Remodel tour - week 1

It has taken a long time to get to this point, but here we are. Our home remodel is in progress, finally. After timing the sale of our old house and the purchase of this new one, moving into our loft downtown, designing with the architects, dealing with one bank and then another, redesigning and budget engineering the plans, here we are. The demo has been going on for about a week and, it turns out, things come down pretty fast.

They've pulled siding off the exterior of the house...

and in spite of the fact that we aren't remodeling the finished basement, they did have to tear off the basement ceiling to access duct work and plumbing for the main level. The plus side of that means that we get a new basement ceiling and Ryan doesn't have to go through and remove the old popcorn ceiling himself (he did that already in just the downstairs office and it took a LONG time).

This was our first of planned weekly walk-throughs of the house. We will meet our architects and construction manager at the house once a week to see the progress and deal with any issues that come up. We were a bit nervous about the demo as you never know what you are going to find when you strip a house down to its bones (we've watched the horror stories on HGTV). We were very relieved to see that once the make-up came off, we liked what we saw underneath...

The house itself is in really good shape. No structural problems, no wood rot or mold. Whew!

 A view of the ceiling rafters

and the subfloor. All looked good.

Looking towards the front door, which will be replaced eventually. Everything goes - there will be all new windows, all new doors. It will be unrecognizable.

All these walls? They will all be gone except for one wall dividing the main living space from the master suite on one end, and one half-wall between the kitchen and mud room on the far other end. I can't wait until they start removing the walls and the space suddenly opens up.

Although there weren't any major surprises or hiccups, there were some curious patch jobs that were revealed once the walls were exposed - like this not very structurally sound connection (above)

and this odd floor board covered in fabric or wall paper.

I asked the construction manager if he found a large stash of money hiding under a floor board, or a secret family treasure worth millions, but he said no. Bummer.

Our Architects are also the ones building our house, a process called Design-Build (I am learning so much). They recently won architecture firm of the year in KC and I'm still in awe that we get to work with them. Despite the challenges of getting this project going, it is a dream coming to life in many ways.

The fireplace is still there, but it is going soon.

The stairs going down to the basement are behind this wall. One of the last design additions we made was to open up this wall so the basement space would feel more integrated with the main level. The door will be taken away and there will be a screen-like wall in place to keep the space open, but prevent little ones from falling down the stairs. 

Oh my, the trash! We did take as much out of the house as possible before the demo and gave it to Habitat Restore, but I'm not sure you can avoid some level of waste.

That does it for this week's tour. Check back next week for the latest updates and please say a prayer or two for some mild weather for the next few weeks. We need to get the house framed in with the upstairs addition, and the weather needs to cooperate. They gave us a timeline this week with a projected finish date of mid-May!! I can hardly dare to think it...

Remember what the house looked like before??