It is difficult to believe that it has been so long since I posted anything about the remodel. We passed the 1 year mark last week and we are still going. However, we are almost done now. Let's do a little catching up.
Structural
We have finished all of the structural corrections (which took 9 months!). Some of the things we needed to fix caused us to open up walls (tightening the bolts that hold the house to the foundation) which in turn required us to do more patching than we needed. It is amazing how many things lead to another.
Some of the structural adjustments where to over-engineer sections that simply weren't strong enough. All of these adjustments were made on advice of a civil engineer. I highly recommend hiring a third party engineer to work with your contractor. It should be someone that the contractor trusts, but it should also be someone that was not involved in the initial design. Such a person will feel free to discuss ideas to solve problems that arise without being wedded to the design as it is.
Pay attention to everything
One of the most important lessons we learned from this project, communicate everything. Don't be afraid to change your mind or to own up to bad decisions. The sooner you communicate that you think something is wrong, say it. An example of where we didn't do that is our drywall. We made some assumptions based on the method the drywaller used that he was very detail oriented. He is methodical, but did not have an eye for the details that we saw. When we asked for things to be done, we would say; "Please finish the living room walls so we can get the painter here." After he was done, we did not question his work nor look at it with eye toward what was wrong, but rather told the painter to get started on the painting. He said there were a few things that he needed to have fixed, which he could do. Since the drywaller was not immediately available, we agreed to have the painter fix the things he was seeing. The result was that when the paint went on the walls, we saw every defect, every place that wasn't sanded, and everything that the drywaller didn't do. In the end, we had the room painted five times. That was mainly because we did not go through the drywaller's work with a fine toothed comb before allowing the painter to start. The painter and the contractor carry some of the fault as well since both should have done some of the inspecting first. However, the responsibility is completely up to the homeowner to make sure that everything is the way it should be.
Kitchen
The main focus of the remodel when we began was the kitchen. I wanted a larger kitchen that would allow me to cook for large gatherings and be a place that we could hang out. We now have that in spades. We hired a family friend to install the kitchen cabinets. Custom Spaces is the name of the company. Daniel used to build the cabinets himself, but that became impractical when they had more than a few customers at one time. Currently, they buy the cabinets from a company in Quebec Canada that uses formaldehyde-free maple plywood. Daniel does the installation with some helping hands and the result is stunning. We couldn't be happier with the result. We ended up painting the cabinets and the result speaks for itself.
We are currently using the kitchen for dinners. There is an eat-in-counter that is not pictured that is awesome. There are still a couple of items that need to be addressed (note the missing doors in the foreground of the first picture) before it is completely done, but it is functional and beautiful.
Floors
We had one heck of a time with our flooring. We decided to go with a local mill that sells lumber and mills their own flooring under the impression that local is better. However, the material we got did not meet our exacting requirements. We wanted rift and quarter-sawn white oak for the downstairs. That is very similar to the original flooring. The original was top-nailed and this would be tongue-and-grove 1/2". We knew to expect some variation in wood color; after all not all trees are the same. We ended up with about 25% of the wood being unusable. It was either an odd green color, or pink, or some mottled black and white that was jarring to look at. After going back and forth with the vendor, we finally got enough material to cover the entire floor and it looks great, but it took a long time to get there.
Having learned our lesson from the first floor, we went to a different vendor looking for the material for the second floor. We decided on quarter-sawn red birch. What an amazing color when it is oiled. It has a depth that is out of this world. The material was so consistent that we still have most of the overage that we purchased. We hope that we'll be able to use it to refloor the only room in the house we didn't touch upstairs.
Upstairs
We are almost done upstairs as well. The painting is happening now. By the middle of next week, all of the walls, ceiling, and trim will be done with the exception of the master bathroom which still needs to be tiled.
The tile design for the master bathroom took a very long time to design (as did many things in this remodel). We finally found the tiles we wanted and colors that made us happy. Of course that means we are using four separate tile vendors just for the bathroom. The tile setter is the same that tiled our upstairs deck. He did a very good job and fixed the grout at his expense when his crew installed the wrong color. In our experience, most contractors would have tried to convince us that the wrong color was just fine or that they would need to charge us for the labor to fix it correctly. Be wary of those types, you can be talked into all kinds of things you don't want.
Well that's all fro now. I'll write another chapter when we get moved back into our space upstairs.
