Finally, a peek into what’s been going on INSIDE the house!
After we moved out in early February, our contractors were able to start demoing the rest of the inside of the house, but largely continued framing outside.
Here’s the view from the back door:
This is the entrance we use to get in and out of the house now that our front entry way is a construction zone. We’re getting a new back door, but for now our old back door has an electronic lock with a code so that our contractors can get in and out of the house. It’s incredibly convenient, and I like it so much that I’m going to put one on our new back door!
Our family room (TV room) is getting a new wood floor, since it will share the same floor as the kitchen. The TV room (and our master bedroom and bathroom above it) was an addition from the 90’s, and it had prefinished cherry wood floors that did not match our original (Doug fir? Pine?) floors at all. We’re putting down a mix of rift- and quarter-sawn white oak, which won’t match our existing floors exactly, but will be much closer.
One of our goals with this project was to create more cohesion on the first floor, and I’m excited to get rid of that awful cherry floor. (About 1/3 of our downstairs will maintain the current wood floors, since we didn’t have enough in the budget to do the entire downstairs, but the plan is to redo those floors in the next few years with the same wood we’re putting down now.)
Here’s our old dining room, before they demoed the kitchen (to the left in this photo) and broke through to the new addition:
Here’s the old laundry room, when Justin found a hidden room (old wine cellar?) underneath:
The old kitchen was on the other side of the wall in the right side of this photo.
Here’s another look a few days later from the back door looking into our old kitchen. They’ve demoed the kitchen and dining room walls, so you can see the new addition to the left of the windows:
Here’s the exact opposite view, standing in the old dining room and looking through the demoed kitchen into the TV room at the back of the house:
The teal wall on the left is my pantry; it’s staying but getting new doors and a new coat of paint.
Here’s a view from the old kitchen toward the new front entry, which is hard to discern. (Follow the drop cloth on the floor to the random 2×4 propping up an LVL [orange beam] and look beyond that.) The old dining room windows are still in, and the black tarp is helping control dust to the rest of the downstairs. My desk is through that tarp and on the other side of the wall on the right in this photo.
This photo is taken from the new addition, looking through the old dining room to the old porch (far left), and you can see the old kitchen and back entry (far right). The old porch is now enclosed and insulated and will be an actual room of our house, instead of a ‘one season’ pass-through room/dumping ground for shoes.
Here’s Andrew, marking where our kitchen walls will be:
He’s standing in the new portion of the laundry room; it used to end after that small portion of wall to the right of the door. You can also see a little ‘nook’ Andrew made sure we created for laundry basket storage (where the red air compressor is sitting). Our new laundry room will have less floor space and our units will now have to be stacked, which doesn’t leave much room for baskets. It felt silly at the time, but I’m glad he was adamant about it, because we ended up stealing even more space from the laundry room (again), so it’ll me tight quarters in there!
Our contractors wanted us to have complete control over this section of the kitchen, since we were trying to fit in our fridge, our existing wine fridge and the cut-out for our washer/dryer. It was a bit complicated, but we got it all to fit!
Coming soon: new windows!
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