bumps in the road

The demolition process has uncovered a few unexpected things. Neither John or I are surprised by this, but we're still dismayed.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the contractor discovered an unexpected shear wall between the great room and 4's room. This shear wall meant that we were going to have to leave it. After much discussion, we have decided to proceed with our original plans and remove it. Since it wasn't noted on the original plans, and it was "okayed" by the City of SLO, it's outta there.

Sidenote: Through these discussions, I learned that a "shear wall" is not the same as a load-bearing wall. Huh. You learn something new everyday.

In addition to removing the shear wall, we're also going to "take" 4's closet, seen here as "closet #1."



Taking "closet #1" was not part of the original plans; however, in doing that, we will gain an additional 2.5 feet in the width of our kitchen.





From the blueprints, you can see how the additional 2.5 feet {width} will improve the flow of our kitchen.

Obviously, we'll have to reconfigure 4's room to give her back a closet, but we'll figure that out later.

our renovation timeline

"When do you think you'll be done?"

This is the question we're most commonly asked by friends and family.


"End of May"

This usually raises some eyebrows and heavy skepticism when they knowingly see the current state of our house:






Not to mention the torn-down chimney...


But let me clear something up: When we say "done", we don't mean 100% painted, trimmed-out, tricked-out... This is our checklist for being "done":

• framed and closed in
• new wood flooring installed and finished
• plumbing & electrical finished
• drywall work finished

We remodeled our previous house and we're used to living in a work-in-progress. In fact, I'm pretty much assuming that we're going to have a 'temporary kitchen' set up.





We want to be moved in by May 31st because our lease is up at the end of May. We can always extend our lease, but we don't want to pay {mortgage + rent} any longer than we have to.

86 days to go...
Think we'll make it?

appetite for destruction

Let's be honest. I've been going stir-crazy lately, wanting to get started on our renovation plans. I'm tired of waiting for permit approval, and I'm tired of feeling like nothing is happening.

If it seems like we've been doing nothing but dreaming about new front doors and fencing, it's not true. Actually, we have been doing quite a bit of destruction demolition.

Demo #1: Removed the unnecessary shed-like structure.

here today...

gone tomorrow.

Demo #2: Removed a wooden step inside the garage.



After John jackhammered the garage floor, he had new plumbing put in for the new laundry location. After the new plumbing, John patched the concrete...



and then finished the patch with self-leveling Finish Coat.



Demo #3: Carpet removal

My personal ongoing project...

4's room

the hallway

front entry

You can see that we have been busy. Trying to make {small} progress before the real progress begins...

very little progress

If it looks like we haven't made much any progress with the house, that's because we haven't. But it isn't because we've been twiddling our thumbs and spending days at the beach.

Well. You got me. There were some days at the beach. But we live in a beach town -- what did you expect?!

But we have a good excuse.

No, really.

The house closed escrow at the end of October. We immediately hired an architect to draw renovation plans.

Unfortunately, it took much longer than we anticipated for the architect to finish the plans. We expected to have the finished plans and permit approval by the beginning of December.

It wasn't meant to be.

We managed to barely submit our plans to City Planning before they closed for the holidays. I was told that it usually takes 3 - 4 weeks to get permit approval. And since we were submitting our plans just days before Christmas, it was probably going to take us the full four weeks.

In the meantime, we've been going a little stir crazy wanting to get started.

Here was our dilemna: Where were we to begin?

Many of the rooms and spaces are going to be affected and/or altered. Not all, but many of the existing walls are going to be affected in some way or another.

The areas of the house that we have left to work with are:

• 7's bedroom
  
• downstairs bathroom
  
• closet in master bedroom
  
• garage

I'm getting started in 7's bedroom. John has the lovely job of working on the garage. More details on that later.