House Remodel

Our major project this year was a house remodel, and this is our "calm before the storm" picture - we'll get you some "finished" pictures a little later! The object was in part to have a place for Benjamin to bring him up from the basement (he HATES with a passion being two floors removed from everyone else, and I don’t blame him. But with the “Daniel” dynamics, it’s not an option to share rooms) and in part to hopefully accommodate Mark’s dad who is almost 90 and needed to not be living alone anymore. We hoped we could have him half time and Diane (Mark's sister) have him half time. In the mean time, he moved in with Diane, and it was pretty traumatic, so now we're thinking it won't work AT ALL to shift him back and forth.

The house project has taken longer than we planned because we were trying to do bits and pieces ourselves to save money. Secondly, we’ve been hiring friends etc., because they’re less expensive, but then we also have to wait for them longer. And finally, we were so buried in other stuff … kids, church, etc., that we were a little slow in decisions that needed to be made, so we’d have to wait for something to come in and such.



Basically we opened up the whole side of the house and added a family room, bake center (large walk in pantry with counter space so I can have my appliances on there), master bedroom with big bathroom and closet (the old master closet & bathroom were TEENY and obnoxious), and then the basement (unfinished for now) will be the “game room” and eventually a bathroom and kitchenette down there. In the process, we also had to remodel the kids bathroom and parts of Daniel’s bedroom (cause we cut through them to get to the new bedroom), and remodel the kitchen (we took away one whole wall so re-did basically everything and got a new island &
cabinets). We got a great clearance porcelain tile, so did a LOT in tile – family room, kitchen, laundry, main floor bathroom, kids’ bathroom, our bathroom! With the collapse of the ceiling in the laundry room and part of the main floor bathroom, we also had to have that fixed, and we painted and replaced the cruddy linoleum. THEN, since everything else on the main floor was going to be fixed and beautiful, we had to throw a couple of coats of paint on the living room walls and replaced the carpet in there at the same time they put the carpet in the master bedroom. (We still had the cruddy cat & dog pee-soaked carpet in there from when we moved in 5 years ago, so we’re THRILLED to have new carpet.)


Apart from taking over the second part of the project and being the contractor, I spent the last ten months running around either in front of or just behind workers – prepping stuff – cleaning up after them, etc., etc. Things happen like this: I went down into my scrap room the other day, and I did not realize they’d had to cut ANOTHER couple of holes in the ceiling there to accommodate for the electricity in the island. So there is MESSY drywall mush all OVER scrap papers, photos, EVERYTHING. I don’t know where the water came from, but it soaked some pictures and stuff. I just couldn’t even face it. So I turned around, shut the door, and will deal with it later. Now WHY couldn’t he have asked me for something to cover things up??? This type of thing happens ALL the time if you’re not watching constantly. And unfortunately, I can NOT be there to watch constantly. Another “for example”: I keep a supply of rags handy for the workers, and I try to take them regularly and clean them out. But the other day, I saw the tile guys had picked up two of my GOOD dish towels and were using them to wipe up grout. That was the end of the towels!

We got the kitchen and family room pretty much together (after no kitchen for a month) and I’ve moved my Africa things down here (used to have it in our bedroom). I *LOVE* having it here – it looks great. But messy things keep happening, like yesterday they were putting down flooring in the side room (using the laminate we took up from the kitchen), and after starting cutting in the garage, they brought the saw INTO the room, and I came through to see sawdust flying everywhere! I nicely asked them to keep the door closed, and put a rag along the bottom, but not before I got a good supply of sawdust out here. I’ve literally just given up on cleaning up in many places, because I have cleaned things SO many times, and they just end up all mucked up again. There’s SO MUCH I can’t put away because there are so many little things that have to be sorted out. It’s a hassle. But it will be awesome when it’s done.