Our new house!!

It needs quite a bit of work, most urgently some new paint, new flooring, and a fence for the Pig. Then a new kitchen, and after that some updating on the bathrooms. But it's ours!

Front of house

Closer pic of front of house

Back of house

Screened in porch

Den (gotta hate the wood paneling!)

Living Room

Dining area

Kitchen

Foyer with stairs going up to bedrooms

The joys of remodeling

So, I've been told that I should add more stories, instead of just giving a progress update.

So the first real casualty of the job was my pinkie finger. I was prying the layers of vinyl up from the kitchen floor with a crowbar, and had all my weight on the crowbar. Unfortunately, when the vinyl gave way and the crowbar snapped down, my pinkie was caught in the middle. It bled underneath the skin, creating a kinda blood blister (see picture below). I'm not sure if I'm supposed to pop it or not. If anyone knows, feel free to let me know.

In the meantime, I'm super frustrated. The painters are just about done, and the gables look like crap. They pressure washed the gables and then scraped some of the old paint off, but a lot of the old paint was left on. They didn't power sand it because they said it would do more damage than good. So now my gables have an alligator like texture (see picture below). I talked to them about the problem, and they said that they could put new wood on and repaint for $500. Hello!, I'm already paying you about $3000, and I'm already over budget on almost every single part of the job. If they had told me that it would either look like crap or cost an extra $500, I could have made my decision accordingly, and maybe even done shingles on the gables too. But they didn't. Instead, their proposal said that they would scrape and sand everything and fill all cracks. There are cracks everywhere! So I got a good pep talk from Glenn, and a great Starbucks latte, and I'm all revved up to go back and tell them that I'm not satisfied and they need to make me satisfied before I pay them.

And the drywall guy came today to look around the kitchen, because I decided to re-drywall, and decided that due to time constraints it was better to have it done while I'm gone rather than attempt to do it myself when I get back. He told me that the builder is completely overcharging me for building the kitchen closet and reframing the walls. He said that he would charge me $800 for the work they were asking $2200 for. He also said that he could help fix the gable problem. So now I need to go back to the builder (who called to say that he can't get here today and would get here at the earliest tomorrow afternoon) and see if we can come up with a cheaper solution. Like maybe he could do the framing and leave all the drywall to the drywall guy.

Adding to the frustration is the fact that we're completely broke -- too broke to get anyone decent Christmas presents this year -- yet somehow need to come up with money to move, take the NC bar, and with any luck take a vacation.

Sigh......

More pics

Drywall in my lip gloss.

So everything is going.... slowly. It's going, though. The hall bathroom is completely gutted. The master bathroom is halfway gutted. The kitchen is mostly gutted. Everything is torn apart, but nothing has been put back together yet.

The electrician has been there for three days and is mostly done. We have a new circuit breaker/meter box to replace the outdated fuse box and meter box. All the circuits in the kitchen have been grounded. The fans in the bathroom have been vented and are ready to be installed. The inspector came today to examine the electrical work and gave us the OK to go ahead with the framing.

The new roof is completely finished.

The exterior painters are on their third day here. I had chosen a color that I thought was neutral beige in an attempt to get rid of the yellowy color that's on there now, but it turns out the color I chose was not too far off from the color I'm replacing! We're putting shingles on the front gable, and I didn't have a shingle sample when I picked out the trim color, and I really hope the colors don't clash.

I've scheduled someone to come put the shower pan in on Thursday. However, after talking to the plumber today, I realized that the plumber needs to come first and he won't come until Thursday. So I need to call and reschedule. And to schedule the drywall guy to come do the bathroom right after that.

The builders that are doing the kitchen recommended that it would be easier to completely re-do the drywall rather than to just patch the spots where the electrician had to break into the wall. And all I'm thinking is "ka-ching, ka-ching". Every day things turn out to be more than I assumed.

Yesterday I ripped out the vinyl in the kitchen. Only to find.... more vinyl. That looks like brick. So I ripped that layer off and got.... more vinyl! Ugly green stuff. I think they're actually resilient tile. I kept ripping off layers today, which goes incredibly slowly by the way, but had to stop when the painters painted the kitchen door, which was open right above the layer I was ripping out. So I ripped out the door and door frame to the third bedroom instead! Which was kinda fun, the only hard part was getting it out of the room myself. So now it's sitting on the porch, which is becoming more and more cluttered every day. I think I'm gonna have to get another dumpster (I filled up the one used by the roofers, and it's now gone).

So maybe in the interest of saving money I'll attempt the drywall in the kitchen myself? With a little help from my friends, assuming I can bribe any of them to come out and help me. Or I'll try the guy whose name I got from Lesley, who apparently does good but inexpensive work.

Anyway, that's all for now! Pictures will come shortly, and I'm back to prying off the floors, which has to be done by tomorrow morning, before the builders come. Christmas is coming at a very inconvenient time this year!

This is not my beautiful house

This used to be the kitchen.

---

The cabinets, beadboard, and toilet are sitting out on the porch.

---

This used to be the bathroom, before I dug up the tile and three inches of mortar and started ripping the tile wall off the plaster and whatever weird metal mesh thing it was attached to.

---

The weird metal mesh thing.

---

Anyway, obviously things are still in the process of coming apart rather than being put back together. It's scary how little time there is until I was supposed to be done. It seems that everything depends on something else before it can all get started. For example, I finally got a kitchen guy that is good to go, but I first have to get a permit. When I go to the permit place (for the second time, because the first time their computers were down) I have to give the name of the electrician before they'll give me a permit. I call the electrician, and it turns out that he can't come until next week. Which sucks, because the electricity has to be done before the walls are done. So then I called another electrician, which is making it more expensive (although he is doing more than the first one is). But at least maybe it will get started this week!! I'll only have one week to get the floor down and the cabinets in before I leave for Christmas. Yikes.

New things every day.

So yesterday I finally got the courage to unscrew the fuses! Or rather, I got the power guy who was looking into burying our power lines unscrew the first one for me, then I did the rest of them. For some reason I was afraid that unscrewing them would electrocute me.

The most amazing discovery was that even after all the fuses were pulled, the bathroom outlets continue to have power! I'm not sure exactly how this is, since pulling the main fuse was supposed to disable all the outlets and lights. The electrician is coming today; maybe he'll be able to explain it to me.

Maybe he'll also disconnect the wiring on my garbage disposal. It's wired to an on/off switch on the cabinets, which means I can't finish disassembling the cabinets until it's taken off.

I also learned my first lesson in how having the right tools make things a lot easier. After turning the water line coming into my house off and then back on using two small wrenches and struggling with it for about 5 minutes each time, I finally got a nice big wrench, which shortened the time to turn it off to about 15 seconds.

Some Pictures

Demolition Begins!

Demolition Day

After a long Thanksgiving hiatus, I'm back to working on the Montford house. Well really, just starting to work on the Montford house. Most of the bids have come in, and it's time to start demolition of the kitchen and the bathroom to make way for the new. My most commonly used phrase has become "well, I saw someone do it on TV...." And my favorite comment from the construction people has been "You should get a man in here to do some of this work!" Um, yeah, dummy, that's why I'm hiring you. It's definitely very much a boys' world out here in construction land.

But anyway, things are progressing.... slowly. I intended to do most of the demolition today, but that didn't happen. I was going to take out the tub, except that I had to turn off the water first (which I finally accomplished), and I was worried about going weeks without water, so I tried to call someone about installing a new tub ASAP. But apparently, plumbers don't work on Saturdays, which I discerned after about 40 phone calls. One that I actually got ahold of estimated that the job would cost $600. My DIY book says that an experienced person should be able to install a tub in 3 hours. That's $200 an hour! The stupid tub would only cost $200 in the first place! Another wanted to charge $50 just to come out and give me an estimate. Another one couldn't even give me an estimate for three weeks. So my options have become 1) do it myself (with the help of our handy friend John Bugg), or 2) find someone who can refinish the tub (ie, paint it with epoxy paint).

I'm having fun, though. Today I ripped out about half the bathroom floor. Well, probably not half of it, since the tile was embedded in concrete and I'll probably have to rip out all the concrete anyway. I had my sledgehammer on one side of me, the crowbar on the other, and hammer and chisel in hand. It reminded me of being in high school and paying $10 at the fall festival to beat the shit out of some old car.

Tomorrow the reinforcements are coming in -- my mom is coming to pressure wash my deck (and maybe she'll be brave enough to unscrew the fuses from the old-timey fuse box that I'm certain will electrocute me if I try to touch it), and on Monday her boyfriend, who is a contractor and has done lots of high-end renovations of old houses, will join her here to give me some much-needed advice. Until then, I'll keep working on the bathroom floor.