Even Little Things...

Yes, even the little things are big progress. Bath fans have been cleaned and replaced with new ones, all of those annoying plugs and light switches have been replaced with nice new ones and the repairs to the various holes in the walls has taken place and now we await the drywall team.

They will be resurfacing everything in preparation for paint! Yes indeed, paint! This is the next big piece of the job that Laura and I will be tackling ourselves and it will be a biggie! As the drywall team finishes a room we will swoop in and prime, this entire process will take a while but we are hoping to have it done by the time the cabinets arrive on the 9th of July. Hope, fingers crossed and all of that.

The most recent big change is the beam in the living room. Since it was a rough piece of wood cleaning it was a pain. Once clean though we decided to eliminate it. 

It is now wrapped in green board and the drywall team will texture it to match the rest of the walls and we will paint it and it will vanish. Too cool.

Catching Up

I just can't take all of the pictures myself! :) Laura snapped a few of the work in the hall bathroom. This is Betty (Long story, actually his name is Frank) prepping the tub for removal. He has already removed the Alien and is getting ready to remove the tub itself.

EEEK! It's an alien! And in one piece too! The folks from Stardust were more than happy to have him too. And as I have said, I was happy to see him leave.

Laura was on the plant shelves scrubbing the gunk, this is an image of where the speakers sat for 38 years. I put them there myself and this is the first time I have seen the shelves in decades.

This is how the cleaning progressed.

And when she was finished it looked like this! It is simply stunning how easily the stains and gunk came off the surfaces as well as how easily that evil grass cloth wallpaper came off the wall. We have also removed the dark wood trim that was around the windows. You can see that here on the left and also on the window on the right side of this image. Actually it makes the room look bigger than before without the trim, also kind of amazing.

Finally though the reconstruction began yesterday. This is the kitchen and the NEW location for the refrigerator. The right side image is where the closet once was in the office. It is the back side of the refrigerator and future pantry. The speed with which these guys work is simply amazing to me, and the quality I am seeing in their work is making me very happy indeed.

I am looking forward to visiting the site this evening to see what has transpired in the past few hours.


 

Things Progress!

One of the most telling landmarks has been the removal of the grass cloth that was on the tall wall in the living room. Some of the contractors that originally bid our job had said that this wallpaper was going to be the hardest part of our project. One even said he would have to replace all of the drywall! Hahahahaha!

 

Well Laura and her trusty spray bottle matched with our new scaffold made smooth and quick work of it. The last prep work now is simply to scrub the rest of walls in the living room. Then, when the drywall work is complete we can begin painting! WooHoo! 

I was seriously surprised when the guys finished removing the tile without bringing in a grinder/vac. They did the the entire thing with with their electric hammer.

And the hall bath is certainly empty without a bath!

And POOF! The closet in the office becomes part of the kitchen!

Lastly, the guys from Parker & Sons have removed the water softener, that's a lot of extra space!

The pace of this project is amazing.

Day 2

 And so day two has come and gone and it is amazing what happens when you're not there watching. For instance...

The dumpster that was supposed to be here on day one showed up today. I was impressed that there was already so much junk inside of it when I got here at 6.

The soffit above the kitchen is no more! You can see the high attention to detail paid by the workers from UDC when they built this house in this photo, the wire you see hanging down in the foreground was simply laying on the dry wall. Trust me when I tell you that that is not how you are supposed to do it. Oh well, it will be fixed now.

Now Laura and I had removed the cabinet facing and the shelves inside the pantry, but this is what I found after only two days of work! Wonderful! Laura joked that we could just leave it this way so we had a second door to the office, you know "open floor plan" as it were. Alas, the refrigerator must go someplace...

In the hall bathroom the evil space alien has finally left! For those of you that never saw the alien it was a face in the cultured marble of the bathroom wall. I saw it the very first moment I walked into the house back in 1983 while construction was still ongoing. It was one of those things that once you saw it you could never un-see it. Personally, I'm glad it's gone.

With all of the cabinetry gone and you may have noticed the doors as well, we think that it has been a very productive couple of days for the crew here. They will not agree with us as they are having an issue with the tile flooring.

Do any of you recall Dad's problems with the grout on his original floor? Well the company that came out to clean his grout screwed it up so badly that in the end they agreed to pay to have a new tile floor installed instead of face Dad in court. The old floor came up so easily you could remove whole tiles without damaging them by just sliding a screwdriver under the edge. The company that set the new floor was told not to make any mistakes.

The result is that the crew here now is using electric jackhammers to remove the tile and it is not coming up. Next week they are bringing in a super-duper-sand-N-vac machine to grind the tiles off. I'll bet that will be nice and quiet.

Another thing about dear old UDC, you might notice in the left side of this picture that the nine foot mirror in this bath room is gone but the wall is incredibly clean. Think about this, a 9'x3'x3/8" glass mirror held on to the wall by TWO screws. Not one drop of mirror mastic behind any of them! When we pulled it off the wall, Yeah we did that, we nearly fainted. Go to YouTube and look up how to remove a mirror like this. We were ready for a fight! Damn thing practically came off in our hands. 

The work to remove the wallpaper in the living room continues now that our newest toy/tool has been delivered. It was always clear that working from ladders was not going to be fun, but once Laura tried it the answer became a definite no. 

So we began to search for something we could rent. There are lots and lots of equipment rental companies in town, but on average for three weeks the price was going to be more than $1k IF they had the equipment when we were going to need it.

The answer to this conundrum then was simple, either build our own out of Lego bricks or buy our own. So of course we went with the Lego option only to discover that we would need approximately $12k in Lego in order to construct a 12 foot scaffold and that it would not support the weight of our cat Tybalt let alone one of us. So we bought one instead for just over $600 and we can use it for the duration if needs be. What's more if I happen to spill paint on it I won't have to pay some one an "Environmental Fee" to clean it off.

So now we are the proud owners of our very own scaffolding and Laura is happy as Larry! Plus now we can reach all of those difficult to reach spots. WooHoo!

And Work Begins...

 It has finally begun! Finally!

It's dusty, an noisy but it is wonderful!

And this is just the very beginning! Woohoo!!!

It's Official!

 We have engaged a contractor, FINALLY! Work begins on Thursday, yeah Thursday! We can hardly believe it!

The End of an Era

With some grunting and cursing we were able to remove Dad's shutters from the windows and prep them for removal. Of course they cannot have any fasteners still attached and they were of course hung on the walls using three foot long monster nails. More cursing was involved, I hope the neighbors didn't hear.

We then took some time to take a bit of a break. We planted ourselves in the chairs around the table as we have done a million times before, took a collective deep breath and said ... Nothing.

We took in the scene around us, though there had been changes it was still at it's heart Dad's kitchen. 

 

 We had sat here on countless occasions talking of subjects both important and mundane. And then the stories began to come. We sat and remembered holidays in this room, Dad attempting to advise Laura on exactly how to properly cook a turkey. Christmas presents, political discussions, jokes, card games, pizza, and wasted hours just spent in glorious conversation.

We spoke of the stories Dad told of his days in the Army or when he was at college. We talked about the numerous times we talked about cars, right at this very table. His Healey, the MG, his first new Volvo and the time the Chevy got sandblasted in a dust storm on the way back from California.

We laughed about how Dad and I sounded so much alike on the telephone and how some people had made the mistake of assuming they were speaking to one of us when in reality...

We talked about all the times there were family around this table and the love that was focused here when that happened, even though it wasn't frequent.

We talked of the strength and support we had received at this table over the years when Dad put on his Dad hat and made us both feel that no matter what we were safe and loved and secure as long as he was here to have a word about it. And I finally talked about how, at this very table, Dad told me that he felt I had been dealt a bad hand work wise and how proud he was of me that I had kept at it despite the obstacles others put in my way. I was gobsmacked.

Then we talked about change and about how this room though it wasn't exactly Dad's kitchen any longer was still going to be a place of welcome and love and support and that Dad would be happy to have a seat a new table and to share in our new memories. That was an important part of the conversation as it allowed me to move to this next step with less hesitation.

You see the next day a team of guys from a donation site came to help us with...

And now it looks like this...

 

 

 

It's the same throughout the rest of the house now. There is little left to remove but most of the demo work that we could do has been completed. But alas still no contractor as of this moment. So while we wait to build new memories, we are also waiting to build a new home. Sigh.