Because I needed to make it more complicated

I owe a huge apology to everyone for not updating this. So many of you are interested and asking me about the progress, and I just haven’t been doing what I promised. To be honest, the job is much farther along than is represented in these photos, but I want to do this justice, so I will make you wait a bit longer for the final photos.

My last post was Nov. 11, just after the hardwood floors were completed and the electrical update was ongoing. Next was the kitchen demo. All of the cabinets were being removed and the former owners were taking the stove and refrigerator but I was going to keep the dishwasher. We had discussed the layout of the kitchen at length and I polled everyone who came to the house.

existing kitchen cabinets

side wall with refrigerator and 12" deep cabinets. The refrigerator placement was moved to the wall on the left with the wallpaper

Ultimately we decided to move the refrigerator to the pantry wall and not replace a wall of small 12” cabinets, but keep the rest of the layout. I won’t tell you what the contractors found behind the cabinets, but suffice to say I’m glad they got rid of it, and the thing that ate it (partially). The crew took off the vinyl floors in the kitchen and laundry rooms, but left the plywood so they could place the new vinyl on top. I arrived home as they were taking off the final pieces of vinyl and just didn’t like leaving the plywood. The kitchen had had a funky smell, and I suspected that it was in the floor from the leaking refrigerator. I worried that if we left the plywood, the smell would remain. So, I asked Dustin about replacing it, and he told me it would (of course) cost more. Joe, the flooring contractor had been pretty sure that the wood floors did extend through the kitchen, so I took another notch out of the budget and insisted we take out the plywood and see what we had underneath. Lo’ & behold, more wood floors!  Unfortunately, refinishing them would require me to leave the house again since they have to dry overnight with two coats of polyurethane.

So, this leads me to my next tangent. As my friends will attest, I am a homing beacon for stray animals. If you recall, I had been living at my friend’s house for a month before I closed on this house. My 2 dogs and 3 cats came along too. I can’t tell you how great my friend was. The dogs, as we discussed stayed in a pen outside, but the cats went on his small sleeping porch. So, you see what’s coming, right? Just a week into my stay, I found a kitten. I was walking the dogs by the Ball Ground library and heard a meow in the bushes. It was raining and this poor thing kept crying, but wouldn’t come to me. It took about 2 hours of coaxing but I finally got her out. She was only about 5 weeks old, but fortunately weaned. Of course the last thing I needed during all of this was another cat. But she got to me, so she joined the other 3 on the sleeping porch.  

New kitten Sophie the night she was found

Anyway, the real reason for this tangent is to explain that I really didn’t want to leave my house again to refinish more floors. It was a huge imposition on my friend, not to mention dragging the dog beds, litter boxes, etc. back & forth. Since we had closed off the doorway from my bedroom to the living room, the only way to get from the front of the house to the bedroom & bathroom, was through the kitchen. So, resourceful Dustin rigged up a ladder from the outside to my bedroom window.  I can’t imagine what my neighbors thought seeing me climb in & out of the window in my pajamas to go let the dogs out. But, I only had to do this for 3 nights and it was better than displacing us all again.



Living room with old doorways framed off.

Right about this time we were examining the budget trying to see if we could find some room to replace the carpet upstairs. I think the Holcomb family added this room during their residence for their sons. It’s lined with nice thick wood paneling, not the flimsy stuff you see now. They added the stairway in what (I think) was the original hallway & added a closet under the stairs. The carpet was old, and red, and now that we’d opened up the doorway, we agreed it had to go. 


new filled in stairway. We used the extra tongue & groove flooring to fill in the old doorway so it matched the boards in what was the original hallway.



Upstairs room

Unfortunately, when they arrived with the new carpet, they were short because they forgot to measure the closets outside the bedroom. It’s not entirely their fault, because the electricians hadn’t gotten around to adding a light up there yet and it was really, really, dark, so they just didn’t see the closets. So, it’s one Friday evening and they are installing the carpet and then notified me about 7:00pm that they didn’t have enough material and were going to have to leave it unfinished. Again, this is where the pets come in. The cats had been staying in the upstairs room during construction because it was the only place I could lock them out of the way and keep them from the dogs.  My dogs get along fine with my adult cats, but they just wanted to eat the kitten. She was small & furry and very much resembled their chew toys. So, when I first moved in I had to find a room to lock in the cats. Except, none of the doors would close and we were missing a few. The house had settled, or the doors became loose, and they simply would not latch. That certainly added to my stress the first week as I tried to block them with boxes (which didn’t really work).  But, finally, I had rigged up the upstairs bedroom for them, and now the contractors were saying that I couldn’t use it because there were tacking strips on the stairs and they didn’t reinstall the upstairs doors because they no longer fit with the thicker carpeting. So now the only room that I could close off that the contractors weren’t working in, was the back bedroom where I was sleeping. I love my cats, but I’m not sleeping with them.  Honestly, I don’t remember what I did that weekend, but I do remember stomping around the house and saying not very nice things to the poor workers. I’m not sure how much English they understood, so maybe I didn’t hurt their feelings too badly.

A closely-monitored Jake eyeing his new chew toy

The kitchen demo was moving along and Dustin had to balance everyone’s schedules to do the floors and install the appliances. The dishwasher had been moved outside while the floors were done, so the morning the plumber is scheduled to reinstall it, they noticed that it was damaged. Apparently the critter that had been found behind the cabinets had been feasting on the dishwasher too. So after a flurry of phone calls, we located an appropriate dishwasher from Lowe’s (apparently Home Depot doesn’t keep any stainless ones in stock) and the plumber picked it up on his way to the house. 

new cabinets (but before floors refinished) with stubborn wallpaper on the soffits

After the new cabinets were installed, I started work on removing the wallpaper from the soffits above them. Again, mainly due to cost, we had decided to keep the soffits because it was cheaper to leave them and have Dustin’s crew patch in the stippling (a plaster finish like popcorn) on the ceiling.  There were two layers of wallpaper up there, and even though it all had come off on the walls earlier, the earlier blue layer just would not cooperate. I would have to sand it off. This would take hours, and so I justified that I would rather spend those hours taking down the stippling and it would make me happier to have the soffits come out. So, Dustin gracefully accepted the change, and took the soffits out. Now, had I known how much work it would be to take down the stippling, I might have made a different decision. I spent about an hour on the ladder working before I decided it was a better job for my handyman, Ovidio. He worked hard, but after a day’s work it still wasn’t finished. And the mess, OMG. We put down plastic tarps but the dust got everywhere and tracked through the house. After we cleaned up that day, and I vacuumed the floors & carpets, I started dinner. Unfortunately, we forgot to clean on top of the appliances & cabinets. So for the next week, every time I opened up my freezer or cabinets, plaster dust rained down. Just when I thought (again) that I had things cleaned up, I turned on the microwave vent one evening and a volcano of debris came flying out of the top.

 

 

The job still isn’t finished, even though the contractors are now gone.

 

Ovidio taking his turn on the ladder

 

new kitchen with soffits removed, but ceiling & painting not finished 



But other than that, things were moving along smoothly and I started enjoying a number of firsts. The first time I had an outside light to greet me when I came home after dark, the first time I could really cook in the kitchen, the first time I could use the new bathroom, and the first time I could lock my front door. When we removed the family room that was now the porch, we removed the outside doors that the Holcombs had used. They didn’t use the original front door, which could only be locked using a skeleton key (same with the back door). In fact, all of the interior doors are original and have this locking mechanism, along with original glass doorknobs. As a historian, I find skeleton keys kind of charming, and will use them on the interior doors. But I don’t think they are the best solution for the exterior, so I was happy when Dustin’s crew installed deadbolts! 

I promise I won't let too much time lapse before I post again! Happy Holidays everyone!

The original front door in use again (although more paint scraping to be done) and a glimpse of one of the "after" photos coming soon...