Zeigen

Today we move back in to our house, after nearly four months of living with friends.

As is typical for a remodel, the work took twice as long and cost twice as much, although we definitely added many more items as we went along.

Our house was built in 1950, in a hurry, and previous generations of owners had done their own work, badly, and without permits. It’s a very small house, with a number of issues. Things were fine when it was just me and my brother, less fine after I married Kimi and my brother moved out, quite a bit less fine when Sammy was born, and really unacceptable after Sophie was born.

We grappled with selling it and moving (bad timing for that, though), with renting it out and living in a rental somewhere else, with knocking it down and starting over, and with torching the place to collect insurance money. Between the market, our desire to obey the law, and not wanting to be out of the house too long, we decided to remodel instead. (We do love the neighborhood and the yard.)

Ultimately, for the remodel, we:

• replaced extensive dry rot damage, especially in the master bath’s shower
• retiled that shower, and added a pocket door to the master bath (it didn’t have a door previously)
• tented for termites, sealed many open beams, and repaired lots of termite damage
• did what we could to level the floor and deal with the cracked slab foundation
• ripped out disgusting carpet and put in a hardwood-like floor
• took down some walls between the living room and kitchen and a useless corridor to open up the place
• moved the kitchen to the back of the house
• took out some awkwardly-placed side windows, put in smaller ones
• ripped out some dangerous wiring and had the electrical redone (our contractors wondered why the electrical hadn’t shorted out)
• ripped out some disastrous plumbing that was like an octopus junction; at one point, someone had snaked it, the snake had snapped off in the pipes, and they just left it there — no wonder we had always dealt with uneven draining
• took out our badly water-damaged cabinets and replaced them
• took out a load-bearing wall made out of multiple pieces of scrap wood (our contractors wondered why the house hadn’t falled down) and replaced it with a safe support column in the middle of the now large living/kitchen/dining room
• replaced our antique and difficult-to-use oven with a modern one
• added a trash compactor
• moved the microwave to an under-the-cabinet model
• replaced some clumsy French doors to the back with compact sliding doors
• removed a chimney/fireplace that took up too much space and had unsafe masonry
• replaced the fifty year old furnace (the wood above it was so charred our contractors wondered why the place hadn’t burned down)
• added a closet to what is now Sammy’s room and had previously been an office
• added a coat room near the front door (taking up the space where the fireplace had been)
• replaced a door that banged into the front door with a pocket door
• deepened a linen closet that previously had been too shallow to place a towel in, by taking up space where the master shower had been unnecessarily wide
• previously, we had ripped out a termite-ridden back deck (with wooden boards we couldn’t keep from being unsafe) and removed the 60s-era hot tub and deck area with concrete, and turned the back yard into an open lawn
• replaced some inefficient 1950s front windows with larger, modern, insulated windows
• put in new light fixtures and evened out the ceiling textures of the big room (previously, some parts were exposed beams, some parts were sheet rock, some parts were wood planks)
• repainted and added new trim/molding inside and out
• probably a dozen more things I’m forgetting

This morning we walk through it all, and start the move-in process. I’d take pictures but our cameras are packed away…

Many thanks to Bob for letting us stay in his place for 3 months, Garry & Marilyn for putting us up for a week when things ran long and Bob’s relatives came to stay, Rob & Kelly for hosting us the last week and a half, Kyrie for numerous consultations on the design and plan, and support with the kids. and most of all to my darling wife who managed the whole project.

Done! (Except for the unpacking part. That’ll take a good two months, I’m sure.)

This entry was posted by Stephen on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 9:03 am and is filed under family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.