Jim Dabrowski

Yep. That’s it for today.

Seriously. They capped a couple of pipes.

JIm

What?!? Day 21! Yeah, I reconsidered my day numbering convention. At first, I was going to go by work-days. They started on Tuesday the first, worked through Friday the 4th, that’s 4 days, but then I counted the following Monday as day 5, not day 7. But now with this lull I realized, who cares about work-days, I want to keep count of how many days I’m without a functioning kitchen! So, this is Day 21. So there.

Finally got back to work today. Plumber came to remove some old plumbing and put in some new.

See those nice new pipes sticking up out of the floor? That’s our water for our sink and a drain. How nice.

See those tape lines on the floor? Dena and I got impatient and taped out where the island was going to go so we could get a better feel for what this will look like when it’s done. We like it so far.

They also took out that last little bit of wall. Cabinets will be all along that wall.

I thought about titling this post, “Another day, another change-order”. Any time something new comes up that wasn’t in the original estimate, they file what they call a change-order. It’s essentially a legal addendum to our contract specifying what additional thing we’re going to have to pay for. Some of these have been expected—money for the permits, credit for their not having to jack-hammer out the concrete in the foyer. That sort of things. Others not so expected, but I kinda feel like they should have been.

Take today for instance. We’re going to have another change order because, by code, when they put in new plumbing they also have to put in something called “nailing plates”. Now, if this is something required by code and they knew they were putting in new plumbing, don’t you think they would have known they also had to put in nailing plates and factored that into the estimate? I think so. smh

Anyway, it was good to once again see some progress. I’ll keep on blogging as long as they keep on working.

JIm

Another day, another senseless school shooting, and another round of politicians offering their “thoughts and prayers” while not actually doing anything about the epidemic of gun violence in this country. I’ve reached the point where all I can conclude from this is politicians want these shootings to continue.

Why they want this, I don’t know. I know if they actually wanted to reduce the number of people murdered every year by gun violence, they would take action by passing sensible laws to restrict or otherwise control the flood of arms and ammunition into our society. But they don’t. Hence I can only conclude they don’t want to. They want this violence to continue.

I know, they talk about second amendment rights and how they can’t do anything, but that’s bullshit plain and simple. We don’t let people in this country buy fully automatic weapons and that’s constitutional. Why not restrict the ownership of other types of weapons as well?

Because they don’t want to.

We already have laws that prevent certain people from owning guns and those laws are perfectly constitutional. Why not pass more laws expanding who can’t own a gun?

Because they don’t want to.

They’ll say laws like that don’t actually reduce gun violence but that’s a lie. Reduce the availability of guns and you’ll reduce gun violence. It’s that simple.

My own congressman, Paul Ryan, is the goddamn Speaker of the House! He sets the legislative agenda for the entire House of Representatives. He decides which bills come to the floor and which do not. Furthermore, he announced he’s retiring at the end of this term so he has nothing to fear from constituents or doners and yet…he’ll do nothing. All I can conclude is that he, like all the other politicians in congress, for some sick reason, wants this senseless slaughter of children to continue. I don’t understand it.

I don’t care what party any of these people belong to, they’re all at fault because they all clearly want this to continue. If they didn’t, they’d do something about it.

It is that simple.

JIm

Well, today we got some good news and some bad news.

The good news: Got a call from the lead guy, Jerry, telling me things are going great. They got the inspection from the city today and all is well. They are happy with all the structural work and things can move ahead. Even better, the workers are ahead of schedule even, way ahead of schedule. Things are great.

The bad news: According to the schedule, the next step is to have the electrician and plumber come in and do the work they need to do. But, since we’re way ahead of schedule, they aren’t ready to be here until week after next. So…a bit of a “lull” in the project. If they can get the folks to come out sooner, great, but usually they’re pretty booked up so…be patient.

sigh

Take care all.

JIm

More walls coming down and beams going up.

So, I missed Day 4. That was last Friday. I got home from work that day, took a couple of pics and then headed to the airport to go to Vegas to watch my older brother get married. That was fun, but no time for writing blog posts. So, today is a two-fer.

Recall, prior to Friday, the kitchen looked like this:

When I came home, it looked like this:

We’re opening up the wall to the family room to make the whole thing more open. To do that, they built a temp-wall to hold up the ceiling while they removed the old wall and put in a new beam to hold up the second floor. Like such:

and such:

That was about it from Friday.

Then today I come home and things are looking a bit more open.

A big improvement. Our family room is hidden behind that wall of plastic. A good look.

Then they turned their sights to soffits. Remember, way back when, when the one wall looked like this?

Well, now it looks like this:

We’re still gonna put cabinets in that opening. But for that, you’ll have to wait a while. I don’t want there to be any spoilers.

Take care all.

JIm

And the walls come tumbling down—well, sort of.

Continue to make slow but steady progress I guess. That whole wall, for the most part, is coming down and will then be open to the family room. Looks like they’ll need to move some plumbing I’m thinking.

Then in the foyer they got that top layer of tile off.

Maybe we should just leave it? Kinda trendy and plaid-looking with the old tile and the left-over grout. OK, maybe not.

That’s it for today.

JIm

I’m shocked. I honestly think never before in the history of home remodeling projects has a project been reduced in scope and price. But yet, that is exactly what happened to me today.

I generally approach this project with the thought that if the project lead ever calls me in the middle of the day, it’s gonna be bad news. Why else would they need to call, right? So today I get a call from Jerry and I’m thinking, “oh shit.”

phone rings

Jim: Hello.

Jerry: Hi Jim, this is Jerry, how you doing today?

Jim: Fine ’til you called. (Yes, I really said that, I know, I’m a jerk.)

But then he goes on to tell me that he actually had good news. Remember that tile over tile over concrete thing in the foyer? Well, turns out, he decided if he removed it all the way down, he would have to rebuild up the subfloor by 2–3” which seemed silly to him. So he had the bright idea to only remove the top layer of tile and then tile right back over the old layer. This means no jackhammering, no rebuilding up the subfloor which saves both time and money from the original quote! Yay me! So, all he has to do is fix up that area they already dug into and they’re good.

Will wonders never cease? Let’s hope so.

As for the rest of the kitchen, they basically got all the tile off. That was about it for the day. I’ll leave you with one glorious picture of a plywood floor and talk to you later.

JIm

Here it is! Day 1! The start of our kitchen remodel. I hope to post every day about how the changes went so everyone can share with me the joys of a full kitchen remodel.

First a reminder.

Before:

And after:

And I must say, this is going to be interesting:

They mentioned there being concrete below the tile in the foyer but they didn’t quite notice the layer of tile below the current tile, and then concrete below that. No word yet on if this’ll cost us extra. They were already anticipating having to jack-hammer all the concrete out—maybe that extra layer of tile won’t matter.

That’s it for day 1. Stay tuned!

JIm

Almost ready to start!

So we had our “final walkthrough” a couple of weeks ago, which really wasn’t final, cause we’re gonna have yet another “final walkthrough” just before they actually start – which is Tuesday, May 1. They wanted to start Monday, April 30 but Dena and I will be travelling back from Idyllwild, CA and we didn’t want them to start when no one was here. We figure someone should be here to let them in.

So, what have we been doing in the meanwhile? Cleaning out the kitchen! We have to get everything moved out so they can start demoing.

First we had to get everything out and our kitchen looked a bit like this.

Then today, Greta, Tom & Traigh came by to take our appliances. Turns out, they’re remodeling their kitchen as well and our appliances would go just fine in their new kitchen. So what the heck. They also took some of our countertop since they’re building a peninsula as well. Who knew you can just saw through a countertop with a circular saw? So our kitchen looks a bit different now.

The smart reader out there is asking, “What are you doing for eating?” Well, we moved into the basement!

We have this beautiful bar with a mini-fridge and a nice room behind it so we decked it out and we’re basically gonna live down here for the two months while our kitchen is being redone. It’s a bit cozy, but it’ll work.

That’s it for now. The next step is we meet with them this Thursday for our final-final-walkthrough and then they begin the following Tuesday. Once that happens, I plan to blog every day showing the progress and adding some pithy commentary (I hope). Keep coming back, should be fun!

JIm

Eh. Had our “final walk-through” with the builders. The lead guy came here with the lead builder-guy who will be doing most of the work. They pretty much agreed that, yep, work needed to be done. About the only new thing that came out of this meeting was our start date: May 1.

sigh

So hopefully we’ll have our new kitchen in place by July 1.

That’s it. See ya next time!

JIm