Fireplace Project

It's been quite some time since my last post. What have we been up to? Well, come on now, we always have a project going. But, more specifically, and most recently, we've been working on covering our fireplace surround with ledge stone and having a new hearth based poured. To date, and since the inception of the project (well, minus the time spent preparing the surfaces for laying stone such as the wire mesh, and scratch coat), we have 37 hours logged. That's about 6 hours a day since last Friday. It's exhausting, too! But hey, I'm getting some nice arm definition from carrying around 4 to 6 pound stones all night.

Here is a picture from last Saturday. This was about 1/5 of the way through:

The hardest part is keeping the stones tight since this is a dry stack method - meaning that we will not grout the stone. We use a cement dye to color the mortar. This ensures that any spaces or gaps (which are inevitable and common) will not be too noticeable, and you will not see the scratch coat behind them.







Here is a picture from 5 minutes ago:

It looks so good!! And here you can see the beginning stages of our stamped concrete hearth. The border is a form which will give it a real stone edge look. In a week or two, it will be antiqued and colored again to give it a darker, two color tone.

The shelves are made of 3 inch thick unfinished maple. We're going to stain them, distress them a little and then treat them with tung oil to give them a hand rubbed antique finish. I have started staining a scrap piece today to see what the difference will be between one or two coats of stain, and then 1, 2 or 3 coats of tung oil. I and thinking about 'roughing up' the corner edges of the shelves with a large stone to give them a worn and aged look. Right now, they're a little too perfect.

In its final stages...

Well, we have the kitchen about 90% done. The remaining 10% includes the tile backsplash, a new main light and getting the stone for the fireplace. Some things are on hold. We want to eventually get the tile for the backsplash, but for now, we have just painted the walls and that is fine. We also have lots of trim to hang, and some touch up painting. And, of course, we seem to have a very empty house. I feel like I just do not know where to start with decor! No pictures on the walls yet, and that is what I am grappling with. But, to satisfy your need to see what our kitchen now looks like, here are a few pictures.














This one is of Jason using the new stove. In particular, I really love the pendant lights, but that round flourescent light eventually must go!!!


This is a shot of where the wall in the LR used to be. Now it is nice a open, and we can enter from there or from the old dining room side.

Kitchen Remodel

I'm getting lots of requests to post pictures of the kitchen remodel, so I'm going to attempt a few now. Right now we're awaiting the installation of our quartz countertops, and we still have to install the pendant and undercabinet lights. Meanwhile, Jason has laid almost 1000 pieces of tile in the entire upstairs common areas - a combo of 18" x 18", 12" x 12" and 6" x 6" tiles. The kitchen was done over a month ago since it needed to be done in order for the cabinets to be installed. But now we have to grout the other areas. No small task. Poor Jason is stuck with the brunt of the work since I hurt my knee and can only do limited time kneeling on hard tile flooring. But, I digress.

First, some "before" pictures of the kitchen. It was very closed in, and also house a large laundry closet where the washer/dryer resided (I now have a laundry area in the basement with a large section of the base cabinets and countertop we repurposed from the old kitchen):

You can see in the second picture that there is a wall adjacent to the brick hearth in the living room. These pictures were taken prior to our purchase of the house in 2006. We have since taken that wall out and opened up the entire area in order to create a more open floorplan. Here are some pictures of the demolition:

The installation of the cabinets:

Of course, I'm saving the best for last - no more pictures until it is nearer to completion with lighting and installed appliances!!

Catching up - Our progress over the last 4 months

I haven't posted in a while - mainly because summer is always crazy for us. But throw in the complete overhaul of turning a 2 car garage into a gorgeous living room and the complete gutting of our kitchen and remodeling the rooms it abuts, and you have negative time left.
When I last posted, we had just finished the office addition and moved in, and we had started transforming the garage into our new living room. Considering how long it took us to finish the addition (new construction + permits, inspections and therefore, extra time), it took almost no time to get the living room all but finished.
BEFORE:














AFTER:














Not bad, eh? Here is another angle:
BEFORE:














AFTER:














Next time: I will start posting about the kithen demo.

Onto the next phase

OK, so I already mentioned that we moved into the office and have started the transformation of the new living room. DH worked his tail off to get the drywall hung, and I even helped a bit! We waited forever for our drywall finisher to get back to us, and he was supposed to start two days ago, but never showed. But he assures us that he is coming tomorrow at 7AM to get on it and if he does, it really should only take him a few days to finish it. DH already started the finishing, so that will save us money on this guy's labor.

Meanwhile, we started brainstorming and browsing for kitchen remodel ideas. We're drooling over the new Electrolux appliances that have induction cooktops, but we haven't justified the acquisition of one. We really aren't sure if it would be worth having one, and unless we buy a drop-in, we can' get one with 6 burners like we planned on getting. So, we are leaning towards getting another built-in range like we bought in Vermont. I just dread having to clean those grills, but it isn't the end of the world, I suppose. Gas heat is the best. It is exciting to be at this point of the renovations, but the end result still seems so far away. I keep hoping that we can have a celebration party in our "new home" this fall, but I know better than to be too optimistic. We have done this so many times that I know that having unrealistic expectations only adds unnecessary stress to an already stressful project. Don't get me wrong, we love to do this type of stuff (or we wouldn't have done it so often), but there is a percentage of stress for every 10% of fun you get out of renovating a house.

I'll post some pics of our current kitchen after I take a few - this will be an amazing before & after job...can't wait for the after!!!

All moved in!

Well, we ended up getting the final inspection, phew! I suppose the room in question could be a bedroom, and in some cases it will be treated as such, but come on...why should a family of 3 with a home office need to get a whole new septic system because of some stupid technicality?

Anyway, the final inspection marked the entire project from start to finish at 1 year, 1 month and 1 day! We had projected about 9 months, so this was a bit too long for our liking...

But we're all moved into the office, save some needed decor, but that isn't priority with a new living room space in the works (we don't waste time moving from one project to the next and I don't mind spending 1 year, 1 month and 1 day on the minute details - it takes time to make a space your own!)

Here are a couple of shots:

Lessons on inspection deceipt

Well, we learned a lesson in avoiding installation of a new septic system. If you plan to add a room to your home that will not initially or immediately be used as a bedroom, be sure to make it look like something other than a bedroom! We moved into our new office a week and a half ago. While we intend to use the second room we built as a guest bedroom, we had told the inspector way back when that it would NOT be a bedroom, but more of an office/rec room that would be supplemental to the actual office. We did this because he told us that there may be implications in adding a 4th bedroom to the house. Well, we didn't realize those implications involved determining if the septic system was approved for a 4 bedroom house. Likely not, since the house was built in 1976 as a 1400 SF 3 BR rancher. So, being a kind man, the inspector has decided to overlook the bed frame we had in the room, and told us to make sure it resembled an office when he returned to re do the final inspection. So, we will not put the closet doors on, and we will put office shelving and a file cabinet in there; we have a desk and a TV stand rather than a bed in the room. So, take our advice, and be sure to know what the type of room you're uilding might do to your existing utility capacities!!