Delays

Although this past week was supposed to be all wood floor finishing, in reality, that did not happen. The weather was so humid last weekend, then it got cold and then it got rainy. They are trying to acclimate the floors to the proper percentage moisture (whatever that may be) and the floors aren't there yet.

So...we don't know how many more days have slipped. An email was sent on Tuesday officially adding a day, but then nothing happened with floors the next 2 days, either, so...not really sure. They know we want to move on May 10. Or, I guess I should say, they know we want to be back in the house by May 17  (which marks 20 years ago that we purchased that house).

Cabinet hardware arrived and has been stationed with each item in the house, but the finish carpenter has moved on to another job...but he met with us yesterday, so he knows what goes where (there are a few oddities in the kitchen - a smaller handle on a base cabinet and horizontal handles on pull-outs). He should be back before the project end date, so no worries there (yet).

The cabinet-maker also met with us yesterday to take a base cabinet that is too big for the island and remake it into a bookcase, since all of the "parts" we ordered from KraftMaid to make a bookcase had finally arrived. All of the replacement parts for the damaged KM cabinets have also shown up, so the final cabinet install (with different contractor) is scheduled for April 28.

Then the granite fabricator will need to develop a template for the island top and get it made and installed. I don't know whether we will make the May 2 handover of keys. We're still hoping.

For those in the neighborhood, sometime in the next few weeks, the exterior will get painted, too. We gave Steven the colors yesterday, and no, neither is any shade of TAUPE (or baby-poop, either)!

On a Moving Forward note: 
We happened to be at the Home Depot Pin Oak store a couple of weekends ago when they were having their annual Rug Event in the parking lot. Having discovered a few days earlier that the Ten Thousand Villages 100% hand-knotted wool Pak-Persian rugs we have are too small for the dining room space (the colors of which were planned around one of the rugs), we decided to look through the appropriately-sized rugs to see if we found anything that we liked - which we did. Here is our new (shh! machine-made, polyester) dining room rug. That is a dining room chair and a leaf from the dining room table on it.

T minus 3 weeks!

As you might well imagine, we have been very busy lately. Jobs, yards, gardens, house remodel.

While the remodel of 5206 was originally scheduled to be completed this coming Good Friday, various delays (weather, damaged product, back-ordered product, delayed ordering of product, expansion of scope, change in island plans) mean that we are about two weeks behind. The latest schedule has us tentatively getting keys back around 5/2.

The first coat of paint is on all of the walls and we are pretty happy with how the colors have turned out overall, once we got the correct Kelvin temperature light bulbs in each location to show off the colors correctly (once light fixtures were installed). All paints are Behr Ultra Premium Plus, though some colors were color-matched from others' paint lines.

Entry way in progress (Biscuit and Rich Navy):

Laundry room in progress, and, yes, those walls are all different colors - laundry should have something to make you smile-the 4 walls are the 3 bedroom colors plus the study color (the wall you don't see in the picture):

Front bedroom (guest room) aka the Garden Room or "Go soak up some happy in your happy green room" (60% Bonsai Tint). This room overlooks the front garden:

The kitchen cabinets are installed, the granite countertops are mostly installed (one section needs to be replaced yet), we have light fixtures every where finally, the appliances were installed last week, and the bathrooms are mostly completed and have plumbing trim outs finished, etc.

This week, April 14-20, they will sand, stain, and top coat the wood floors. We added painting the exterior of the house to the scope once we decided that we were close enough to knowing what color we wanted it painted. So exterior painting will commence the week of April 21 while they finish up inside (and hopefully the kitchen island and granite can get done this week, too) and clean everything up and have final inspections.

Then they will finish coat the room walls, install the washer and dryer, and we can move back in! We're planning to move around May 10, though we haven't yet done any packing. We'll move somethings ourselves (clothes, dishes, etc.) as those are easier to toss in a car and drive down the block that box up.

But, that's where we're at these days.

Timeline update and selecting paint colors

I am obviously pretty far behind on the weekly chronolog of activities and pictures. I've been quite busy, despite not having a client (aka income) since mid-January (thank God I haven't had a client since mid-January!). Anyway, I thought I'd write a "here is where we're at today" post.

The current week of March 3rd is Week 9 of the 14 active weeks of the remodel. (Week 15 is final cleaning.)

Things continue to progress, sometimes several steps forward and a half-step or two backwards. The weather hasn't been exactly cooperative these days - can't lay tile and grout in freezing/near-freezing temperatures in an unconditioned house in the rain, for example.

That said, we have drywall; we have wood and tile floors, with grout applied in several locations even; we have a bathtub and a shower base and much of the tub and shower surround tile has been set; we have interior doors; and we have floor and door trim. It looks like a real house again!

Painting is scheduled to commence next week. We have been struggling with selecting paint colors for the past 2+ weeks. We were held up when my favorite paint lady (the only one who knows how to mix samples at Home Depot on this side of town, apparently) went on vacation for 10 days or so.

While she was out, I tried 3 different Home Depots in an effort to find anyone else who can mix samples properly!! The guy at the store down on Hillcroft at the Beltway actually had colorant running down the sides of the sample jar -- and expected me to want them. (I spoke with a supervisor and explained the myriad problems with the 4 paint samples I had just had made, and no, I didn't buy any of them. At that point, I was pretty livid, explained why they were wholly inadequate as color samples, and left.)

The good news is, we have managed to get colors selected for most of the rooms in the house, though we did go through numerous candidates to get there. I have gone through a number of "touch-up" kits, which are perfect for applying paint to foam-core boards from Hobby Lobby, which is how we evaluate colors. Here is a glimpse into the past several weeks' purchased paint color candidates, though there may have been additional colors that were so awful as to have been tossed almost immediately into the trash. Of course, the picture doesn't include the half-dozen plus recently purchased candidates.

The rooms we struggled with the longest were:

1. the front bedroom, which has a 6x6 foot south-facing window through which you see the parterre garden, and which I want to be a shade of green
2. the study, which faces the neighbor's house to the west and now opens east to the kitchen, and which Roy wants to be a shade of mauve
3. the laundry room, which I want to have some fun with - Roy describes my desire to have it "be something that makes me smile" as "whimsical" (he's one to speak, what with trying to find a color he likes for the study!) - ooh! I just had an idea...we'll see what Roy thinks of it (he agreed to it! you'll just have to wait to see what we decided to do in there)

Plus, heaven help us, we actually managed to select a trim color that will coordinates with, ahem, all 10 wall colors! I bought 3 potential trim colors and we went with the one we initially had chosen from the color cards (that is Polar Bear). Yay!

So that's where we are at - about two-thirds of the way through the remodel and finishing up our time in color selection purgatory.

 
The big news of the week is that someone literally bought every slab (all 10 of them) of our chosen granite for the kitchen less than 24 hours before we were to go out and choose a mere 2 slabs. That created a multi-day panic that isn't over quite yet. I have spent the better part of the past 2 days in the granite yard haunting the aisles looking for solutions.

The good news is, we have a potential work-around that may cost us more, but should still get us the desired countertops, as we cannibalize pre-fabricated countertops and island tops that are broken and/or stained to get the linear feet that we need. At least for the main kitchen countertops. The island might have to come out of a different piece (color) of granite, so I spent today ferreting out candidates for an island top.

We'll be back at the granite yard in the morning for more perusing and weighing of options. Then I'll meet the fabricator at the yard next week to look over what we've been able to cobble together and see if he thinks it will work.

Week 4 - more MEP, more ice!

Week 4 continued "MEP" on the schedule, plus a bit of continued framing. Plus another day off for icy roads, for good measure (who ever would have thought Houston would have 2 bad weather stay-off-the-road kind of days within 5 days?!?).

We spent that entire Sunday (1/26)  installing low voltage "boxes" throughout the house and running coaxial and cat6 cabling between our structured media panel in the hall closet and each drop: 8 drops for a total of 15 lines run. The contractor offered to do it, but any hard bends in the wire could ruin the cat6, so we chose to do it ourselves (after we removed the cat5e that we had run back in a very hot July 2001). That was a long day and I'm thankful that Roy was willing to walk around an attic with only joists for support, to staple up the wires. We still need to run new wires to the back of the house, but with the big pile of dirt in the master bedroom closet (from excavating the bathroom drain area), we decided to wait. But it turns out it was a good thing we got most of the lines run on Sunday, as they installed HVAC ductwork on Monday, which leads us to....

We did our standard mini walk-through that Monday night. There were still some electrical things out of place, but they had corrected some others. Our walk revealed that they had finally moved our whole house air cleaner, a Trion Air Bear that we had had for almost a decade - a single 5-inch pleated filter that serviced all of the return air ducts instead of having individual thin filters at each grille, and only had to be changed once a year. So we looked over to where it should be installed, between the heater and the return air ducts, and nope, it wasn't there. They had installed a return air plenum and sealed that up.

Well, that didn't bode very well, so we went outside to the dumpster, climbed up on the outside of it, and dug around the inside until we found what we knew we would find - our Trion Air Bear bent up and discarded like so much trash!!

Needless to say, that generated an e-mail to LCI. It was actually the 3rd email before 7am on Tuesday morning. The 1st concerned securing the new, full water pipes against damaging freezes, and the 2nd was yet more arguments about the electrical system and what they (electrical sub) think they get to bill us for as additional work. About the only thing I like about our architect is that his standard project specification includes clauses like, and I quote: "Verify the capacity of the existing electrical service to the house. Additional panel space is available but adequate capacity should be determined prior to submitting a bid." So for them (electrical sub) to decide now, 4 weeks into the project that we need a new panel is a "fine, but we're not paying for it" talk (yet to be held). It is, amusingly, the exact same amount that he wanted to charge us to rewire the entire house and we hadn't agreed when they were full steam ahead ripping everything out, so that became their cost to bear, not ours. (The resolution on this did wind up us paying for a sub-panel. Yes, the contract really does cover us, and yes, they really didn't bid accurately. But, sometimes you just give a little bit for goodwill. Current NEC is ridiculous in many areas.)

But the fact that they discarded the Air Bear was simply insane. Dan had addressed some of the other pieces of email (plumbing and electrical), but when he got to the HVAC, I can imagine that he used words, under his breath if nothing else, that they are not allowed to use. Here's his response to us: "WOW- I am almost speechless here.  I have no idea why it would have been tossed as we discussed placement of it yesterday.  I certainly assure you it will be replaced.  Let me investigate." It was replaced and they did have to rework the plenum, too.

We wonder how much more profit could be made by the subs and/or the contractor if they weren't constantly doing work that had to be ripped out and done again, correctly!

Week 3 - Taking Shape

Week 3 was "MEP" on the schedule, plus continued framing. What's MEP? Turns out it is Mechanical (HVAC), Electrical, and Plumbing.

Most of W3's accomplishments involved the infrastructure of the house - for plumbing, that meant running all new water lines in the attic and walls, new water supply line between the meter and the house, new plumbing ventilation stacks, new drains and P-traps where required by our building plan or current building code.

We are utilizing a PEX manifold only for the cold water distribution in the house, because we wanted to have a more sensible hot water solution than running water down the drain waiting for it to get hot. For the hot water distribution, we specified what is called "structured plumbing system", wherein a hot water line runs in a loop through the attic, and smaller lines drop down from the loop to supply each fixture. An "on-demand water circulation pump" is installed near the water heater to circulate water through the loop, and it is activated by a simple doorbell-wired button installed at each hot water location.

The pump we chose, after much research, was the Chilipepper CP2011. We are very excited about the potential savings not only in water down the drain, but of time spent waiting for the water to get hot in the master shower, which is as far away in the house as you can get from the water heater! (This water pump was originally designed as a minimally-invasive water conservation solution for older homes. Read up on it if you are interested.)

We did pretty well in our plumbing design, requiring only the master shower drain to be relocated, which did require busting through the foundation. The master toilet, although not moving, had an issue with drain route (or something), which required them to bust through the perimeter of the foundation (another thing altogether, and they figured out how to minimize that impact--if you have to cut through the rebar reinforcing the concrete foundation perimeter, that is apparently a Bad Thing, and they were able to narrowly avoid having to do so). All other plumbing rearrangements were able to utilize existing drain lines (and therefore, roof penetrations,)!

Because we are installing real hardwood floors, the floor "height" will increase by 1.5 inches. What does that mean? Every doorway in the house must be raised 1.5 inches, even those doors whose position/type did not change. For all of the new doors/doorways, they simply framed the opening 1.5 inches higher. For the rest of the doors, they have to raise the existing door framing. This includes all of the exterior doors, so although we saw the new doors in the laundry room and front entry briefly last week, those came down so the openings could be reframed. Since we reversed the hinge side of the entry door, they have to use the new door, but it is now securely encased in sheathing to protect it from damage til it needs to be painted. The laundry room door is back to being the old steel door.

The one nod to the "current style" common in the remodeled houses in our area is the arched doorway. We changed the square opening between the front entry and the living room to be a cased arched opening. We think it looks nice already and defines the space with more panache.

Also notable in the living room is the specialty electrical box we purchased for the TV wall. It handles electrical and cabling (coaxial, cat6, and whatever audio wire you want) in a recess, which allows a flat panel TV to be installed flat against the wall. Although we don't own a TV, we figure there's a pretty good chance the next owners will. :)We also decided to install a similar box, but without the space for audio cables, in the master bedroom.

OH construction well underway (Weeks 1 & 2)

We are nearing the end of Week 3 of the remodel of the old house and it has been going along pretty well. We tour the day's work each night with our headlamps (one of the best purchases ever!) and sometimes marvel at the changes and other times, panic, though at this point, we have moved beyond panicking now that we have had reassurances from the contractor that all will be okay, that his word is good, and anything we might find done in conflict with our understanding will be fixed and not at our expense. They have been a great contractor to work with so far.

Weeks 1 & 2 were demolition of various kinds - what few fixtures we had left, kitchen cabinetry, master bathroom cabinetry, flooring, sheetrock, insulation, HVAC ducting, etc. A few things disappeared that we didn't expect - the hallway return air chase (because it was made out of sheetrock) plus the linen cabinet above it, and also the oak and birch wood linen cabinet in the hall bathroom (because we hadn't explicitly labeled it "not trash/keep", we guess).

This is the remains of our master bedroom, bathroom, and closet by Day 4. They waited until all of the walls were out to pull down the ceilings and the nasty 57 year old insulation and various droppings (we'll just leave that description at "disgusting"). 

But here is one surprise we saw in the walls, near the back patio light switches (yeah, it's probably what you think it is):

 We figure it was some kind of rodent. Perfectly preserved skeleton. Gross and cool at the same time.

We have no idea how many dumpsters-full they have hauled away. Several, we're pretty sure (we know of two for certain). This was at the end of Week 1.

At the end of Week 2, we had our second and third blips on the radar on the same day, this time when we walked through the house on Friday morning and discovered them ripping the electrical out without our go-ahead (we were discussing it with them in e-mail and had not approved as we thought that there were some perfectly fine new circuits installed in 2000 for dedicated purposes that shouldn't be touched), then we walked again Friday night and discovered re-wiring had commenced, and not to either the as-built electrical plan nor the new electrical plan! They had also cut the installed-in-2000, dedicated wiring to our porch downlights and Christmas light timers, which we had explicitly and repeatedly said "no, do not touch that".

They also ripped apart the HVAC system that day, and relocated the return air without asking and installed HVAC registers in the wrong places, basically completely freaking us out. We had already set up a meeting with Dan to go over the electrical and HVAC in the entire house on Monday, so we were confused. And really worried, as they work on the house 6 days a week (Mon-Sat) and we could only imagine how many more things would be wrong by the time Monday morning rolled around!

Dan actually checked his e-mail late that night and e-mailed us reassurances that we were still planning to have the walk-through on Monday morning and that things would be as we wanted and expected them. He canceled their work on Saturday, which was very reassuring.

I had the walk-through Monday with Dan and James from LCI, as well as our architect and his sidekick. Dan again reiterated that his word goes, that the electricians jumped the gun and what they did was on them, not on us and not on LCI. We then proceeded to walk every outlet, every switch, and every HVAC in the entire house. Roy & I had walked the same things Sunday night, so I had annotated plans (would you really have expected anything less?), so the walk-through on Monday went off pretty well, though it did take 3-1/2 hours by the time I was finished answering questions from all of the trades and Dan.

The former hallway HVAC return air chase will be converted into a full height linen cabinet in the hallway (instead of the half-height it was) and they will build  a small built-in dresser unit in the middle bedroom (by borrowing an odd section of closet from that walk-in closet to both square off the closet and enable us to install Elfa shelving on that side plus it will create a usable space in the bedroom when combined with the former air chase space).

Next post (no promises when, but maybe in the next day or so when the weather is so horrid here in Houston) will cover the new stuff going on in Week 3. It's pretty exciting to see the house take on its new interior scape with the new walls and doorway placements, etc. They installed the new laundry room door (with operable window!) and new front entry door in the past couple of days. We like them.