Don't Talk About The Rabbits

mollyamory is trolling around all the free new pilots available to us via iTunes tonight. In this manner, we ended up watching Ironside, followed by Brooklyn 99. I knew basically nothing about Ironside going into it, and even less about Brooklyn 99.

( Brooklyn 99 )

( Ironside )

The plumber arrived way too early. The silver cats discovered a flaw in my security procedures to keep them indoors, and away from the plumbing, and they made their escape, all collarlessly, out through the basement bulkhead and into the wilds of the back yard. We didn't see them again until noon. And the plumber has revised the plan and will be back again next Saturday at 7:30 am to finish the job, and will need to get to all floors of the house at that time. I could cry. Doesn't the man know weekends are when I fruitlessly attempt to make up my sleep deficit?

But there will be heat, eventually, right? A new tankless water heater has sprouted in my basement like a large red mushroom. Also a crapton of copper pipes are winding around areas they didn't exist before.

So, we are on Day 63. I'm not going to try and day-by-day the last two weeks. It was unexpectedly full of more traumatic cat issues, and exhausting. The little bastards are determined to run us ragged.

However, with Final Inspection slated for TOMORROW ZOMG, and only a few things to wrap up after, (heating, bracket replacements) we currently have a functional, operational, LOVELY kitchen.

So, this will be a wrap up post! New content and old! The new range hood! the correct drawer fronts! (They are glorious!) The spice rack, screen doors, and dividers for above the fridge!

This is the Before and After Post!:

( In the Beginning, there was a Plan )
( The Exterior Before and After )
( The Kitchen turns into the Dining Room )
( The Wall Comes Down! )

Is that really everything???

Okay, how about ( This cat who no longer has a worm up his nose. )

Whew!!!

So, there was no picspam last weekend, or any of the days between now and the last one at all. That's because the last two weeks were sort of brutal. In fact, at one, point, I was like "That's it. This was entirely a bad idea. I'm calling it off." And mollyamory and arduinna were like, "No, see, you can't really--" And I was like "SHUT UP I MEAN IT. I CAN'T DO THIS, IT WAS ILL CONCEIVED, THEY NEED TO ALL LEAVE NOW."

I think they bought me some ice cream or something, I'm not entirely sure, it is sort of hazy.

But we appear to maybe be through that patch? There are still some tense things coming up but the part where it was completely unbearable might be done with? I hope?

Because of the nature of the work being done at this point, there are gaps in the pics -- some days simply have nothing that I can show, and there were days workmen had to stay out of the house entirely.

( Day 29 )

( Day 30 - TEMPLATES )

( Days 31, 32, 33, and 34 )

( Day SOMETHING. MAYBE 35. )

Days 36 and 37 appear to be more photos of the floor. These days cover the time period when all my contractors unanimously agreed they should not be walking around on my drying floors, and stayed away. So all we could do was sort of take photos of the floor and go upstairs, because we needed them to return to help us move the super heavy furniture back in.

( Day 38! A return to carpentry )

Day 39: I got nothing.

( Day 40 )

RIGHT NOW: Zomg, I am hot and tired from just typing this. Luckily we are about to pick up arduinna and go see Pacific Rim. HURRAH!!!!

I let myself get behind again! I blame the inexorable advance of certain terrifying vidding deadlines.

But, a lot has happened:

( Day 16 )

( Day 17 )

( Day 18 )

( Day 19 )

Tomorrow they are arriving bright and early at 7 am. This makes everyone in this house who is not a cat want to cry, honestly. We are not morning people. We miss our Saturday mornings where 10 a.m. is a bit too early.

But, we will get up, and apparently, we have to go pick out paint fast, which I did not realize. I thought it would be one of the last things, and I was taking my time on it, but it needs to go up in at least one of the rooms before the cabinets, so, it has suddenly become an urgent issue.

Tomorrow is supposedly a day for plastering. Monday will probably be outdoor work to let things continue to dry. Tuesday -- painting, hopefully. Wednesday: CABINETS?!?!?! (don't jinx it!!)

There were a lot fewer pics this week, because a lot of the work was internal stuff -- plumbing and electrical, which is vital, but not as flashy for a picspam as, say, ripping out a huge honking wall.

There was supposed to be more outdoor work than there was, but the weather did not cooperate with this plan.

( Day 8 )

Day 9 - No new pics: The plumbing was completed! Okay, only this part of the plumbing, more will occur later after the cabinets and counters go in, but the prep work was completed, and the inspection was passed later in the week.


Day 10 - No new pics. Here is why:

So. As mentioned above, it has been a little wet in these parts lately. And by that, I mean, unrelenting rain which set back lots of the outdoors work that had been planned. It poured and poured all Tuesday night. Wednesday rolls around, and I roll out of bed, and start getting ready for work, and I hear this from mollyamory: "So, do you think there are any workmen here yet? Because I am naked and I forgot and left all my clean clothes in the dryer in the basement."

So then I went down to the basement so that she could be presentable. And there was water everywhere. On the floor, dripping from the overhead pipes, all over the washer and dryer... I panicked. I ran upstairs to see if water had been coming in through the ripped open walls, or what. But it was dry. I ran around, trying to figure it out. I called my main contractor. He pointed out what I already knew, which was that the upstairs was dry. I called the plumber. "No WAY," was his reponse. "Not a chance it is the pipes!"

So at this point, it's late, I can't possibly take the day off work, mollyamory is mostly naked still, and we don't know what the hell is going wrong. Molly decided to work from home, and deal with the situation, which turned out to be a lifesaver. The electrician arrived, as scheduled, to do his early part of the job, which also turned out to be a lifesaver. Molly then spent most of the morning running up and down stairs, testing things, taking direction, while the plumber and electrician yelled suggestions at one another over her cell phone, trying to figure it out.

And here is what it was. My old pipes were cast iron, and apparently, were actually still in pretty good shape -- on the outside. On the inside, they had gotten -- grody. Less and less actual space in the interior as rust and crud and things I don't like to think about hardened and hardened and made the actually pipe a tiny little space for the water to go down, mostly at a trickle. And then we removed that, and the water pressure down the new PVC came fast and furious, right up until it hit the point under the floor where the sewer line to the street runs, which hadn't been asked to handle anything more than a trickle of water for like, 40 years or something. There was CHURN. The water had nowhere to go. It backed up and went everywhere. (Shower water, thank god).

So the bigass plumbing company you have to call in when you need a sewer line snaked came out, and they snaked it for over an hour, and apparently there was 50 feet of sludge removed. I do not like to think about it too closely, actually.

This appears to have done the trick. So far, so good, anyway?

( Day 11 )

( Day 12 )

Day 13 & Day 14: No workmen of ANY KIND! We were a little surprised, but it was a combination of being unable to go forward inside until the electrician finishes (which probably won't be until Tuesday) and wet ground and weather related issues.

Here are some nice flowers instead! I planted these 3-4 years ago, but this is the first year they have really come into their own.

( Flowers )

Tomorrow: More Electrical Work! A guy might show up who can help us with a couple floor situation issues -- since we took down a wall, we need to find wood that matches for that spot. And since we removed the cabinets, we discovered MORE of the disgusting vinyl tile underneath it. If the weather isn't frightful, they might do some outdoors work on the deck.

We are under construction! It is cramped, dusty, muddy, dirty, and was temporarily toilet-less. Okay, there was a toilet, but it was in the basement. Which is sorta tough on those of us who regularly wake up at 4 a.m. in need of the facilities.

This is such a huge thing. Apparently I am not made of very stern stuff. This is hard, and there are too many decisions, and for me that means researching things, because you want to make the right decision, and that, my friend, is a RABBIT HOLE of research OCD.

I want to document this for myself as much as anything. I meant to do a post a day to keep up with the progress, but the progress was chaos, and it got away from me. Now, I am playing catch up big time, but I hope I can do it, and start doing daily posts. I'm breaking these first posts up because they are so loooong. I am using boatloads of cut tags for those of you who are bored by this crap.

This first post is: The Way Things Used To Be


In August of 2007, this house went on the market. Below are a combination of photos from the MLS listing, and from my camera, as I took shots during inspection. Everything shown is going to be impacted, big time.

( dining room, kitchen, back of the house, and side of the house, in 2007 )
Moving forward slightly!
( About a year after I moved in, the fridge died. )

A year after that, the oven one dead burner, lost another burner. I had a repair guy out to fix it, and he brought in his tools, and looked it over, and stood there a while and then was like: "Look. Just buy a new one. It'd be cheaper."

So we did.

A bit after that, in an episode that has caused my newest OCD habit (check every faucet 4-5 times after using it) I let an upstairs sink overflow. In 20 minutes flat, it took out the entire kitchen ceiling, and caused this ceiling fan:

( this is a fan, not a Fan )

to almost brain mollyamory when it ripped itself free of the ceiling and hit the floor.

We got a new ceiling, ceiling fan, plumbing, and kitchen lights because of that incident.

Another year after that, and we re-finished the downstairs hardwood floors. The reason for this, in part, had to do with old damage, but um. Also, because we had just lost a couple of very old, very dear cats, Boojum and Riley in the last few years. We loved them so much. They hated each other so much. They expressed their hatred of one another in ways that... made re-finishing the floors after they were gone seem like a good idea. We took the opportunity to strip the vinyl the kitchen floors, and uncover the hardwood beneath. I have no idea why they covered up the original wood, I love it so.

( Before and After, The Floor Edition )

( shot of the new kitchen fan, lights, floors, after that work was done )

So here we are, and it is Present Day, more of less. The current kitchen contained: Two sets of very large windows (one wide, one tall) and four doors -- one to the dining room, one to the living room, one to the outside, one to the basement.

This stumped a lot of the cabinet people who came in to look things over. There's only so much you can do in this situation, and one of those things, universally pushed for was "Seal up that leaded window, just lose it." I was not thrilled with this suggestion, for a number of reasons. I tend to get sentimental about inanimate objects, and I loved the window, and also, i felt it would be dark. I held no such attachment to the wide ridiculous window over the sink, but no one suggested we get rid of that, just re-size it to something more sensible.

For years, mollyamory, addicted to house shows, has had a battle cry that sounded like this: "TAKE. THE DAMN. WALL DOWN." But, I didn't really think it was realistically doable. It would take a huge chunk of space from her office. It would be expensive. It might not be possible. LOTS OF REASONS, I KNOW I HAD THEM.

We decided to take the wall down. The magic words, uttered by the third designer to come up with a plan, were "French Doors." We couldn't have them under the current layout, because the dining room windows are over a bulkhead, which cannot be moved. However, if we were to flip the dining room and kitchen spaces, and give the new kitchen all that lovely wall space, then the new dining room would have a wall we could knock out, and we could add a tiny little deck to the back of the house.

So that is what we are doing. And it's absolutely massive, and involves reconfiguring some of our plumbing, finding missing floor boards, and a lot of other stuff that is intimidating, but I suppose as half our house is already gutted and the toilet is sitting in the hallway, it's too late to change my mind.

( Day 0 )


Next Post will be... CHANGES....