Good Guts

Over a month has gone by since our last post.  A lot has changed - but largely to the guts of the house so to speak.  New sub-flooring, electrical wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall and HVAC! I'm sure other homeowners can relate to the fact that even though this doesn't go too far in making the house look good, it goes a very long way to making for a good quality of life in the house.

Rheem HVAC guts

In particular, getting HVAC  is a huge relief as the temperatures have been increasingly heading south over the past few days.  Our space heaters were doing fine for the most part until it got to down around the freezing mark.  HVAC selection and installation was not easy at all but we were finally able to install a second furnace zoned for upstairs.  In the process we learned all about Manual J and FFX county's new rules coming in March 2012 which they had the nerve to try and foist upon us and would have required us to install a lousy heat pump.  But our HVAC trade made sure to come up with a creative plan to ensure that we were not stuck with a heat pump.  Yes I understand we may not be being very green, but I'll own that one.

We also can now look forward to less squeaky floors, electrical wiring to code and enough outlets in the places we need them and rooms that don't let warm air out or cool air in.  

Plumbing guts

Spray foam and drywall

One external area that was been finished nicely since last I wrote is the siding, trim and roof.  Yay! No more peeling paint, rotten wood or dripping ceilings when it rains or worse when it snows.  Looks pretty good on the outside, huh!?!

New Siding & Roof on Front

Siding and roof on new kitchen space and office

Next week our kitchen cabinets should be delivered. Fingers crossed that we measured well.

Decisions, Decisions

I have often heard people talk about the number of decisions that need to be made when you are renovating but I definitely didn't appreciate just how many until now.  Over the past 10 days we have made decisions about our kitchen cabinetry, bathroom vanities, faucets two or three times over, kitchen sink, placement of the attic stairs, roof and siding colors and done some changes to the space.

I for one am absolutely exhausted and didn't quite anticipate the hours and hours of internet research and endless discussions with spouse.  But I might as well get used to it, there are selections to be made for lighting, hardware and more on deck. I can't imagine what this must be like for folks who are building a house from the ground up!

New kitchen wall

It is beginning to take shape though and the contractor is moving quite swiftly.  This week the walls of the new kitchen/great room space went up and most windows went in.  The electrician has rewired much of the bedroom floor and the framing upstairs is just about done.

The contractor is also putting finishing touches on the roof on the entire house.

Exterior of new kitchen/great room

Facing old kitchen

And we did decide to work with Cliqstudios.com.  Our kitchen designer Jayelynn was wonderful.  She came up with a complete design for the kitchen and pantry in about a day each.  I shared with her my inspiration pages from houzz.com and she knew just what we wanted. Corey and I met her for a virtual appointment where she shared her screen through Adobe Connect which allowed us to make and see the adjustments to the design in real time. No abstract or time consuming discussions needed!

And here is the design:

Kitchen Design

Pantry Design

Don't steal the ideas - they were courtesy of Jayelynn working with us :) These are just renderings of the basics of what it will look like and not an exact reproduction. Thanks Jayelynn - we look forward to receiving the cabinets in about a month.

By the way, cliqstudios.com had their cabinetry featured on a recent episode of Kitchen Crashers on the DIY Network which I just happen to be watching as I blog right now. See Cliq's blog for more details on catching the episode in reruns. The designer on the show picked the same cabinets we did!

This ain't SO bad

So spouse asked today when we were going to start roughing it. It's true, we really aren't living too badly *yet*! Yes it is inconvenient to be basically limited to two rooms for living, to go to Starbucks rather than work at home once a week and to have a steady flow of contractors through your home. But hey, our two rooms are big, I get to earn more Starbucks points on my Gold Card, and I have a good excuse for my house looking like a hot mess.  Plus, we do have a bathroom, separate sleeping areas for us and the girls and, so far, still have the use of our kitchen. It will get worse, I'm sure, but so far so good.

So, as we have had to make some selections of materials so far, I thought I would share some of the resources we have found.

We have ordered quite a number of appliances through a local outlet that we found and actually ordered through Ebay.  Appliance Builders Warehouse have saved us about 40% on new appliances over those bought new in store.  Delivery confirmed that they are brand new in box and warrantied.

We were quite impressed with the quality of the materials from an online cabinetry company cliqstudios.com. We think the benefits of using cliqstudios include benefits of using them is that they are quite transparent with their pricing, offer a good amount of savings by eliminating some of the middle man purveyors of cabinetry, and offer completely free kitchen design.  They don't have a very wide selection of styles, but we understand that they will be introducing more colors in the winter according to our cliqstudios designer.

I'm showing here one of the cabinet styles from cliqstuidios.com that we like.  We are not sure that we will choose cliqstudios yet, but they are definitely on our list for consideration.

We also found Thos. Somerville Company to be a wonderful specialty showroom in bath/kitchen fixtures and cabinetry.  Hard to believe, but Thos Somerville has been in the DC area in some form  for 150 years!  We ended up ordering two BainUltra bathtubs through working with Henry at the Falls Church location.  We were only going to order one for our master bath, but the girls noted that they would end up in our bathroom all the time if we denied them the chance to have their own therapeutic bubbles!

Finally, I just thought I would share my favorite website for house renovation inspiration - Houzz.  What do I like about it? Well their pictures are stunning, the designers that post their creations often respond to member inquiries about their selections and styles, they let you gather ideabooks with the pics and accumulate others from around the web, and their content is constantly refreshed. Check it out through the link or the gadget on the right.

The end of the second week

Two weeks in and we've had a fair amount of changes. After the old breakfast nook was gone, the foundation work had started. The hole for the footings were dug then days of rain delayed the whole process:

...but a couple of days later we had a foundation wall with matching antique bricks

Meanwhile, BTF Construction told us that if we cleared the upstairs sooner, they could start that work in parallel - sounds reasonable...until you have to clear 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and 4 closets (2 unaffected ones remained sealed shut):

A new 'upset' (on the same level of the joists rather than below it) LVL beam to support the ceiling joist after widening the MBR. Then, calling an 'audible' to accomodate a 5' bath rather that a 4' deep soaker and removing a hallway closet to open things up:

Homework this weekend: make a final tub selection and final modifications on lighting/electrical plan for the top floor. Oh, and shower and tub plumbing fixtures so the plumbing locations are set.

Demolition underway

So there was a saga around the permit...thank you Fairfax County! Someone warned us that the building permit workers sometimes ask for very minor changes with the only discernable purpose to justify their existence.  I'm a bureaucrat myself so I don't want to be so cynical, but it was really hard to see the rationale in the modifications they asked for. Further, they wrote done one request for change and then when we completed that, they notified us of a completely different request for change.   A structural engineer, a contractor visit and 4 hours of the architect's time and pleading later, we finally had our permit!

Ok, so even though the work is going on around us we still haven't packed up everything in our house that we intend to put away while the work is going on.  Spouse may disagree with me, but it is clear to me that we have way too much stuff. I've done a fair amount of purging, but it still seems like we have too much.  Clearly we have been blessed so the charity trucks are doing overtime at my front door.  We are also going to try and salvage cabinets, windows and anything else we can save from a landfilby passing things on to a reuse facility or Freecycle.

Going through the kitchen though was interesting. I distinctly remember ribbing my mom just this past summer for having cans and jars of food that expired back in the early 2000s. And while I may not have been quite that bad, I did find more than a few food items that dated back to 2007 and 2008.  There are also multiple bottles and jars of things that I never use...like Browning.  I mean, I do cook Jamaican food every once in a while but I am not going to attempt a blackcake or bun so why would I keep the preservative???

This weekend we are to tackle packing up the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms and finally taking up full time residence in the lower two levels along with the kids.  Our contractor joked (I think) to us by saying "I hope you two have a strong marriage."  Not LOL. This will be tough but we'll make the most of it.  

In the meantime, the contractors have made steady work of demo'ing the kitchen nook.  We found quite a lot of wood rot under the siding, so I'm glad that stuff is gone.   We also have a very pleasant dumpster and port a potty in the driveway to join our Pack Rat pod, so it really feels like progress :)

It's begun...

Well sort of begun.  After six years of living in our wonderful house in an even more wonderful neighborhood, we have finally started to do a fairly major renovation.  This is the back side of our house...

As you can see, there has been a mish mosh (technical term) of renovations to the original 1958 house.  Not all of them were done to our liking.  So, after doing a few minor renovations ourselves, about six months ago we engaged an architect. We spent about six months figuring out what to do - much of that was just me and spouse trying to agree on what to do, such as whether to protect the beautiful trees in our yard.



But that time frame also included hiring an architect (Bob Braddock of Red House Architects), expanding the scope of the project several times and then narrowing it, and of course selecting a contractor (Anthony Meyer of BTF Construction).  The general plan is to renovate 2 floors, the living floor with all bedrooms and the main level with the kitchen. More on that to come...

We sort of have a contract, sort of have the permit done (just waiting on minor adjustment to plans be checked by FFX county's approval), sort of think we will clear the community architectural committee and sort of have a start date for beginning demolition ....gulp....tomorrow.  Clearly, there is still a lot up in the air, but yet our contractor assures us that he is ready to go.

So, its near 10:30pm the night before the contractor wants to get started, provided all else goes through as planned, and I've barely started packing up the kitchen which is the first part of the house to be demolished.  And of course I wanted to start a blog, which puts us even further behind.  Somehow, I have faith it will all come together even though I may be sleepwalking through work tomorrow.

prep kitchen 1

prep kitchen 2

So, enjoy the messiness of the preparation, I'll get back to work and we'll see what tomorrow brings.

prep kitchen 3