Doubling Down

or, "Pardon Me, Have You Seen My Ever-Lovin' Mind?"

Guest blogged by Roy.

Any fool will tell you, if you're having trouble getting a remodel off the ground, that the thing to do is to take on two remodels. That's how you know they're fools. They say foolish things like that.

Or maybe it's not so foolish. Maybe it's brilliant, in a non-obvious, John Nash kind of way. At least that's what we're hoping, because that's the direction we're going, now. See if you can follow the meandering path of reasoning we've been on:

To have our house remodeled, we are going to have to move out of it for a not-well-defined period of time, between six months and a year. We could either pay rent, or we could buy a place so that we'd at least have some amount of equity to get back on what we pay. Now, if we're going to buy another place, we could just fix up our current house and sell it, and move into the other place. But we don't want to leave the neighborhood we're in. We like it here.

However, there is a house a few doors down from us that has been on the market for some months. It is on a substantially larger lot (though the house itself is smaller). We could buy it, do the big remodel on it, and then move in there, remodel our own house, and rent or sell it.

We walked around the outside of the neighbor house, and determined that its layout isn't suitable to the design we want. The master bedroom is in the front of the house, which precludes expanding the master suite, much less the ability to tack the Endless Pool enclosure onto it. Sigh.

But since Shelly was already in real estate researching mode, she continued to look for properties to buy, on the idea that we could move there, remodel our house, and move back in. She located a short sale home that has been empty for four years. It's in a really nice little neighborhood, on a nice-sized lot. The house is a comparatively spacious two-story. We liked it, fundamentally, but it needs a lot of work, including a new air conditioner, and all siding (the first story is brick, the 2nd story and the garage are siding). And there's a tree leaning on the roof, but it doesn't seem to have penetrated. The plumbing inside has leaked at some point, damaging floors. The utilities have been off so long that the meters were removed.

We ran the numbers on that, and found that we could actually afford to buy it, fix it up, do our remodel, move home, and then keep the other house as a rent house. As a bonus, we know the people who live across the street. It would be really tight, though. And it leaves us on our original lot, whose size is very constraining.

So then we did some more thinking about what we wanted to achieve, and realized that it would make more sense, if we're just going to live in another house while we fix ours up, to buy the one down the street that doesn't need all kinds of repairs, and is just down the street. Duh. Then we went one step further and closed the circle: we can expand that house in much the same way as we'd planned to expand our own. We'd just add a new master suite on the back, with the pool attached. The front bedroom stays a suite, a nice feature for guests. An added advantage is that the house becomes a 3-3-2.

So that's the plan now. We're running numbers to see how many phases we have to go through to get it all done. Keep your fingers crossed and keep watching this space.

Serendipitous Preview - a Halloween treat

You never know when, or where, an "A-ha!" moment will occur.

On Sunday, Halloween, we attended the surprise birthday party of one of Roy's church choir members, Carol. It's not too far from our house, actually, and was coordinated by Carol's son & daughter-in-law, Will & Melissa, and held at their house in Parkwest 2 (which is another Westbury subdivision, we are Westbury 1).

As usual, everyone is hanging out in the kitchen, and we're talking and admiring the kitchen, which Carol said Will & Melissa had just re-done last year. I'm looking at the granite and thinking "that's Giallo Ornamental, isn't it..." and then looking at the cabinets and thinking "and those are the KraftMaid cherry wood in Cabernet, I just know it!".

Obviously, we started plying Will & Melissa with questions, and while neither one of them remembered the granite's name for sure (they knew they had looked at the Ornamental), yes, the cabinets were indeed the exact KraftMaid we have spec'ed, down to the curved door panel style!!

It was very cool that we were able to get a visual impression of what our color and style choices for our kitchen will look like, all the way down to the black appliances! There are a few things we'll do differently than they did, but to see it all put together on a large scale (versus a tiny sample of this next to a tiny sample of that) was just this absolutely unexpected treat for Halloween.

[The trick came today, in the form of an e-mail from the disliked owner of our prior design-build firm, Bill. We'll just leave it at that. To say I never want to deal with the man again would be putting it mildly.]

We need to find time to revise our scope of work and start shopping for an architect/designer/design-build firm. We have several recommendations to check into, we (meaning, Shelly) need to find time to interview them and get this project restarted. Only problem is, my work is not AT ALL conducive to this right now and won't be for a while yet...we're not exactly sure what we're going to be able to do, but since the piano is actively being restored, we need to be actively working on the remodel plan. Maybe we'll work on it on the plane ride and car ride to/from KS for T-day.

Moving on down the road

Today, our 245th wedding anniversary (in months, in case you are wondering), our piano was disassembled into 8 pieces at the antiques store on Memorial and packed up to travel the 789 miles to Friendsville, TN, where Michael Stinnett of Antique Piano Shop will restore it to much (if not all) of its former beauty. The restoration process should take about 8-12 months.

Of course, since we don't want to have to take receipt of it in a rental property, that means that somehow (yeah, really) we have to get the remodel of our house back underway. Neither of our work situations are very conducive to time off right now, but we're going to have to figure out where we can carve out some time to rethink our remodeling strategy and get moving ourselves.

If any of you want to volunteer some extra hours in your day, I'm all ears! :)

Here's a little video of clips I shot today of the packing up process. It was all very professionally done by Modern Piano Movers from Missouri and I was pretty impressed at how smoothly it came apart for something that is 157 years old!

The piano: Heritage

At the antique store with the piano was a framed page that gave some of the piano's history. The piano was made in 1853, but our story begins in 1900.

Krouroe Gordon Jones of Mississippi had asked the beautiful Celeste Bedell Collins for her hand in marriage. Krouroe wanted to give his future bride a wonderful gift; he traveled to New York and bought a piano, just exactly like the Presidential Piano.

The president in question is William McKinley, whose piano was bought by McKinley's father after the 1853 New York Exposition and given to McKinley's mother, who later allowed President McKinley to take it to the White House. Looking at our piano and the McKinley piano, they're not "just exactly" alike, but close. Our is actually a bit fancier.

Krouroe carried the piano home to his betrothed in a wagon from New York City to Franklin, Louisiana, St. Mary Parish, on Bayou Teche. Lessie (as Celeste was called) was thrilled with her beautifully crafted instrument.

Krouroe had an arduous journey by wagon with the heavy piano. The Galveston Hurricane of September 8, 1900, hit and he took shelter. When he made it home, all was well.

The family and the piano lived on the Alice C Plantation, a sugar plantation, from 1900 until 1920, when they moved to Houston. The couple had a daughter, Celeste Bedell Jones, in 1907. The piano stayed in the family until 1990, when it was sold by her daughter to an unrelated family.

Here's where the story gets interesting to us. We did a search for Celeste Bedell Jones, and found the 1928/29 General Announcements from the Rice Institute, which included degrees conferred on June 6, 1927, and showed her graduating "with distinction". Further searching of genealogy sites found her daughter (the one who sold the piano), and her distinctive name led us to find her father, Whitman Denny Mounce, listed as a sophomore back in the same Rice general announcements!

What are the odds that a piano that a couple of Rice graduates (us) buy was previously owned by a pair of Rice graduates?

The piano: an introduction

The interior

A few weeks ago, while out at our favorite bird store, we decided to browse a nearby antique store. One of the first things we looked at was an old square grand piano. We didn't give it a lot of consideration at the time, but on the way home, we had the "did you see anything you liked" discussion, and Roy mentioned the piano.

After further discussion and a fair bit of web research, we decided that it would be a nice 20th anniversary present to ourselves to buy the piano and have it restored, and make it a special feature of our remodeled house.

(If only we can get the remodel to happen.)

Our web research turned up the Antique Piano Shop web site, which is clearly the most useful and popular web site on the subject. The owner, Michael Stinnett, has been restoring pianos since he was a teenager, and we think is almost single-handedly responsible for there being any market for restoring them at all. From some modern musicians' perspectives, they are not desirable. However, our interest isn't primarily in having a professional instrument worthy of a grand concert hall--we're more excited about preserving a bit of Americana. There's also the issue of authenticity: the modern piano sounds considerably different from what composers of the 1800s played on and wrote for.

Ivory keys: all present, only one seems to be replaced

We went back to the store and spent a little time playing the piano to see how functional it was. It turned out to be surprisingly functional. Some of the low notes had problems with damping, and the high end was out of tune, but in the middle, it worked well (notwithstanding that all the felts desperately need replaced). We figure that is promising for restoration potential.

Front view - note the Empire Revival octagonal legs (Click on the pic for full view.)

We wrote to Michael Stinnett to see if he could tell us how old the piano was, and how much it might make sense to pay for it. By looking up the serial number, he was able to tell us

AGE: According to the serial number you provided, your piano was built in 1853. We estimate that less than 10% of the surviving square pianos today are from the pre-Civil War era. These pianos are exceedingly rare.

1853 is the year that Stephen Foster wrote "Old Kentucky Home". More:

Maker's mark

Let me start by saying that A. H. Gale built exceptional pianos. Although they are very rare, we have restored a handful of A. H. Gale square grand pianos over the years. They are consistently some of the most well made square pianos we see come through our shop. We have seen some vintage catalogs showing square pianos selling for as much as several hundred dollars at the turn of the century...the cost of a small house of the era! In the past decade alone we have seen these pianos nearly DOUBLE in value, making their restoration a very good investment. You most likely have a wonderful piano there with a lot of potential.

Also:

The models with the Mother Of Pearl as you described were used only on the most expensive, high-grade pianos offered at the time.

Well, that's encouraging, even keeping in mind that his interest is in convincing us to restore it. It doesn't matter to us whether we could potentially sell it for more than we put into it. We intend to keep it. We really wanted to know was that we weren't getting, say, the least-worth-preserving piano out there. At any given time, there are plenty of unrestored square grands available on eBay.

Note the curved keyboard end

So we put it on layaway. Not because we are strapped for cash, but because that gets them to store it for us for a while. We want to ship it direct from the store to the restoration shop, and from there to our remodeled house. To do that, we need to get the remodel done!

The piano has an interesting history. More on that next time.

Progress on one front

We successfully closed on our HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit) this evening. It only took 3 loan officers (phone) and 3 bankers (local) to get it done in 49 days. We were told, of course, that we'd have one banker (who ended up leaving for another bank!) and one loan officer (who decided to take vacation in the summer, who ever heard of such a thing?!?! and then so did her backup...), but it's all finished. Finally.

The bank undervalued our home even more than the county, but since this LOC was a contingency plan anyways (we'll dip into it after we run out of savings), that's ok. And the rate was good - prime plus 1.24% (the rate will vary with the prime, but we don't see the prime going anyplace any time soon).

Now, if only we could find time to work on the design and/or find someone we trust to do it for us...we'd be set.

Reflections

It's been 4 weeks since the train wreck occurred. We have indefinitely halted the actual remodeling process. We're thinking maybe the end of this year, once we shouldn't be on the dirty side of any more hurricanes, tropical depressions, etc. I think that maybe experiencing two different named tropical systems in 12 days was a sign from God that this wasn't supposed to happen this way. It certainly caught my attention, anyways, and I can be superstitious when the occasion warrants.

We had a few exchanges with the Design-Build firm July 6-8. In one, the owner lamented for the 2nd time the fact that they didn't have specs on the pool and its enclosure, and they should have asked more questions (because the 20 page "we want these things in these rooms" apparently wasn't sufficient info to go on).

Fed up with them blaming us for the pool debacle, we referred them to an e-mail we sent them May 21 (the day after we first met with them). In that e-mail was the pool spec, which hasn't changed significantly. That finally shut Bill up about how the pool room error was due to our not communicating spec. (Yes, him harping on that just made me mad. You FUBAR'ed it, shut up and take responsibility already. At least he shut up about it, even if he hasn't acknowledged they screwed up.)

We're sporadically working on designing our house. The software is pretty fun to play with. We get frustrated by it on occasion, probably limited in part by our inexperience with it and in part with limitations in the version we bought. (We might upgrade to the next product up, but that costs more than twice this product. So, Roy's not sure it's worth it. Of course, being able to create architectural objects would be most handy, so the time savings could be worth the cost.)

With my work getting crazier by the day, we also needed to slow this process down or risk sending me to the loony bin. Since we have almost all of our products selected already, it's just a matter of getting the right design for the core of the house and the addition. We love the west side modifications we've made, we just have to make the actual core - kitchen/breakfast, entry, living room, and dining room - work. We have some ideas there, too, and some serious issues to address. But we have time - we have waited this long to remodel, waiting til we have a design we love is not a problem for us.

Roy built our pool in the software and even filled it with water. He had some serious frustrations with the process, but is happy with the result. He's also made significant progress on our new master bathroom, dressing area, and closet layout for our bedroom. There are issues to work out there, too, but they look easier than the core of the house.

I do not know what the future holds, but appreciate the thoughts and prayers that have come my way during this process. I'm sure that they are what has held me together at times. I only cried that first night. Since then, I've bounced between aggravation, disbelief, and even laughing at the idiocies they tried to push off on us in the name of "better design".

Yes, I can laugh about it now. There are things, such as removing our large windows that are set in brick and knocking out brick a few feet down to put smaller windows, that just make me mad and show that Will really doesn't understand what design in a remodel is all about. There is no way on earth that you could make that change look good. With what are you going to fill in those holes (24 sf and 18 sf) in the brick wall to make the patch blend with the existing brick façade? I can answer that for you: nothing. There isn't a thing in this world that you could do that would make that look good. More problems were created than solved with that "design move". And that, my friends, is a bad, bad, bad thing.

Now, for your entertainment, here are some excerpts from their communications:

Voice mail from Bill, the owner, (and father of Will, the designer) in response to our e-mail asking them to stop working on our design:

We are very, very sorry that you guys are disappointed - that's crushing for us. We strive to try to do the best that we can, but evidently we have failed to provide you with the service that you wanted...

Yes, it must just be "crushing" for them. Crushing to know that they might have kissed the really big project $$ good-bye. But, hey, they have the Design Fee to keep them warm at night.

A followup e-mail before we had a chance to respond to his voice message:

it seems like we deviated from some of your major criteria and failed to include others that you felt were important....We should have gotten a little more information on the endless pool size and surrounding space requirements.... I also apologize for not understanding your commitment to the master shower set up. We should have just designed the one you wanted and not tried to show you other possibilities....Will has learned a hard lesson on when to be creative and when to give clients what they want even if he has a better design idea.

Yeah, ignoring 90% of a 20 page scope of work document, which listed items to be addressed room by room, along with an initial listing of likes, dislikes, and "Big Picture" items...that might be "deviated from".

E-mail from Bill, in response to a follow-up e-mail from us:

3. It may make sense to have a meeting with Will & I before you get too involved with re-designing so we have an opportunity to discuss with you some of the challenges and difficulties. This way you will not waste your time putting something together that may not work for reasons beyond your construction knowledge. From that meeting we can be both providing solutions and come up with creative answers together.
5. We are in no rush either and have no time table to complete the design. Only to have a completed design we can build within your budget constraints. With respect to the budget, we need to keep a careful watch over the design. We do not want to end up with a great design and then we cannot afford to build it.

Italics are mine. Lessee...our construction knowledge tells us that placing a dishwasher in an island in a kitchen on a slab foundation is...something "that may not work" - yet it was in the design given to us-we are the ones who pointed it out. Likewise with "erasing" existing large windows set in our brick home - somehow, "our construction knowledge" tells us that there is no way to make that work - yet several of those were in the design given to us. And, the crowning glory is the 6 ft wide by 25 ft long overhang that Will created between the pool and the existing back entrance to the den - yeah, that puppy isn't structurally feasible without one heck of a lot of supporting pillars, etc. And I won't go into the fact that he pulled the center line of the roof off center of the bedroom....just completely whacked.

And with respect to budget? Yeah, those aforementioned new windows that Will put in the design would certainly chew up a large portion of that budget, look crappy, and ... you get the point. 'nuff gritchin'.

New Plan

After recovering from the shock of being handed "a design for Edward and Victoria," as we have taken to calling the design abomination handed to us on Friday afternoon— it might be a fine design (might), but it's a design for someone else, most definitely not us— we decided to take matters into our own hands. We are now the proud new owners of Architectural Home Designer 9.0.

It took us about 5 hours, learning together how to use the program, to create a model of our existing house. Then we started turning it into the "new" house. First alteration: put in bi-fold glass doors to the "West Room", which, though used for storage at the moment, it is destined to become Roy's "Music Room". Voilà! We have natural light entering the core of the house from that room, something that we were told on Friday "just couldn't be done". We decided on this solution on Saturday when we visited my co-worker, LeeAnn, who has these gorgeous bi-fold glass doors from her entry into her formal dining room. It is a lovely effect.

So...Debbi helped us pack up most of our china and glassware on Sunday (packing progress: 2 closets last Sunday (also thanks to help from Debbi) and lots of breakables this Sunday), then after Debbi left, it was back to AHD. After fighting with the program (and design ideas) for a while, we decided that the plan of attack will be to build our spec-requested elements, then play Tangram with them til they all fit appropriately.

As of 11 AM Monday morning (it's a holiday), we have a washer, dryer, and our chest freezer in the utility room; a dining room set in the dining room (located where we wanted it in the remodeled house-item 13.1); and we have been assiduously finding/building the required kitchen elements that weren't included in Edward and Victoria's™ design: items 10.6 microwave oven tall cabinet and 10.22 secondary oven wall cabinet. We've learned how to build any kind of cabinet we want, using the Kraftmaid Spec website in one window and then modifying a cabinet in the design software to match Kraftmaid's spec. It's actually a pretty spiffy process that we have gotten pretty good at in a very short amount of time.

Oh, and our big picture window to the back yard, that looks out toward the pond? Yeah, we're not touching that (imagine that, we're not removing our custom-built 72"x48" window and replacing it with a 36"x36" window over a sink....imagine). In fact, we have put a "breakfast bar" right in front of that window, as per item 10.14 in our request spec. (Another thing that we were told "just didn't work".)



It's amazing what is possible, when you adhere to customer spec, and use a little unconventional thinking.

As for the contract with our design firm? We're planning to send them an e-mail Tuesday morning that informs them to not work on anything— anything at all— for us until we contact them again. Our desire is to create a design we like in the next week or two (we will have jobs to get back to on Tuesday, after all) and then we'll hand them our design to merge into their design software (their software can read our software's output, which is why we chose the software we did).

At that point, the ball will be in their court: they can either man up and create an appropriately-designed-to-our-spec home design without charging us $110/hr for the privilege, or we can go to another Design-Build firm. There are certainly plenty of them around.

Aghast

Appalled.

Horrified.

I can't think of a solitary spec in our "Need" category that was met by the design we were presented this afternoon, though I'm sure there must be a few. Someplace in the house. Surely?

I can think of numerous "we absolutely DO NOT WANT THIS" items that were in the design. More than I can keep track of, in fact.

WTF?

I am ready to cry.

"What would you say if I could get you a refrigerator for $1200 that matches everything else in the kitchen?"

Huh? We didn't even go down the path of the fact that the current, less than 2-yr-old fridge is black and matches the just-over 2-yr-old black dishwasher. I just said, still stunned and somewhat communicative at that point in time, "we have a $2000 refrigerator that is less than 2 years old. It's exactly what we want and it's staying."

But I should have known that things were only going to get worse.

Much, much, much worse.

Such as a pool that is only 5'11" wide on their floor plans, when we told them it would be 9' wide and need about 1-2' access. We gave them this measurement, in writing (e-mail), on May 21, the day after we met with them at our house. The fact that the owner got all huffy and said, "well, you need to get us the dimensions of the pool immediately" seemed like some sort of bad-- really, really bad-- joke.

Rush to judgment?

When, two days before the "great design unveiling", you receive an e-mail from your designer that reads:

I will have to say that I was not expecting the design to be too complicated while still maintaining and preserving your expectations. However, after numerous rearrangements exploring all reasonable options, I have manage[d to run] into a few snags that will need your attention and decision. With that being said, I have managed to get just about everything incorporated into your design with the exception of two layout items/circumstances that will impact the overall design.
...
At this point, the design is just about complete and our production department [is] working on items they can estimate for the rough estimate. Although the rough estimate will not be completed pending the directions we head, the guys have been putting numbers together this week to get a head start and stay on track. I think what would make the most sense to me when we meet is for us to nail down which direction we wish to proceed and then let production look at it and complete the Rough Estimate.

Uh...you've had 3.5 weeks to play with the design and can't make it all work together and you expect us to make a decision in 15 minutes which path to take, a path that will "impact the overall design"??

The Design Presentation and Rough Budget meeting is scheduled for Fri, 7/2, at 1pm. If it seems that a little jolt runs through the fabric of the universe sometime in the ensuing 3 hours, that might well be me. I guess we won't be getting a rough budget on Friday, because it is very doubtful that we're going to be willing to make a decision, with an audience, that will affect the entire outcome of the remodel.

Stay tuned.

Winnow shopping

We've sporadically looked at various products over the past few months (even years), but have spent quality time for the past several weekends looking at lights and other things (plumbing fixtures, cabinet styles, granite, etc.) to try to narrow our choices down. Here are some of the things we liked.

We have potentially selected under-cabinet lighting for the kitchen that we saw at Lighting, Inc. We both liked the true-color rendering of the fluorescent fixture (Priori T2), which has a CRI of 90. Plus, it costs a lot less than the LED fixtures (whose color we don't like as well—though they are getting better). It's not dimmable, but we're not sure we need dimmable under-cabinet lighting.

Visiting Ferguson right across the street - oh, good Lord. Plumbing fixture overload. We did find a very interesting sink by Kohler (recently introduced) that we are considering for our master bath.

We ignored most of the kitchen portion of Ferguson as we have decided all of the appliances already (we're reusing everything we bought in 2008 pre- and post-Ike). But, they did have the prettiest pendant lighting over a bar there, almost exactly what I've been searching for. Now to see if I can squeeze a couple of those into the budget and hang them over our breakfast table!


Heading west to Re-Bath, we evaluated the color samples of all of the Onyx Collection colors in relation to some granite we'd like to use in our master bath. Actually, we have had to do this twice, since the granite we selected over a decade ago is no longer imported into the US (if we lived in Germany or the UK, we could get it!). The old granite was Blanco (Bianco) Iberico, from Spain. The new granite selection is Misty Pearl (origin unknown). It's as close as we could get, but definitely a different look.

Onyx Collection will be used for our tub surround (and caddies) in the hall bath and the entire shower (base, walls, shampoo caddies, etc.) in our master bath (we detest grout with a passion). We toured Onyx's manufacturing plant in 2008 , courtesy of our Onyx contact, Jim J., when we were in Kansas for a niece's wedding. Onyx Collection is an American-made solid-surface product similar to Corian, and to say that they have excellent customer service would be a gross understatement.

The Great Indoors has a rather impressive appliances section, including the Electrolux wall oven with its awesome racks that run on ball-bearings (this is one of my extravagances in the remodel).


We also looked at washers/dryers (ours are 16 yrs old, bought when we bought the house), and more plumbing fixtures-we like one of the Kohler sinks for the kitchen. And we're still pretty settled on a GROHE faucet for the kitchen sink.

We even looked at some flooring. Actually, rather a lot of flooring. And we have a lot more looking to do. Since we were in the area last weekend, we stopped by Arizona Tile on the Beltway near I-10 West, where we found a flooring tile that we might use in both the master bathroom and the pool area. Or might not. We looked at a lot of flooring on this side of town on Tuesday and brought home several other contenders (pictures not available yet!)

In the beginning...

The modeling of the As-Built house is complete! Will sent us the file so that we can get comfortable with the Chief Architect Viewer software. (He said no one has ever asked him for the As-Built before - we suspect that this is only the 2nd instance of many firsts for them in our relationship!) The image above is looking into our kitchen from the north wall-you see the den (and one of the two ceiling fans in the den) on the left-along with the door to the hallway and the front bedroom door (which is closed in this picture) , the entire kitchen in the middle, and on the right, you see part of the "breakfast room" with the door to garage. You may need to click on the image to see the whole scene if you're on the blog. (We'll see what happens with the e-mailed version!)

It is interesting. There is a fairly steep learning curve, even for two technically competent folks like us. It would probably help if we had a tutorial - you want to do this, choose this tool and this setting. But, overall, we were able to navigate through the house, although sometimes we walked through the walls instead of the doors, if the door wouldn't "open" for us - I think this might be a rendering issue, I'm not sure. We think it will be a big help to visualize the new spaces, which Will will have populated with our actual furniture measurements (dining room table 48x87, sofa 40x86, etc.) so that it's a real house with our possessions and not just four walls and a door for each room with maybe a few stock furniture pieces.

If you are seriously considering using a 3-D design service and would like to play around with our house as-built and then the remodeled version, drop us an e-mail and we'll send you the files. For obvious reasons, we don't plan to post our floor plans to the web.

Modeling Our House

The modeling work began Friday morning. Scott, the modeler, was here pretty much all day. This model will serve as the starting point for the model of the new design. Once we send Will, our designer, pictures of the granite we want for the kitchen, the light fixtures we want for each room, etc., he will upload those into the software and they'll appear in the design. That is pretty darned sweet.

Scott began by getting exterior measurements to build the shell of the house. Then he measured each room's dimensions with a laser/ultrasonic measuring tape and entered these into the modeling system they use, called Chief Architect. After the room was built, he would go back and mark where the openings are (doors, windows, other openings), where any kind of outlet is (phone, electric plug, wall switch, cable), where HVAC items are (return airs, registers), and lights/fans, furr downs, etc. Kitchen cabinets, sinks, appliances, you name it. When he's finished, he has a nearly exact floor plan of the room in the computer. I'm sure I missed a lot of what he was doing.

Then, this is the really cool part: you're looking at the 2-D floor plan and you click the camera icon. Click a spot on the floor plan and then drag the cursor the direction you wish to look. Voilà! Suddenly, you are looking at the 3-D representation of the room. We were able to see our kitchen in 360, complete with black French-door fridge, wood-grain laminate countertops, sink and faucet, everything. It was awesome. Then we walked around the corner, out of the kitchen, into the den and looked right across the den, through the hallway door, and to the front bedroom window (a sight-line we are planning to change). It's all right there, in the computer!! Really amazing.

He also will model the exterior (roof-line, vent placement, etc.), so that they can show what the finished addition will look like, how it will blend into the existing structure, etc.

Since they are pretty much touching every part of the house in some way (except for the front porch), they are entering the entire house - every room, every closet, every everything, into the system. He ran out of time Friday and will come back Tuesday morning to finish up with the master bath and closet and the rear exterior.

Hopefully, we'll get a file to review on Tuesday, so we can "walk through" our virtual house and make sure it's just like our real one.

Yes, this is beginning to get real and very exciting!

Draining

Last week, I submitted our deposit for the Endless Pool. Submitting the deposit gets you the Sample Kit, with real pieces of the materials so that you can make an informed decision as to what you want. Cha-ching. There went the first real money on this project.

Then I spent Friday afternoon looking at more stuff (lights might be my least favorite thing to look at), then we spent Saturday repeating the process with more stores and more stuff with Roy in tow. Six hours of driving, looking, taking pictures and notes, driving, looking, looking some more, taking more pictures. (And there's a lot more of this to come yet.) Talk about draining!!!

We also spent a large part of the holiday weekend fighting with the shower drain in our master bath. As the only working bathroom in the house currently, it is imperative that it remain operational until the demolition in August. The arsenal included: snake (can't get past the first bend in the drain), plunger (1st line of attack and auxiliary force for every other attack-but only after running copious amounts of water down the drain after the chemicals failed), Drano's Foamer (2nd line of attack on Sunday), and ZEP's 10-minute hair/clog remover (3rd, 4th, and 5th lines of attack on Monday).

After two days of really fighting with the clog, late Monday afternoon the drain finally cleared and worked again. Woo-hoo!! (Note: having sewer clean-outs immediately outside the bathroom assisted in knowing when something was working - when you have sewer lines replaced, we highly recommend having cleanouts installed at every exit point from the house - makes plumbing so much easier down the road). We also recommend annual treatment with some product to keep your drain lines running free and clear. A smaller clog wouldn't have taken so long to break up!

Then on Wednesday evening, I delivered a signed Design Agreement to Wm. Shaw & Associates along with the check for Stage 1 (Design). Their modeler will be out Friday morning to measure our existing home and build a replica in their 3-D modeling system. Bill said the modeler will be here pretty much all day.

So, the remodel is officially underway! The draining of the $$$$$$ has just begun.

The Remodeling Process Has Begun!

Actually, it began on Thursday, May 20. We met with Bill & Will of Wm. Shaw & Associates at our house.

While they could see that the choppiness of the core of our house (living/dining, den, kitchen/breakfast, utility room and office) wasn't useful space, it was our 76-inches on a side master bathroom that really wowed them. (Yep, that's less than 49 sf for our master bathroom!)

We then met with them at their offices on Tuesday to see a demo of the 3-D design software they use. Very spiffy!

We'll be checking references in the next couple of days, then they will come out next week to do as-is measurements. These will be used to build an As-Is model of our home, as it exists today, in the 3-D software. It will include windows, doors, electrical/plumbing/HVAC fixtures, etc. That should be interesting.

We have been methodically sorting through everything in the house for the past several months. The kitchen is completely sorted and I'm working my way through the china cabinet and things in the living room. It's an arduous process to evaluate why you have something and whether you should keep it. But it's necessary so that we don't keep storing items that we don't plan to use - and having to pack them up and move them twice in the next 6 months and then never plan to use them...nah. Give them away now so that they can go make someone else happy.

For those who don't know, the plan is 3-fold: completely rearrange the core of the house (everything but the bedroom wing), expand the master bedroom/bathroom, and add a natatorium with an Endless Pool^® (which will be accessible from the master bath and the backyard).

This is by far the largest project we've ever undertaken. We're excited, but it's a little scary, too. In the next 9 weeks, we have to completely select all of the furnishings for the new spaces (paint, cabinets, hardware, flooring, etc.) as well as completely pack up and move out (to where we don't know yet)!! And there's this little thing called work that we both have, too.