Kitchenette and Laundry Area Renovation

And so the big renovations have begun…we have taken our entire kitchenette and laundry area down to the studs. We got smart this time and hung visqueen at the two entry ways to the kitchenette so that we minimize the dust and mess.

Next we started the fun stuff – demolition! Turns out I’m pretty good at this! Especially prying nails out of walls, oh I’m so talented. Brett is good at all of it including hauling it all out side (that’s usually the point I lose interest). Overall, we took out the accordion doors to the laundry area, the laundry area walls, the peg board in the laundry area, and the wood paneling for 2 more walls. It’s so much more impressive if you see the pictures so here goes:

Yep, that's brick inspired linoleum under the tile

We’ve uncovered so many other problems too. Word to the wise – if you’re doing home improvements and you ever think it’s a good idea to cut through a stud and not reinforce it, put down the tools and go call a contractor – a licensed one! And if your solution to fixing a water leak is painters tape and electrical tape – call a contractor! Literally both of those problems exist in our house, on the same wall no less. Oh did I mention that there was no insulation in the walls, yeah that was interesting too.

We figured out some other weird things too. Based on the framing of the wall between the kitchenette and den, the kitchenette was built long before the den was. It looks like at one point there was a window that overlooked the area that is now the den. Since we think this den was added on much later the doorway between the kitchenette and den was obviously added later too, this would explain why we are missing two studs above the doorway.   

Despite the weird stuff we have a game plan! We found so awesome old rustic wood at an architectural salvage store. We are going to use the wood to transition from the kitchen (9 ft ceilings) to the kitchenette (8 ft ceiling). We are going to insulate the room and sheet rock but leave the exposed beam ceiling. In the laundry area we are building a small panty/storage space for mops, brooms, Swiffer, etc., build counter tops over the washer and dryer and install cabinets above the countertops.  We are also toying with the idea of installing a nice big bay window to overlook the back yard. But before we get to that fun stuff we have a ton of repairs to make. We need to relocate the electrical box on the outside of the house, reroute the electrical inside the house, repairs a few spots of rotted wood, reframe the doorway to the den, remove and reframe the door in the kitchenette, and last but not least reinforce the studs that were cut.


Before we started tearing things down, I asked Brett for a timeline for this little project. You know a guesstimate as to how long this would take. He looked at me, laughed and said, “Seriously?” At the time I was slightly offended, but now I get why he didn’t want to commit to a deadline…needless to say this little project is going to take a while! It's also going to take a lot of energy!

Shelby and I resting up!

Rain, Rain Go Away!

If anyone tells me we're still in a drought I'm going to happily show them pictures of my kitchen and living room. For what seems like 4 solid weeks we've had at least on good downpour in the middle week. While I'm glad all the rain comes in the middle of the week, I was not glad to get this text message from my husband, "Was there water all over the kitchen and den floor earlier?" Followed up with these pictures...

I know it's hard to see the water all over the floor here but trust me, it was there.

Of course had not seen the water before I left for work but to be honest I didn't walk through the back of the house either. Regardless, we have a serious water leak. We've know for some time that we had a water intrusion along the back wall of the house but we thought it was an isolated issue. We were wrong!

It appears the flashing around our upstairs bathroom was not installed correctly and thus we have a leak from the upstairs bathroom through the ceiling to our kitchenette. I gave my husband the ok to rip out the kitchenette ceiling, about 10 minutes later I get these pictures...

Much to our surprise and excitement we have amazing wood beam ceilings! Once we both got home from work we decided to take out the rest of the ceiling. Lucky for us the next day was trash pick up!

Here's what a night of kitchen demo in our house looks like...

Since the deconstructed is quite popular right now, we are looking into ways to create a seamless transition from the kitchen. While this definitely wasn't top on our project list, it just took over the first spot! Aw, the joys of home ownership!

Hiatus

To say we’ve been on a hiatus is an understatement. It’s been a crazy couple months. Here’s the quick synopsis of the past two months in our house - Mardi Gras, great news – a new job, bad and scary news, tough decisions, Shelby’s surgery, my Mother-in-law’s surgery, and now more tough decisions. I know most of that was vague but to be honest it would take way too long to fill you in on all the details. Suffice it to say we’ve been on hiatus from blogging and home improvements. But I’m happy to announce we’re getting back in the swing of things!

Now, because we’ve been neglecting our home improvement duties the last few weekends have been more maintenance projects then an actual improvements. We hadn’t really cleaned up all the leaves that fell in our yard during the fall and winter so we decided it was finally time to rake and bag the leaves. It was all fun and games for about 10 minutes then I started to think about how sore I was going to be the next day. Thanks to our local Ace Hardware, the same Ace Hardware I went to 3 times before 3pm on Saturday, we found these awesome leaf scooper things. I’m sure they have a real name but I can’t remember what it is. We also got a bag holder that keeps your trash bag upright while you’re scooping leaves into the bags. These two little helpers definitely cut hours off our yard work. 17 full trash bags later we were done racking leaves.

Unfortunately it didn’t stop there. Our porch had been neglected for a while too, so much so that there was a visible layer of pollen covering the porch.  The grass needed to be cut as well. After two weekends of manual labor we have a new found respect for gardeners!