Clearly it's been a long, long time since our last post. It's not that we haven't made progress, but instead it's because we've been so busy with renovations (and getting married) that we haven't taken a minute to share our milestones with this web audience.
Here's the rapid summary of what we've done in the past 3 months:
- a new electrical panel was installed in the basement
- sod was laid and our yard took root
- Jon's dad and friends built a deck off our kitchen into the yard
- Jon and dad Happy (not kidding, that's what everyone calls him) built a tall, gorgeous fence around the yard and stained/painted it
- got a new, working fridge!
- hung dry wall on every inch of the main level and the stairs to our new basement
- designed our kitchen and ordered the cabinets, cork flooring, counter-tops and appliances
- demolished our existing kitchen cabinets, counter and sink
- wired the kitchen for the aforementioned appliances
The relocation/basement portion of our endeavor is now as finished as it's going to get for the next year or more. Onto the next stage!
By far the biggest sense of accomplishment from the past 3 months came from the construction of our fence. Choosing the height, style, lattice, post caps, was one thing. Digging the post holes was another thing entirely. After the beating our property took from the house relocation, with all the heaving equipment that was in and out, the ground was rock hard and not willing to acquiesce to our shovels and picks. We ended up renting a post hole digger, but even that took some serious sweat and 3 grown men to operate. Add in the effort to get everything square and even, plus an overly demanding spouse who decided that the stain wasn't the right color AFTER it had been applied to an entire 20 ft side, and then insisted that the lattice frame HAD to be white (and thus removed from where it had been nailed in, in order to be painted and re-installed) - it was a long, hard piece of work.
It was all worth it though, because we now have a gorgeous, dark brown and sharp white fence that affords us great privacy from the walking trail, and more importantly keeps our adventurous basset hound Arrow out of trouble.
As you may have guessed from the summary above, we've already moved on to some interior work. First we needed to fix up the areas that were exposed from the removal of a few walls and the creation of the basement stairs. Unfortunately, in a very old house, nothing is square. So Jon and Hap experienced more fun and frustration working to get dry wall hung in every shape and size you can imagine.
Tomorrow we're heading to Australia for a belated Honeymoon. While we're gone a contractor will be crackfilling the entire downstairs. When we get back, all efforts will be focused on the kitchen. My next post will introduce our kitchen reno with the "Before" images, the post-demo images, and hopefully by Xmas time, the "After" shots! As always, our Picasa site holds many more photos the sod, fence building and more. Thanks for reading!
