Articles with construction days

Updated Renovation Plans

So as last week all of the construction has happened in 3 days, but we are still scheduled to finish be the end of this week with phase 1, or structural work + major electric upgrade.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to update everyone on our evolving plans – that’s a nice word, evolving. Also could say expanding, second-floor consuming, ever more expensive plans. After we took down the ceiling in the kitchen and it became clear that we need to fix the mess of second floor joists, and then when we thought about the fact that we are moving all of the plumbing (except for the stack) and vents for first and second floor, due to new framing for the powder bath (all of those pipes are located inside the walls of the powder bath), we said to hell with it.… Read the rest

Construction Day 2

Ok so construction day 2 did not bring us any surprises (unlike day 1) — though can’t say the same for our contractors. According to them, the second floor joists were not nearly the piece of cake like the first floor joists. In part because of the shoddy job that was done in patching them up before, and in part I imagine it’s much more difficult fit the beams into place than dropping the into place.… Read the rest

Construction Day 1

Wheeeee – it has started. We handed over a whole lotta monies, keys, took a deep breath and prepared to trust the professionals. The builder agreed to take pictures of Day 1 for us – so here it is in all its glory, i.e. new floor joists and leveled sub-floor:

To start off the day – nice and airy. It appears that our joists were not even in as good of a shape as we imagined, so all had to go (we did save them because the wood would definitely work as island butcher block)

here are all the new joists:

nice and level – apparently this is the hardest part of installing a new floor in an old house.… Read the rest

Excavation, Day 1 & 2

So how cool is this? Nation capital’s own ginger ale. Just one of many, many, really many bottles we discovered digging out our basement/crawl space below the kitchen.

Although a lot of the bottles were kind of cool looking, I must say the sheer quantity that turned up are quite astounding. Here are some shots, and these don’t account for all of the broken glass and some of the newer ones that we recycled.… Read the rest

Demolition Day 4&5 – No more floor

All of the hardwood boards have been removed, nails hammered out (or in) and we are left with the bare bones carcass of a kitchen/ powder room.

On friday night we started out with this:

And after three hours of prying and hammering out nails we were done! All of the wood boards are clean and ready to be re-used and re-purposed. I am not quite sure yet whether to toss all of these nails or keep them for the memory of good times.… Read the rest

Walls and floors and timing

We are getting a bit tight on timing, with structural builder coming in next Monday and actual kitchen work schedule to start June 1 (make it June 4, Monday actually). Plus we have been doing a bit of traveling on weekends for weddings and family/friends events, which makes weeknights the only possible time that we can squeeze in some more demo and prep work.

Obviously that wasn’t going to get our bricks walls clean and ready to go for June 4.… Read the rest

Renovation Life: Camping out

Before we get to the good stuff – an update: we have found and signed a builder to come in and do all the structural work, including installing the french doors! more on that on Monday – their first day! And wood floor restoration people are coming on Thursday to tell us whether our kitchen boards are worth saving.

So it’s now been over two weeks living without a kitchen. So far, so good.… Read the rest

Demolition day 3

Not really demolition so much as cleaning up, prying off plywood, and cleaning the exposed brick. Our Saturday started really early – with a uhaul reservation for 7 am. DC dump allows uhaul size of up to 19 feet, so that’s what we got cause we were quite certain that we would need as much space as we could get to haul all 100 trash bags of kitchen cabinets, drywall, plaster, tile and whatever else miscellaneous crap that was taken out of our old kitchen.… Read the rest