forty days in

We're forty days into our kitchen and guest bath renovation, and things are going well!  The toughest part has been obviously not having a kitchen, but luckily my dad loaded us up with tons of frozen food when he was last here in early December.  I also view cooking in a toaster oven, slow cooker, and microwave to be an Iron Chef-equese challenge, so you'd be surprised to hear how often we are actually eating at home.  That's not to say I didn't jump on the opportunity to go to George's Brasserie for Restaurant Week on Friday.

I'm trying to take progress pics as we go, but it's tough because I'm not home until well after dark most days, and this pic was taken on one of the last days before we lost wired lighting in the kitchen (1/7/2013).  My sister had her baby on the same day, so the following weekend, we rushed to Charleston to meet our new niece.  (It's crazy to think that just less than four years ago, we had no nieces and nephews, and now we have four wonderful kids to dote on!)

 

One thing that's fascinating about the pic above is the old wall lines visible on the ceiling (the ceiling has since been removed completely).  Our dining room used to extend all the way to that second line from the left, which makes total sense because it's always been strange to me that our dining room windows are so off center.  While it would be nice to have a larger dining room, I don't think it's a trade off we're willing to take considering we have just enough space to fit our dishwasher and sink next to each other against the far wall.  Also, we're adding a window above the sink which will give us so much more natural light in the kitchen.  We'll end up with two windows in our kitchen which is so much better than the crazy, singular window we used to have.

This is what the space looks like today, two weeks later.  Plumbing and electrical are in, and you can see where the new window is going.  Also, the door leading to the old bathroom has been framed in as we are eliminating that door completely.  Another addition that looks tiny in this pic is the recessed lighting.

 

The new guest bathroom area has also undergone several changes over the past two weeks.  Here's what the space looked like at the end of demolition.  This is where our old breakfast nook was.

The next day, the framing was added, and you can now see the shape of our new bathroom entrance.

Another mega-bonus about our new kitchen/guest bath layout is that we are also adding a door directly from our guest bedroom into the guest bath.  The new door is framed out now too.  I'm slightly nervous about the day they bust on through (really only because of the dirt and dust associated with it), but it will be totally, totally worth it.

One thing our contractors suggested that I didn't even consider was saving the beadboard we used to have in our breakfast nook.  While I don't love beadboard in the bathroom from a practical standpoint (this is totally lazy, but we had it in our old house and I felt like I was constantly cleaning Tuesday hair off of it), I love the way it looks and love the idea that we're reusing materials.

 Last two things on this post--first, while we're lucky in that our kitchen and guest bath are at the back of our house so we can still maintain some sense of normalcy in the front of our house (if cooking on a beer pong table is "normal" to you), we still need to get back there to do laundry.  There have been a couple of times that the kitchen has been completely off limits (imagine me in my pajamas carrying our laundry to the back of our house... through the church parking lot... on Sunday morning), but Daniel googled and found these sweet zippers that can be installed onto the divider plastic so that you're not constantly taping and untaping at access points.

(This particular zipper and frame were installed by our contractors since renovations have crept into our dining room a little bit.)

And the last thing--Tuesday has been a pretty good sport about this whole thing.  While I feel really bad about how she's spending her days in her crate (she's usually free to roam about the house while we're at work), she never gets mad at me in the mornings when I ask her to get in her crate.  Also, I'm fully convinced she doesn't actually roam about the house when we're at work.  We usually find her cuddled up in our bed or sunk into a couch cushion when we get home from work.  We also had a sad little run in after the floors and subfloors were removed from the mudroom.  Daniel was in the backyard with her when he decided to go through the back door, and Tuesday ran after him up the stairs, however she didn't see the foot wide gap between the threshold and the temporary particle board that Daniel was walking on.  Poor girl fell right into the crawl space!  I do and I don't feel bad though--we often find her darting into the crawl space now that it's easily accessible from inside our house.

Anyway, it would be a GIANT understatement if I simply said, "Yeah, we're totally excited about all this."  I really honestly can't describe how awesome we find all of this.  We are really thankful that we're able to do all this.  As much as I may talk about how crazy and scary our house is, I really, really love her.