, we had to go with the contractor to pick materials because we had to come up with a cost to base the budget on. Many of our materials were picked on the fly in October, two and a half months before we even closed on the house. We don't have samples and are praying we still like what we picked. Here are some photos of just some of the things we chose for the house:

This is a tile (I think)

Another tile

Carpet

Ledgestone

Tile

Glass tile

Caesarstone (doesn't the name sound like a stripper?)

Black!

So, I mentioned before that we had decided to stain the cabinets a darker color and get rid of the honey oak that was there. It was between that and painting them white, but in the end we all agreed upon the dark stain.

So, we were a little surprised when we came over and found this:

That's primer. Last time I checked, you didn't put primer on cabinets to be stained. We called a meeting with our contractor and he said, no worries, it's all part of the process. We were skeptical but decided to wait and see.

So it was even more a surprise when I came in a couple days later to find this:

That's paint, Black paint. Not even a particular color, just Black...Can you see Finn in that darkness?

Another look at Before:

Such a pretty kitchen :)

Cabinet Detail

Another view 

It's now Black, very black. We toyed with the idea of distressing it:

and it looked pretty good but, in the end, we decided to keep them black to avoid any more issues and hits on our budget

It's starting to look better

Or maybe I am just getting accustomed to it

I think it will look better without all the plastic on the flooring and windows and walls that are painted black too. I keep telling myself this. Still haven't found a finish that we like though :(

Paint, Paint, and more Paint

The painters have arrived and have started to demand our colors for the home. This required endless trips to the paint store, Sean meeting (again) an old friend (from grade school in Washington) that happened to work there, about 30 paint samples to paint on the wall, and Nicole walking around everywhere with her trusty paint fan of colors.

You can see all the colors we ended up choosing under the Paint Colors tab.

The Master became a test wall space since it was the only place sans paneling. I can still tell you what all those colors are

OK we did test on the boys wall too

The primering (and the mess) had begun

At least you can't see the carpeting anymore

Downstairs already looks amazingly different

Guest room is brighter

More downstairs

So sad to see the wallpaper go :)

What a difference!

Um, they took the primer a little far...This is the first hint of a major problem

Changes

Everyday brings some new surprise. Sometimes these surprises are good, other times not so much as you will see. Today though brought some good ones.

These were the Master Bedroom closets

Bye Bye

We demolished the little half bath in the Master and combined it with the pink and yellow main bath to make one larger bath

Here is another shot of that

We tore out the shower downstairs and the closet that was next to it to put in a bathtub and shower combo

Is it Worth it???

Our new house is a 1960 ranch house with a walk-out basement. As the pics have shown, it is a sea of brown and green paneling and the carpet was just as bad. The main bathroom was a pink walled, yellow bath, sink, and toileted marvel with the pretty brownish, taupish, greenish carpet. The other bath wasn't much better.

The good news was that the house has had pretty much only one owner that had it built. It was a family that loved the house and took amazing care of it. It was owned by the person that bought it from that family for only a couple of months so we don't count them. It was amazingly clean and you could tell that it had been loved.

Why are we captivated by this brown and somewhat stinky (old smelling) house that was really not much to look at from the street?

Walking from the street/carport to the deck

This is our deck that runs the length of the back of the home

This is the view from the Master Bedroom

This is the view from the Living Room

The setting is beautiful and the house is on 3/4 of an acre for the boys and dog to play on. How could we resist?

Demo Begins

Well, we passed all the inspections with flying colors and the bank decided we were worthy of a loan.

We were very lucky to get a renovation loan which includes extra money on top of the purchase price to remodel.  It's now time to decide on all the finishes and colors and what we are going to do to this place.

First things first, to stain the Kitchen cabinets a nice dark Espresso color (um, this didn't happen) and to demo the bathrooms and wall between Kitchen and Dining Room.

We decided to save some money in our budget and not drywall over the paneling so paint will be the key thing on the walls.

We closed right before Christmas and this is the week of Christmas. These guys got started really quickly.

There's a Dumpster in the carport!!!

I see a yellow sink and toilet

There goes the wall tile

The wall to the Living Room

Lots of Light

Here's what it looks like from the other side