Lucy Manages to Get By

We've been staying at Lucy's best friend's house. Somehow, she seems to be managing to relax amidst the chaos and changes. She and Coopie have been getting two giant walks a day together and non-stop cuddles and play time. 

Wackadoodle Kitchen

Josh and Elder contemplate our crazy kitchen. Elder repaired the floor in the kitchen today. The tile guy grouted the studio bathroom. Holy crap does the tile look better with grout! Cesar is back tomorrow to finish prepping and sanding. I hope he can start priming the studio this weekend. 

Exploring

Poor Muffin and Spats greet me every morning with a chorus of meows. Luckily, the weather has been really nice, so they have been supervising the demolition and framing from the backyard. In the evenings, they come inside for a snack and to sleep in their little beds in the back. They are clearly a little frustrated by the state of things, but they are little troopers. I need to get them treats tomorrow for being such good girls.

Framing

I know I promised more demo shots, but this is what I got for ya for now. It's the view from the front door looking in. Pretty crazy, huh? The amazing framing team is making incredible progress. Luckily, they still can't get back to their other job site, so we've been lucky enough to have them for the last three days. They moved through the original portion of the house pretty quickly. Where we've run into more difficulty is in the horrendous add-ons that were done of the years. The lack of an exterior wall in the kitchen is one, the sloping floor being another and then in the bedroom we discovered that when they added on a portion, they neglected to make the floor level with the rest of the room. It's about an inch lower, so they're dealing with that. They're also adding in a lot more supportive beams. These framing guys are incredible. Pat has some for foresight about everything. He knows to build a door opening two inches over to make sure that you can get a full casing on either side when you go to do the molding later. Every little possible detail he can think of, he does.

Cesar is almost done prepping the downstairs to paint. I'm hoping he can prime the whole studio tomorrow. The tile guys finished laying all the tile yesterday and will be back tomorrow to grout. 

We just have to deal with the city now in getting a few final sign-offs for some structural things downstairs. Some things that a contractor who was working for us briefly 1.5 years ago now managed to f up. We'll get it all sorted out, I'm sure. Just another hurdle for now. 

A Sea of Beautiful White Pickups

I never fully appreciated how anyone who is a contractor of any sort drives a white pickup. Never red, never blue, always white. Sorry not to include any demo pics yet, but my computer isn't up and running yet, so I've been unable to download them. This pic cracked me up. The amazing Chinese guys that are currently tiling our downstairs bathroom had an extension cord running outside to their pickup truck with two rice cookers cookin' away at lunch time. Here is my brief update:

Saturday - Demolition

Monday - Demolition. We discover that when they added the kitchen to this house, they never built an exterior wall. They simply framed directly up against the house next to ours. The floor is also on a wacky slope which we knew about previously, but will definitely require some fixing. 

Tuesday - Demolition continues & Pat arrives to start working on getting things ready to frame.

Wednesday - Demolition is complete & Pat and his boys are hard at work on framing

Thursday - 

- Cesar arrives to take over the operation downstairs. He begins to sand, redo a lot of the previous taping and puddying and finish various things in preparation for painting. 

- Pat and the boys make amazing progress on the framing. 

- The tilers get started on the bathroom downstairs. 

Friday-

- Cesar continues to prep the downstairs.

- Pat and his boys continue to make lighting progress on the framing. 

- The tilers continue to work on the bathroom downstairs. I am very relieved that we never tried to tile ourselves. It's much more complicated than I realized. The tile for the base of the shower is set. 

- The window guy comes out to help asses the proper sizes for various rooms. We've decided to go with Marvin Integrity which is their new cheaper line. It also arrives in 2-3 weeks! We'll be ordering those on Monday. 

All in all, the amount of progress that we've made in 7 days is rather stunning. We crashed at Jonathan and Arminda's for a few nights and then moved over to Cristina's family room with Miss Lucy on Monday. We can't survive without our girl. Josh continues to be at work until the wee hours of the morning. We head over to the house aka the job site around 7am. Josh checks in with everybody for an hour or two and then heads off to work. Then I run around doing whatever needs doing for the various contractors during the day. In the evenings, I return to Cristina's for dinner and take the canines for a nice walk at the beach. Then, I sleep! 

Up and Out

Last week I finally managed to get the rest of the house packed up and shipped out. This was a tricky situation because our stuff is going in about four different directions. I have nothing but great things to say about the Public Storage pods- even the charming ex-cons that came by to pack them. When we're ready for them, we just call them up and they deliver the pods back to our front driveway. Love it. The house was completely vacated by Friday and the demolition derby started Saturday morning. The only thing that will remain upstairs is the framing and the windows. Otherwise, all the drywall, ceilings, and flooring is coming up and out. I only poked my nose in the front door and it's crazy in there. I'll hopefully post some pics later. We've been waiting for years to get to this part in the renovations! It's very exciting. The framing will begin this Saturday and should take no more than three days.

T still hasn't finished taping and sanding the downstairs. The painting of the downstairs must begin as soon as the demo is done upstairs. He is so close to being finished. Hopefully, when I go back to the house in a moment, he will be there hard at work. It is now week six since he started the drywall.

We're staying at various amazing friends' houses while the renovations continue. Now that we're out, I need to work on finalizing any framing decisions for this weekend.

Pregnant Lady with Power Tools - 25 weeks

Living Room Ideas

Joelle sent me this. I don't know where she got it, but I love the colors. Can't stop looking at it.

T is finally back today. I'm understanding why he said it would be a week before we could paint now. J's work has finally slowed down a little bitty bit, so he is downstairs working on stuff too. We will move all the kitchen cabinets from the garage today into the studio to make room for our upstairs furniture. I am busy packing. The packing just goes on and on!

We're finally ready to make a decision on the flooring and paint for downstairs. We will likely use a floating floor downstairs so that we don't have to put a 3/4" piece of plywood underneath. Every centimeter matters down there with those low ceilings. I'm having a really hard time deciding on the floors and paint though. Ideas to come.