Home Sweet Home Reno: Month Four

December 21st we not only celebrated the beginning of Christmas break for the fam, but also another month down of dual home ownership.  Maybe celebrated is the wrong word.  :c)  As you'll see below, it was a busy, busy month!

Accomplishments:

• Dug trenches for re-routing plumbing to new sink location
• Plumbing re-routed for new sink location
• Dug trenches for new electrical floor plugs in living room
• Installed electrical for new floor plugs in living room
• Settled on paint colors (I THINK)
• Picked grout colors for remaining areas (half bath plus master bath)
• Framed out half wall between kitchen and living room
• Framed out return to hide electrical on the half wall between the living room and kitchen
• Inspected cabinetry for kitchen and master bath
• Framed out new opening to master bath
• Framed out new toilet room in master bath
• Framed out pocket door to new toilet room in master bath
• Received stair quote
• Received plumbing quote
• Received electrical quote
• Received fireplace quote
• Received contractor take-over quote
• Bead board research
• Ship lap research

Purchases:

• Microwave
• Microwave trim kit
• Ovens
• Cooktop
• Kitchen Sink
• Half Bath Vanity (included sink, counter, fixtures)
• Half Bath Vanity light
• Half Bath Mirror
• Girls' Bathroom Mirrors
• Girls' Bathroom Sconces
• Materials for Bead Board in Girls' bathrooms & half bath
• Cabinet Pulls for Kitchen
• Cabinet Pulls for Living Room Built Ins
• Master Bath Shower fixtures
• Master Bath Faucets
• Master Bath Pendant 
• Cabinet Pulls for Master Bath
• Cabinet Pulls for Built Ins in Study
• Cabinet Pulls for Laundry Room

In the Pipeline:

• Schedule Plumbers
• Solicit more Electrical Quotes
• Solicit more Carpentry Quotes
• Solicit more Fireplace Quotes
• Line Up Temporary Housing

As you can tell from this month's summary, we got a LOT accomplished and I have the credit card statement to prove it.  Ryan and I each took a couple of days off here and there when we could so that we could be at the house to help GC, run errands, or just watch and daydream about what it will look like when it's finished.  

I'll tell most of the stories of this month's happenings with the pictures below, but the biggest discovery this month isn't in any of the pictures (although if you read between the lines you've likely figured it out).  So- we came to grips this month with the fact that our house will NOT be ready when we are scheduled to close on our current house.  As I mentioned previously we really didn't expect it to sell so quickly and we kind of freaked out.  (We = me.)

We started talking about alternatives with our GC and decided jointly to solicit a bid for what the cost would be to have another Contractor and his crew take over the job in order to complete it on time.  We figured hey- we've done most of the structural work and have purchased 95% of the materials at this point- how bad can it be?  Well... the answer is pretty bad.  The bid came back astronomical and we knew that no amount of bargaining and bartering, short of Ryan selling his body, was going to make it in our ballpark.  So, we came to grips with the fact that the universe and fate seem to want us to do this ourselves.  Roger that.

So that is what our plan is.  We are, as I type this, in the process of researching alternative places to live for a couple of months while we try to finish this up ourselves, with, of course, the assistance of various subcontractors for the pieces of the puzzle we aren't skilled enough to do.  Again I say- it looks SO MUCH EASIER on HGTV!  :c)

Stay tuned for next month.  I think (read: hope) things are really going to start taking shape and I'll have some pictures that look more like a habitable house (read: with sheet rock.)   

Went over to the house on a lunch break to check on GC.  Found him digging this trench in our kitchen.  Rockstar!

I don't include too many pics of materials in these updates because I don't want you to envision something and then think the actual result isn't nearly as cool as your vision.  This month though, as you can see above, I did a LOT of material purchasing/research.  So that's most of what I have in my camera roll.  This particular day I was supposed to be picking grout.  That's the tile for the shower in the master.

Just checking out some knobs. (Haaaa.)

I should mention that this month included Black Friday which is why I went on a purchasing binge.  Thanks to a half off cabinet knob sale at Hobby Lobby, I procured enough of these bad boys for the girls' vanities in their bathrooms.

I spent a LOT of time at Sherwin Williams.  Like, a LOT.  If I had sent them this year, they'd get a Christmas Card.  From the top down we have SW Butter Up, SW Pussywillow, SW Pavestone, SW Sea Salt, SW Glad Yellow, SW Naive Peach, SW Colonnade Gray and SW Extra White.  We are using all of these except Butter Up.  Anyone from my office can probably tell you exactly where I keep the SW fan deck and confirm that if you came in my office I almost always had a couple of chips laid out letting them marinate in my mind.

Here's the half wall between the kitchen and living room.   The half wall will hold the sink, dishwasher and some drawers for dishes, silverware, etc.

If you were an avid Sesame Street watcher, you're probably pretty skilled at detecting which one of these is not like the others.  If not, allow me to show you- it's the top one.  So... what happened here?  I convinced our GC to open the box of our master vanities so I could work out in my mind what color cabinet pulls and fixtures I should look for.  Good thing I did because we found a hot mess.  Mis-colored drawers.  Stripping.  Boxes that weren't square.  Thankfully the cabinet rep came to the house and agreed that they needed to be replaced immediately.

Since our kitchen cabinetry came from the same place as our master vanities, we had what one might call a panic attack.  We set aside a Saturday to start opening a sample of the 61 (!) boxes to check them.  Fortunately we found that the quality of the kitchen cabinets was much better than the vanities.  HUGE sigh of relief.  Ryan doesn't appreciate it when I ask him to take pictures.  My posting this publicly is his repayment for refusing to cooperate.

Ryan left one evening to run an errand after the girls were in bed.  Hopped up on hot chocolate, I decided to make some bad decisions.  I went out into our garage and decided to open the chandelier for our breakfast room because I couldn't wait to see it.  I opened the box and found... this.  What is this?  Not a light.  It's 2 three foot artificial Christmas trees.  They have since been returned and replaced.  On a totally related note- every box in our garage has now been opened and checked.

After the cabinetry drama was put to bed, the men returned to framing out the entrance to the master bath, the new toilet room, and the pocket door entrance to the toilet room.  Previously the entrance to the toilet room was perpendicular to the entrance to the bathroom and you had to walk past it to fumble around for the light switches which were on the wall adjacent to my vanity.  We've now flipped where the entrance was and where the light switches were so that each is in the other's old home.

This is the wall that separates the garage from the kitchen.  On the inside it was previously home to the sink and a faux window box that protruded into the garage.  In the new layout it will be home to the cooktop.  In order to run gas there we had to rip the wall open.  In doing so we discovered that it was kind of a hot mess.  There was wiring that wasn't properly capped and beams for a load bearing wall that weren't properly supported.  GC was busy, busy getting this bad boy cleaned up.

GC and I spent a whole day hunting down ship lap only to discover what I was envisioning didn't seem to be readily available.  So he cut some himself (yes, he cut some himself) so we could compare it to the look of v-groove.  Also, clearly, the paint sample fairy struck here.  Left is SW Pussywillow and right is SW Pavestone.