House Report 6

20 Jan 2017

Woo hoo! First contractors came to take a look at the house today. We had a pool guy and a drywall guy come and price out the work that's needed. It will be great to actually get demo phase over and start to see some progress.

Wallpaper 'helpers'

We also had some ideas today and I'm not yet sure whether they are good ones. Instead of just replacing the galley style kitchen, we think we're going to wall off the formal dining room (because honestly, why on earth do you need one?) and put the kitchen in there. It will make the front room smaller, but the kitchen bigger. It will mean changes to drain lines and we'll have to move a window in the outside wall. Where the kitchen was will become the dining room - open space for a table, really. But then the family room will open up and there'll be more space on the back side of the house rather than the front side.

When you come into the house you come up two steps, and inside the front door there is a raised platform. To get to either the front room or the family room you have to go down two steps. So the other mad idea from today is to knock out the platform, add the two steps to the staircase instead, and lower the hall cupboard and re-frame and lower the front door to the new floor level. Madness! Not sure if we'll do this before or after we move in - the list of things that needs to be done before we move in keeps changing. So we'll see.

Demo continued today - I scraped all the wallpaper off the family room and hallway walls. The littles hoovered the whole house and we finally got twenty years of cobwebs off the walls. Ellie popped baseboards off all through the downstairs. Adam worked like a trojan again today and turned over the soil in the whole back yard. I'm not sure what Jeff did but he racked up 23,000 steps doing it! 

While I was ten feet up on a ladder pulling cobwebs down I was high enough to pull some of the unicorn wallpaper - it came right off. Didn't even leave backing on the wall. So I think the unicorns' days are numbered!