Today I ordered our new stove and hood for the kitchen. I’m so excited about them. Here are the pics!

They’re gonna rock!

Again, Jason does a great job updating on the floor situation. I second pretty much everything he says. I was a little discouraged when I first saw it because of the difference in colors between the old and new wood, but I’m hoping it will season like the contractor said.

I can’t wait to see everything in the kitchen! The cabinets come in next week and I’m about to order our new 36” gas stove. Hell yeah! The first meal we make WILL require 6 pans and/or pots, you can count on that!

Jason does a nice job of updating on the progress of our home renovations. Check it out.

Since you’re dying for a house update, here it goes. They’ve finished trimming all the windows, doors, floor boards and ceilings.

Yesterday they ripped up a good chunk of the hardwood to fix a pretty crappy first attempt to fill in that big square we had under the carpet. Today, we should come home to freshly sanded, stained, and coated hardwood. I think its a tall order, but we’re prepared nonetheless. We will have to sleep downstairs tonight because the polyeurethane coat will need time to dry overnight. However, by noon tomorrow, if all goes as planned (again, I’m not too hopeful), we’ll have pictures of our new floors.

I think it is going to make a huge difference in the appearance up there. I’m excited to see what newly refinished floors in my house look like!

Yesterday they ripped up the carpet we had in our “hallway” and exposed the wood underneath. The good thing is that there is wood underneath. The bad thing is that the carpet was hiding this:

I always wondered why the carpet came out the distance it did. Now I know. So this means they will have to take off that hatch, assuming they can without something awful happening (you’ve seen Lost right?), and then weave new wood into that location. Ugh. I mean, I don’t really care how difficult it is…but it does mean more time & labor which of course means more money.

One cool thing is that they put down a new subfloor in the kitchen:

Which is good because the previous subfloor was in bad shape. They actually took out about 5 layers of subfloor when they gutted the place. No wonder the previous owners had just stacked stuff on top. Anyway, the actual floor will go in today. Exciting!

This is what the new wood looks like (the two lighter, kinda reddish planks in the middle):

Of course everything will be sanded and refinished so it will all match in the end. Fun!

This week has been slooooooooooooooow. I’m not sure they did much of anything yesterday. Although they did finish patching and painting the hole in our basement ceiling, so we can finally rest on the couch without fear of anything falling on our heads.

One exciting thing is they installed the new glass block window in the bathroom. It looks GREAT!

And they built the wall in the pass-through to hold the upper cabinets on the right side.

We bought our new front door, but it won’t be installed for a bit still.  I think the hardwood floors come next.

As Jason promised, I am going to fill you in on our new window buying experience. I may have mentioned previously that we discovered a window frame in the only wall on the first floor without a window in it! It appears that someone considered or did have a window there at one point. We thought it would be a good idea to put one back in and thus began our search.

First we measured the opening, which was about 69” wide and 52” high. Looking at the Lowes website, we figured we could get two 32”x52” windows and put them side-by-side, like all the other window sets in our house. When we got to Lowes, we found said window and spent about 30 minutes talking through whether or not we wanted single-hung or double-hung and whether or not to get the window with the grid. We decided to go with single-hung, even though all our other windows are double-hung, because the price difference was significant enough to make an impact. Especially since we never even use the double-hung part of our current windows. We also got the windows with the grid to match our other windows.

In order to get them home, we had the choice of either trying to fit them in my car or leave them there and have our builders come get them the next day. We decided to try out the FIT and by some miracle, we were able to fit both windows in the back of my car! I really wish I had taken a picture. It was a perfect fit. Anyway.

We got them home, brought them inside, and made our first realization. None of our other windows have grids. I was certain they did, but I was oh so wrong. Then our second realization: the windows are a totally different size than all our other windows. Why we hadn’t thought to just measure our other windows in the first place, I’m not sure. But they are only 27” wide and 48” high. Quite a different shape.

So, we waited till the next day then loaded the windows back into the Fit and went back to Lowes. After hauling the windows back inside and returning them, we went to get the correct windows. But, of course, we come to find out that they don’t keep that size in stock! We really did not want to have to order them and wait 7-10 days, considering that the builder was ready to put them in now. We looked at our other options and decided on one large window, 45”x45”, that slides left to right, instead of up and down. We had previously though a “different” window would look nice there anyway, so this seemed like a great solution.

Now, to get it home. There was NO way this one was going to fit in my car, but we took it out to the car to try anyway. We were right, it did not fit in the Fit. So we took it back inside (as tiring as it is to read this, that’s about how tiring it was for us), and took it to the Customer Service counter. Now, we thought, surely they have a process for this. But we seemed to throw them off-guard and they had only a make-shift solution. I wrote our name on a piece of receipt paper, along with our builder’s information, and they said they would stick it to the window and put it behind the service counter. We felt a little uneasy, but we were assured it would work out fine.

Lo and behold (and I know you saw this coming), I get a call at 7:50am from our builder saying he’s at Lowes and they don’t know anything about our window. So I talk to the lady at the counter, tell her exactly what the other woman told me, and she’s still saying “Well, I don’t see anything here about it.” I gave her my invoice number and she agreed to just pull one for the builder. Thank goodness.

Then, wham, bam, we came home yesterday and they had already installed it! Wow. That was fast. And it looks great!

And from the outside:

They haven’t done the framing yet on the outside, but they said they’ll do it today. I’m impressed!

Its been a few days since an update, mostly because the progress on the house was slow this past week due to the holiday. However, I hear that they are putting up the sheetrock today, so that’s really exciting. Our house may actually look like a house when we get home. Next they’ll do the floors and then we’ll start on the tile in the bathroom. When I say “we’ll start”, I mean we’ll pick out the tile and pattern, and they’ll get to work.

Many people have asked if we are doing this ourselves. Damn people. I cannot even comprehend doing this stuff by myself, even with help (which wouldn’t be by myself, but anyway), it would still be a nightmare. It would take forever, and I’m sure it would end up costing us more in the long run. Maybe the people who ask just don’t know the scale to which we are remodeling. Or maybe they’re handy jackasses who would’ve done it themselves, who knows.

Anyway, Jason ran new cable up and down and in and out the house this weekend, to improve the signal that will run to our future TV location. The outlet that was there was being run all the way around the house, instead of cutting through the house, so the reception was awful. We’re hoping this will help when we move upstairs. However, we’re pretty fed up with Comcast at this point. Ever since we got the new HD/dual-input cable box, we’ve had trouble with the signal not being “strong enough”. Some guys came out on Tuesday and ran new wire (which is what inspired Jason this weekend) and we finally got the HD Discovery channel. However, we still get choppiness throughout different shows, not even all HD. Ugh!

So renovations are coming along nicely. The new plumbing in the bathroom is done and we’re very excited. Anytime “new” and “plumbing” are in the same sentence, its usually bad thing, but this is good. Anyway, the only thing that’s odd is that they somehow cut a huge hole in the bottom of the bathroom/ceiling of the basement. Keep in mind we LIVE in the basement right now. This hole is right above where I sit when I watch tv:

Here’s what it looks like from said position:

Last night we had a little fun teasing the dogs that this was going to be their new bedroom. They were not so happy about being dangled above this:

All is going well! They may take a little break next week for the 4th, so I don’t plan to have much to update you on next week. Guess you’ll have to find something else to waste your time on!

Today the plumbing is being moved around in the bathroom and they are prepping the walls for insulation. Thats good cause I’m really scared to see our electric bill for the past month.