I'm Grateful For...

I read my friend, Ashley's blog and I borrowed this idea. I've been so overwhelmed with work recently that making a list of what I'm grateful for seemed like a good way to put things in perspective. So here goes:

• I'm grateful for my amazing husband and his super handy ingenious ideas. No matter how annoying the phrase "We're making progress" is when I ask how a project is going. I'm actually grateful he puts up with me!
• I'm grateful for a fulfilling (and busy) job, even though it's stressful now I'm grateful to be employed, enjoying my job, and learning new things everyday.
• I'm grateful for our house. While I think I may always be a work in progress, I take so much pride in doing improvements ourselves.
• I'm grateful for my husband's job, as stressful as it is. He always works hard to keep a roof over our head and plan for our future.
• I'm grateful for our dog, Shelby. She's just the best cuddle bug!
• I'm grateful for our amazing friends who are always a great source of support and entertainment. Between dinner parties, happy hours, beach weekends, random hula hoop contests, festivals, wedding showers, weddings, baby showers, and kid's birthday parties we're so blessed to have amazing friends!
• I'm grateful I get to be an Aunt. It's such as blessing to be a part of my nieces and nephew's lives. I love them more and more everyday!
• I'm grateful for my family and Brett's family. We may not always see eye to eye but I know there's nothing we wouldn't do for each other. 
• I'm grateful for my parents and everything they've done and continue to do to support me. They never pressure or push, they offer advice and support and expect nothing in return. Truly amazing examples of selfless love. 
• I'm SO grateful I took a leap of faith and moved to New Orleans to attend Tulane, where I met my amazing husband!
• I'm grateful my husband and I are healthy. We know too many people who have to struggle with various health problems and we are so blessed to be healthy.
• I'm grateful my Mom and Grandma are coming to New Orleans to us visit for my birthday! I couldn't ask for a better birthday present!
• I'm grateful I get to attend my niece's 2nd birthday party today! We are so blessed to have a happy, healthy and super cute niece!

Whew, that definitely put me in a better place! So thankful for my life!

Cabinets are how much!?!

Being a home owner has made me appreciate how hard my parents worked to keep a roof over our heads.  I really just had NO idea how much home improvements, furniture, and other decor costs! I mean everytime I turn around we are faced with another set of expenses and unfortunately, I'm a numbers person so I quickly start adding everything up, adding in tax, cost of installation, etc. That's about the time the room start spinning, walls start closing in and I feel lightheaded!

This latest pricing panic attack came while figuring out how to finish out our kitchenette. Since we want to install cabinets around and above the washer and dryer we got into a debate about what to do with the rest of the kitchen. Should we finish the kitchenette the way we want the whole kitchen to look? Should we wait and remodel the kitchen at one time? What about granite, we need to install all the granite at once not piecemeal......ahhhhh!

It's no secret that I would LOVE a new kitchen, but that wasn't really top on the list of repairs/improvements. Nonetheless, I decided to do some price comparisons. I figured if nothing else it would give me a goal to work towards. Well, after shopping around I learned the kitchen remodel was going to be a big goal to work towards. I think my exact words when I saw the quote we, "Are you kidding me? It's just pretty wood!" The guy working at Home Depot clearly new I was a first time home owner!

Basically, for a new kitchen including cabinets, installation, countertops and some creative construction to make one wall of cabinets fit we are looking at $17,500. Ugh! I guess it makes sense, people always say you spend the most money on kitchens and bathrooms and unfortunately that's what our house needs. I know that we could trim the price of the kitchen by doing installation ourselves (which we were planning to do anyway) but it's still overwhelming.

Enter the resourceful husband - Brett spent much of home depot trip inspecting the kitchen displays and he's pretty confident he can build us custom cabinets. Honestly, since we were going to have to do some creative construction anyway, having the custom cabinets would make the most sense. For the time being we're going to leave the kitchenette unfinished but it is good to know when the time comes to upgrade the kitchen we have some better priced options.

Another Wall Bites the Dust

After deconstructing the kitchenette we considered the idea of opening up the den and kitchen. I wasn't quite sure how I would feel about taking out the entire wall between the kitchen/kitchenette and den so we pulled down the wood paneling on the den side of the wall. We were already planning on replacing the wood paneling so we figured we might as well tear it down now and to see how it would look completely open.

Once we got the paneling down, I loved it! Opening up this space makes creates a much better flow to the house.

Now we just have to figure out how to reinforce the load bearing wall and configure our furniture!

Last weekend's fun - waterproofing and deconstruction

In my last post I mentioned we uncovered a water leak and some rotted wood during our demo of the laundry area and kitchenette. Since this is only one of the many problems we discovered we are going to TRY to tackle one problem at a time!

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!