Dust and dervishes...

I broke down last week. The remodel finally got to me. My breaking point came when a drywall contractor in stilts surprised Cash at 7:30am on his way to finish out my closet. Cash freaked out, barking like mad. I was barely dressed, and here comes some guy into my personal space. I had to manage the barking dog, while not letting the drywaller get an inappropriate peek at my goods. With the invasion into my personal space, came copious amounts of drywall dust. A layer of white covered everything in my house. The lack of privacy, and dust pushed me over the edge and sent me east to my in-laws. It was lovely. I slept in a bed, enjoyed a peaceful morning, and went for a long trail run with Cash. We moved back in to our bedroom on Saturday, cleaned the house, and did boat loads of laundry. Life is so much better, and we seem to be working our way back to normal. Photos from the past week:

Me and my moo at on a lunch break from shopping.

Cashie on our trail run.

Trying to capture the happiness that came with the distance from the chaos at home.

Went on a walk at Lincoln with the dogs, Moo and Lana.

Pre break down. Drywall up, and finishing started.

In my new closet, not finished, but you get a sense of the added space.

Saturday morning. Houston, we have walls with pristine corners!!!

Complete, with primer.

My mom came over to do my hair on Saturday. We were in the basement, and left Cash alone upstairs. Dervish.

The result of rubbing an itchy nose on the kitchen floor. Cash resembles the rest of our house - a nice layer of drywall dust.

Floors, windows, doors, paint and roof (weather permitting) this week. Holy cow progress!

5 Sleepless Nights and a Kitchen Cozy

Lots of changes old friends, lots of changes. The tail end of last week was extremely productive, albeit sleepless. We got all of our permits, our kitchen framed, and our closet uncovered, while living almost completely out of our den, and sleeping on a slightly off kilter futon. The chaos of the week, a need to cook a meal and living out of one room drove us on an impromptu trip to Port Townsend. Thankfully our favorite place in PT was available.

View of living space. The Winterchill Farm - Wolves Den has all the amenities for a super cheap weekend away that feels like a week in Hawaii. It's a converted outbuilding on an active equestrian farm, but is extremely private. It has a top-of-the-line kitchen, fireplace, perfect chair for reading, and twin beds for couches. That's Jim watching TV in the far left.

The best part of the Wolves Den? The awesome Duxiana bed and down bed finishings. What you don't see in this picture is Cash on the bed.

View from the reading chair of the kitchen, and bedroom entry. What you don't see is the 5-star bathroom with Aveda products and a huge skylight that makes you feel like you are showering outside. You also don't see Cash on the furniture.

Brion and Mistilyn joined us at Port Townsend Brewing for a pint after driving a car up to PT. They sailed their boat up on Sunday for maintenance, and needed some way to get home. If you've never been PT Brewing is the best way to spend a late afternoon in PT.

The majority of Saturday was spent at Fort Warden. This is Jim's production of a family photo.

My production of a family photo, v2.0.01.

v2.0.02

This is v1.0. Grownups, and slightly boring, but at least we're all smiling.

We had an early checkout on Sunday, but did not want to go home any sooner than we absolutely had to, so we went tasting at the Finnriver Cidery in Chimacum. It's right outside PT on the way to the Hood Canal bridge. I had read about this place in the PI/Times, and it's great. Maybe a little too polygamous farmer for me, but still great. Jim and I were almost lost to all of you in favor of the brew master. He was dreamy (kind of), and Jim was completely in awe of his way with an apple.

Dinner Menu Saturday night: Ranier and Bacon clams, Olives and Lemon Chicken, Wilted Chard

Oh, and an absolutely spectacular bottle of K's Creator cab.

Not only are there fine specimens of equestrian flesh at Winderchill, there is also Xap the dog. Last time we visited, Cash and Xap played in the open fields for hours. That worked day one, when Cash had a ton of energy. Day two not so much.

Early Sunday morning, an absolutely beautiful piece of land just outside of downtown PT.

Okay, in other news, we are remodeling our house. :-) Here's a quick synopsis of the past week in pictures.

New kitchen entry from living room. Our old counters were too narrow for a dishwasher. This was basically the impetus for the entire project. Also, we exposed our chimney, and it will look great once cleaned up a bit.

The bones of our new closet - almost twice the size. YAY!

The biggest, most important change of the week - double doors from the kitchen to nowhere now, but, hopefully, a deck before summer.

Monday's progress report: insulation. Talk about efficiency. Our house feels remarkably warmer. That the drywall in the foreground. It's being installed tomorrow. OMG!

A view of the kitchen, and new doors with it's new cozy. Keeps it warm inside, but cool to the touch. :-)

Anyway, stay tuned. Not only will we be drywalling this week, we should also be getting our floors installed. Oh, and the closet should be finished by the weekend. Thank god. I can't wait to move back into the bedroom.

Love

Jail Break

We are making progress... Since last week, we've had most of our framing and electrical completed. The city comes out tomorrow to inspect. Provided everything goes well, drywall starts on Thursday.

As mentioned in an earlier post, here's a shot of both of our roofs... In this picture you see the edge of the old roof resting on the beam, and our current roof in the top of the shot. Wild.

Our existing window, and the frame for our future french doors. YAY!

As part of this week's activities, they are expanding and rewiring my existing closet. So, Sunday night, we had to move out of the closet. Since we are only going to be out of the closet for a short period of time, we opted to throw everything from the closet on to our bed, effectively closing down our bedroom. A shot of our empty closet. We are basically replicating the open space to the left of the organizer again on the right.

Our temporary closet. Yes, our whole bedroom is smaller than most modern walk-in closets. Also, a somewhat shameful example of excess. Jim's clothes are relegated to the top right. HOWEVER, he does have a large 5-drawer dresser in the den.

With the move out of our bedroom, our kitchen in our living room, and the total lack of privacy in the house, and closet due to workers in and out from 7 am - 5 pm, we are now pretty much living out of our den. We eat, work, relax, and sleep on our bed. I think I would have more freedom in jail. We do have access to our bathroom, which has turned into not only the place where "bathe", poop and pee, but also the place where we wash dishes, wash veggies and make coffee.

Cash is also in jail. The electrician needs to be in all areas of the house this week, which is great for Cash since he has someone to follow around, but not so great for the electrician, since Cash is a pain in the ass. I ended up buying a dog blanket for the car, and a barrier to keep Cash out of the front seat, so he's been going to work with me for the past few days. At this point, it's not working so hot, as evidenced by this morning's jail break above and subsequent tearing up of of all paper in my front seat. We all may be better off turning our bedroom/dining room/kitchen into Cash's crate as well.

5pm update: just got home and the electricity is off in the back part of the house = bedrooms and bathroom. Awesome. We are officially living out of a single room.

Breaking down walls, tearing up cereal boxes

What you see above is the destruction left by an unhappy, stressed out, super tired Cash. I know, lazy lover Cash, right?? He does not like people making ton of noise in our house all day without being able to be a part of it. Our kitchen is in our living room, and as always Cash is allowed to roam free in the open, non-construction areas. Temptation was too much for my little baby yesterday... He ate through two boxes of Kashi high-fiber cereal, leaving the freeze dried blueberries, box remnants, and torn bags left for me to pick up. He also at two whole wheat buns, and tried to break into a bag of brown rice. Let's just say, my baby is not feeling well this morning with all that fiber in his body. I called the vet to see what we could do, and she recommended benedryl to make sleep all day. Jim and I will take one pill if we can't fall asleep, but the vet recommend 3-4 for Cash. I gave him three, and closed him up in the den. We'll see what happens...

In other news, without walls our kitchen is HUGE! Ginormous. One of the non-kitchen things we're doing is opening up my closet for more clothes, purses and accessories. I was worried about using up our kitchen space for such a silly purpose, but now that we can make our nook a functional part of the kitchen, no more worries. I even posed the question to our contractor, and he said the kitchen is plenty big, and improved storage in an old house is always a big selling point. YAY me. Whatever, I want the extra storage. Here's some photos from yesterday... Huge progress.

Looking toward the living room from what was the nook. The plastic is the current entry to the living room. This doorway will actually be opened another 10 inches or so. Notice NO WALL!! The red beam in the ceiling is what is holding up the roof. Big job for such a scrawny piece of wood.

Another similar shot. The existing plant window will be replaced with a basic vinyl window trimmed out with walnut-stained fir to match the rest of the windows in our house.

A look up into our attic at an old, but good roof. This is one of two roofs in our attic. At some point in the past 100 years, an owner converted a porch in to a nook. Left the old roof on the house, and added a new roof above. Kind of weird to see, but typical I guess. The old roof actually hits our new beam, as if that was the old West external wall of the house.

A different perspective... Looking West. The corner where the old pantry meets the basement stairs is where the refer will be.

So all the walls are down, the first "draw" was requested. The plumber is in today to set up all new plumbing for the refer and the sink. Tomorrow we get the second of many roof replacement bids. We are not just remodeling our kitchen, we are painting our house in and out, a new roof, new insulation in basement/attic, and a reinforced, non-tragedy inducing front deck. We were originally going to just touch up the roof, but after many discussion have decided to just get a new roof. Our house will clean up well, I know it!

The electrician comes out on Monday to get all of the electricity updated in our house, including the 25% of electricity still running on knob and tube wiring, as well as giving us a light in our closet that doesn't share an outlet with the bathroom fan!!! YAY!

Now decisions loom before we can truly move forward. Lighting fixtures, plumbing fixtures, cabinet layout, tile, counters, flooring, french doors - the FUN STUFF!

Next update: drywall...

Rubbish

Day one of the remodel is complete, and our kitchen is gone. I came home at lunch to check things out, and it looked like an episode of Hoarders gone bad. Our dismantled kitchen piled on the lawn did not look as charming as it did attached to our house. The pile of old wood, and garbage bags full of refuse resembled a pile of rubbish coming out of tenement housing. Sad.

Not really... I was bouncing off the walls with excitement. My "sticky" old cabinets are gone. Fuck the charm. The dust and grime of 100 years could never be bleached off my cabinet doors. While functionally sound, my kitchen was a pit of despair, with endless dark corners where the 12 mugs from my wedding dish set went to die. I was cleaning out the area where I stored my baking stuff (a pile really due to such a large space), and found not one, but three containers of unopened Hershey's Cocoa, three partially used corn meal bags, and two unopened bags of panko. Awesome. I am not a Hoarder. I am short, my cabinets were HUGE, and even with a stool, there was no way I was going to be able to get to the back of the baking shelf easily. The shame.

Anyway, here are some shots from day one...

Day two will see our kitchen framed, our ceiling reinforced, our nook wall down, and the plumbing updated. YAY! Stay tuned.

Hoarders, Junction Style.

Where the sink used to be.

Our nook wall. Notice the lath and plaster. This was laid almost a 100 years ago. Prehistoric really.

Our chimney. The contractor said the floor was not sealed around the chimney, thus the flooding in the basement. Better the basement than our kitchen in my mind. We are leaving the chimney intact, and will be exposing it as part of the remodel. Just like this. Kinda charmingly Tuscan, right?

HA! Not.

The window in the nook. This will be french doors in Treehouse Kitchen v2.0.

Having a blast. Love.

The Tear Down

In case you haven't heard, Jim and I broke ground on our remodel today. We spent most of the weekend horribly hung over, but we did manage to find time to tear our kitchen down. It was a dirty process. It's amazing how much filth lies beneath everything. It was a great opportunity to purge broken dishes, never-used mugs and old food. We were also able to "sell" or salvage our tall shaker cabinet doors, our mini sized, 5-panel pantry door, and all of our hardware for $100 to ReStore, or $20 credit. Awesome. I am excited to go back and find cool, salvaged items to incorporate into the remodel.

Our "kitchen" was relocated to the living room, and we are now living like college students in a studio apartment. It's cozy, but temporary. The thrill of the remodel outweighs any discomfort having the refrigerator next to the couch causes. We are likely going to return home to a open, empty space. YAY!

Here are some photos:

Chaotic Mess

Pre-Move

This was Jim's hungover unhappiness.

Our new, temporary kitchen. The stove is merely a counter top, as we do not have a gas hookup in the living room, much to my dismay.

The final shot before the tear down... Awww... Memories.