Here it is!

Took a long time, about 2 months to design and 10 weeks to build. We love it!

Almost a Kitchen!

Not too much to say except, "its almost finished"!!!

Painting and chandelier.

       Here are some pictures of us painting. Well, I should say us, since I didn't paint. I watched children while Tom and my parents painted.  In this group of pictures there is also a picture of the light on the stairway. You can see we replaced it and I love the new one!

Tom just loves painting, in flip flops.

We had the popcorn removed first. You can see the old windows below too. The new ones are white and framed with molding. 

Hard to see, but its the old light. I think Spencer may have taken this picture.

Yeah! New light.

The Kitchen, Part I

Here is... or should I say was, the kitchen. Yeah! It's gone. No smell anymore either.  Wait... did I tell you about the smelly moldy cabinets?  There were three different leaks under the sink. The bottom cabinets are all open to each other so the musty/moldy smell was in all of them.  Tom used our industry favorite, 10% bleach solution to disinfect each piece as it was removed from the house. He also enclosed the room with plastic (thank you Dexter and Holmes on Homes).  We just picked out our slab of granite.  It only took maybe 2 months of looking at slab yards.  We used to go in and look for ones we liked, then after a few times we just started asking the price first. 

  To be continued.....

 

This is the kitchen and family room before we moved in. I am looking for the pictures where its empty of the tenant's belongings.

The plastic really kept the smell in, hopefully the mold too.

 The source of the water was the leaky kitchen sink, faucet and pipes.

The moldy cabinets were removed first with much care.

This is our beautiful new pony wall for behind the sink. 

 

 Our new counter  top, Rainforest Green. To me it reminds me of Michelangelo's Sistine chapel. The veins look like the hands reaching to each other.

Baby Steps

         It's hard to do something big when there are so many things to do.  I tell people, "you don't understand, everything has to be replaced"! So here are a few examples of some of the small steps we have made. The first one is a light fixture off the dinning room.  I think this picture puts the whole project in perspective. You can also see that we got a new sliding glass door in the picture on the right. We haven't painted the trim yet so its just white primer. And honestly I haven't picked the color for the trim.  To many other decisions to make regarding the kitchen. The other picture is of our new gate. We had the house tented for termites and the gate was practically hallow. Tom stained it with our favorite, Redwood 402, from home depot. 

 

 

 

The Deck

In order to get our loan funded the bank wanted us to address a comment in our appraisal.  The appraiser had stated the deck was in need of repair. This was an understatement.  You couldn't walk on the thing without falling through rotted boards or tripping over loose uneven planks.  Luckily the dirt was about 2 inches below the deck. I realized this when I noticed weeds growing through the boards.  Our mortgage broker, and both agents thought it would be a great idea for us to go over to the property and remove the deck.  They made it sound like this was common practice, to go to someone's house and remove something.  This was all to get the appraiser to says, "ok.. the deck does not need to be fixed anymore".  Below are pictures of the wonderful Memorial Day at Solano St.  Oh, and we didn't get a picture of the rattle snake Tom found just laying in the dirt a few feet away.  May the snake RIP.  After the deck was removed, the wood was stacked in three big piles. The concrete and all the wood was over 5 tons. Tom made some new friends at the Carlsbad Waste Management transit station, oh and busted a tail light. Doh!

Where we started...

This project started with the COE on June 22nd, 2010.  I will post some pictures of the house prior to our purchasing it, and a few after shots.  We have mostly done small projects to date. The the next big ones will be the kitchen, master bath, and flooring.