House Report 7

7 Feb 2017

We are in the thick of it!

The drywallers have pulled down the bad ceilings and scraped the good ones. They pulled off more walls than we were expecting - so now we're back to studs in the front room and kitchen. We are trying to figure out what re-wiring needs to be done while we have the walls open. Not a single room in that house has a light fixture in the ceiling, so now's the time to put those in.

What the front room looks like today!

We knew that we would have to raise the kitchen ceiling, that was always the plan; but when we opened up the walls we found an air duct running the length of the kitchen, which means raising the ceiling is a little more problematic than we hoped. But it still has to be done, so that is this week's project, figuring out how to run the vent without affecting the upstairs floor.

Kitchen

The platform inside the front door is gone! The room already looks bigger and more open without it. Getting upstairs requires a little more agility - hopefully Jeff can build the two bottom stairs this week too.

The drywallers worked fast. They scraped pretty much the whole house in one day. The front room fireplace wall has been repaired, the ceiling is scraped, and that room looks clean. I keep finding myself wandering in there to just look at it. It looks clean, and it's amazing how hopeful that feels! The rest of the house is still a nightmare of dust and debris - and as much dust as I clean up we're constantly making more. We cleaned up all the cobwebs the other day and then when the walls came off they're all filled with dirt and cobwebs, so we're looking at grime everywhere again. So I'm very much enjoying this one clean room, and I can't wait for the rest of the house to look this way!

I am glad that something is looking hopeful, because we're flip-flopping on everything else. All plans to move the kitchen to the dining room have been scrapped. The dining room will become the piano teaching room (Jeff's idea, not mine!), and the kitchen stays where it is. We had decided against tile floors, now we're thinking we'll do tile. We were going to build a laundry room where the wet bar was, now we're not. At some point we will have to have ideas and stick to them, instead of changing our minds all the time!