Week 31 of the remodel brought something new to the house: a splash of color. Ever since the drywall went up, the interior has been some shade of white (or near-white). Even after the painters started working, it was somewhat difficult to tell the difference between the areas that had just been primed and those that had received two full coats of our chosen off-white color (which I’ll remind you is called Mawmaw’s Pearls).

This week was different, though. When we arrived on Saturday, it was clear that the painters had been hard at work: Julia’s room was the very minty shade of green that she had selected, and William’s room was the muted blue he had chosen to fit with his Star Wars theme. Joe’s room was still bare, but we found cans of orange and blue paint labeled, helpfully, “Joe’s Bedroom”. We’re still trying to hash out some final questions, such as the type of finish to use in the bathrooms, but things are moving very quickly.

Paint wasn’t the only front along which advancements were being made. The sun tunnels upstairs were finally installed, and they seemed to bring in a lot of light, at least when we stopped by in the late morning.

Enzo’s carpenter also finished installing shiplap on the walls of the dining room and the stairs. Julie and Lesley are thrilled with the way it looks and the fact that it sustains the coastal theme that’s a central element of the overall design (the kids’ paint selections notwithstanding), so it was well worth the (not insignificant) extra cost: as Enzo has reminded us on a number of occasions, lumber prices are at or near all-time highs.

We finally nailed down the carpet this week, figuratively speaking. As planned, we’re going with Pecan upstairs, but we opted for a greenish color, Balsam, in the master bedroom. In this case, we actually went against Lesley’s advice: she thought it might be significantly more expensive to have two different colors. But the difference turned out to be relatively small, so we chose to splurge a bit and add some color to our bedroom.

In the coming week, we have a few major decisions to work through. First and foremost, we have to figure out what we’re going to do with respect to concrete structures in the front and back yards. We have a fairly clear idea of what we want in terms of the back patio, though it helps that our options are somewhat constrained by the fact that the old patio was completely removed during demolition. In the front, however, we have some tougher calls: first, we need to decide what, if anything, we’re going to keep; second, we need to figure out what we want to do with the parts that are changing.

Our original goal was to save money by reusing as much of the existing concrete as possible, but Enzo has more or less convinced us that simply adding on to the existing driveway to accommodate the new two-car garage would not be a good choice. The color of the new portion would never match the old, and it would be very obvious from the street that different parts of the driveway were poured many decades apart.

We also have to figure out what to do about the front porch and walk. Enzo asked us to come by and assess the situation, but his team hadn’t actually cleared the walk by Saturday, so it was still buried under an inch or two of dirt and mud. If it’s still intact, we’d like to keep it, but we won’t know what’s left until next week.

Gallery: Week 31: A Splash of Color

After a couple weeks’ wait, week 30 of our project brought the installation of the island and kitchen cabinets. Suddenly the kitchen and great room feel dramatically more finished. There’s a long way to go, of course, but now it feels like we have an actual kitchen, as opposed to a warehouse or barn. It will feel even more finished when we finally have a kitchen window instead of a gaping hole covered by curtains, but that’s a different story.

As always, we did run into a few wrinkles along the way. As Enzo was placing the island, which isn’t by any means small, he noticed that if we were to stick with the original plan and center it under the skylight, we would have an awkwardly large space between the end of the island and the stove. Going back to the cabinet maker to swap in a larger island would be prohibitively expensive, so Enzo suggested that we use a larger countertop and have an overhang on two sides, instead of one. This will allow us to center he countertop under the skylight, while the body of the island will be shifted a bit toward the stove, providing a more balanced appearance and, as a bonus, room for additional seating at the island.

There are a few other minor issues—cabinet doors that seem misaligned, for example—but on the whole, we are very happy with how the kitchen is taking shape. Just being in the room, unfinished as it is, feels good, even if it’s painfully clear that we’re going to need to keep a step stool handy to get things out of the cabinets: they are very, very high.

The laundry room cabinets were also installed last week, so we’re finally getting a real look at how much storage we’re going to have there. The pantry cabinet is somewhat smaller than we would have liked, but there’s a decent amount of space in the cabinets above the launch pad. Still, we’re still not sure how much additional pantry space we’ll need in the garage, which means that we’re not certain whether we’ll have room to park my car there, which in turn means that we can’t know whether we should have the electrician mount our EV charging station inside or outside. The only thing that’s clear right now is that we have a lot of thinking to do.

At least the painting plan is nearly complete, with the lone open question being what to do with the master bedroom, which is contingent on the selection of carpet for that space. My personal preference would be to stick with a darker carpet color and lighter walls—something along the lines of what we had before—but we’re going with a beige color (technically, it’s called “Pecan”) upstairs, and our designer thinks we may see a significant cost savings if we use the same carpet throughout the house. If we were to go that route, we’d want to add some color to the walls in our bedroom to provide some energy and contrast. The carpet salesman is taking measurements this week that will give us a sense for what the price difference would be; with that information in hand, we should be able to make a final decision.

As we move toward the home stretch of the project, we’ve been on a bit of a spending spree, purchasing various plumbing and lighting fixtures so that they’re ready to go when Enzo and his team need them. Unfortunately, as we mentioned a few weeks ago, Enzo really doesn’t want anything lying around the house where it will get in the way of his crew. As a result, the foyer at our rental is currently chock-full, storing a tremendous accumulation of lights. It’s fortunate that we don’t get many visitors, because it’s actually a bit embarrassing.

Gallery: Week 30: Kitchen Cabinets

In some ways, week 29 of the remodel felt a bit anticlimactic: the giant pile of kitchen cabinets had been delivered in week 28, and I really expected to see them installed when we visited this weekend, but alas: it wasn’t meant to be.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t forward progress, of course. We now have trim and window sills for most of the windows, one notable exception being the kitchen window that still hasn’t arrived, as well as trim around the new closets, upstairs and down. The biggest development, however, was the installation of the cabinets in the bathrooms upstairs.

The bathroom cabinets, unlike the kitchen cabinets, are all stock pieces. They’re of a similar style to the custom components in the kitchen, so they’ll be reasonably well-matched, but it was much cheaper to go with off-the-shelf products rather than a bespoke solution.

There’s nothing especially interesting about the cabinets in the boys’ bathroom. The only tough decision we faced was whether to include towers on one or both ends of the counter to store linens and towels. Ultimately we decided not to go that route, but I’m open to the possibility that we will eventually wish we had.

Things were a little more interesting in Julia’s bathroom. The cabinet under the sink is mundane: there’s not much you can do with the amount of space we have there. However, we’d set aside a large area for storage next to the shower, and we wrestled with the question of what to do with it for some time.

The space in question is fairly wide and deep—nearly closet-sized—and we wanted to use as much of it as possible. However, we also envisioned using the floor in that area for a litter box, so that Felix wouldn’t have far to go in the evening when he’s in bed with Julia. That ruled out any sort of floor-to-ceiling arrangement, and left us to figure out what kind of storage we could float a few feet off the ground, leaving room for Felix’s facilities.

We weighed a few different possibilities, including building a completely configuration with built-in shelves and a door, but ultimately ended up with going with a stock set of deep cabinets mounted to the wall. This doesn’t make full use of the space: as you can see in the photo, the cabinets are recessed relative to the surrounding wall, and they don’t fill the full width of the space, but we think there will be more than enough room to store towels and Julia’s bathroom essentials. That said, I don’t envy the future realtor who, decades from now, will have to explain away this somewhat idiosyncratic configuration.

Cabinetry aside, we encountered a minor setback this week regarding the sink in the laundry room. Enzo reached out mid-week to let us know that the sink we’d purchased months ago would’t readily fit in the cabinet we’d purchased: it was too wide. He offered to try to cut the cabinet to make it work, but warned that it most likely wouldn’t look good: the sink would sit off-center relative to the cabinet, projecting out into the work area next to the dryer.

That didn’t seem like a good approach, so we instead embarked on a search to find a sink that would fit into the limited horizontal space we have, while still providing a reasonably deep basin. After no small amount of digging around, we finally found something that seems like it will work, and it ended up being significantly less expensive than the unit we had selected previously. It’s undoubtedly not as aesthetically appealing as the original choice—it’s a drop-in model, rather than an under-mount sink, if nothing else—but it will get the job done, and we’re happy to prioritize saving money over aesthetics in a functional space like the laundry room.

Gallery: Week 29: Bathroom Cabinets

Week 28 of our remodel brought continued progress on paint preparation—including on Saturday, when a crew was busy applying primer upstairs—but that was one of the least interesting developments this week.

We were excited to see that the construction crew had begun installing the trim around the windows and doors, so we finally had a chance to see what they are going to look like, after no small amount of discussion via email. The door trim is different from what we’re used to: it’s much broader and flatter than the narrower, rounded trim we had before, so it will take a while for it to feel familiar, but it’s not a bad look. The windows look very different with interior trim, and although it definitely provides a more finished appearance, I think a part of me will miss the old, more open feel.

As if the trim wasn’t excitement enough, our new kitchen cabinets were delivered during the week, and though they aren’t yet installed, just seeing them in the great room was enough to give us a better sense of scale. The island in particular stands out as being a surprisingly large piece: when everything is put together, it’s going to be a prominent element within the room.

The wall cabinets are white, as expected, but the island reads as more gray (and less green) than we anticipated when we picked out the color a few weeks ago. Of course, the room isn’t finished; the island may pick up some green from the tile in the backsplash and contribute a little more color when everything is put together. If not, the room may feel a bit more drab than we hoped, but as our designer keeps reminding us, we can always liven it up with rugs and furniture.

Finally, after what seemed like a very long wait—we ordered it months ago—we were happy to see that the new front door had been delivered and installed during the week. There’s no doorknob or lock, of course, but just the fact that there’s a door that can be closed instead of a gaping hole helps to make it feel more like a house and less like a quarry.

There was a slight complication with the sidelights for the door: due to a series of miscommunications, we ended up with clear glass, whereas I thought we were going to go with something that would offer a little more privacy while still letting light in. It’s too late to change things: we’d have to replace the sidelights entirely (and perhaps the entire door assembly), and considering how long it took to have the door delivered in the first place, that’s not a course we’re interested in pursuing. As we settle in, we’ll think about what we can do in terms of window treatments to make the front of the house feel a bit less exposed.

Enzo feels confident that we’re on track to finish the project well within the eight-to-ten-month timeframe we discussed at the outset, and is optimistic that we’ll come in on the early side of that estimate, within the next couple months. That’s both thrilling and panic-inducing, as it highlights the number of decisions, large and small, that we’ll have to make over the next few weeks.

Gallery: Week 28: Doors and Cabinets

The pace seemed to quicken subtly in week 27 of the remodel. It’s not that any one part of the project was completed; very little is actually done at this point. Rather, many different things seem to be happening at all at once, producing the impression that we’ve started to enter the home stretch.

One tangible sign of the activity is the fact that there are different people working on different parts of the house all at the same time—including on Saturday, when we stopped by to visit. There’s so much happening all at once that Enzo very nicely let us know that we’d need to find somewhere else to store all the stuff we’d been keeping in the master bedroom, as there was no place inside the house where it wouldn’t be in the way.

We had stashed a number of larger items from the attic and the garage in our bedroom under the assumption (clearly mistaken in hindsight) that that area would be largely untouched by construction. Enzo’s team moved it all out to the backyard during the week, so we scrambled to relocate it over the weekend in anticipation of rain that never actually came. Some of it is still in the back of Julie’s car; we’re hoping to find room for it in our storage unit the next time we make a trip over there.

During the proceedings, I managed to step on a nail while ducking under scaffolding on the side of the house; I had to use a claw hammer to pull it out of my shoe when we got home. Fortunately, I was wearing a pair of thick-soled gym shoes, so it didn’t break the skin. If that’s the worst injury that befalls one of us on on site during this project, I’ll be happy.

The biggest areas of visible progress this week seemed to center around preparing for painting: a crew applied an initial layer of stucco to the exterior of the house, and a different team went to work applying primer to the interior walls. Neither effort is complete, as you can see in the photos, but the rooms that got an initial coat, like the great room, feel a lot more finished.

We answered and queued up some interesting design questions during the week, as well. One notable decision we made was the type of window trim to install inside of the house. I’d never given window trim much thought in the past, but on reflection, it occurred to me that I’ve lived with two very different styles at different points in my life. In the house in Elk Grove Village that I grew up in, we had trim around the windows but no window sills; and in the house in San Jose, we had window sills but no trim. For the new windows, we opted to do both—at extra cost, of course—as we didn’t think we would be happy without sills, and the designer we’ve been working with thought that trim would give the windows a more finished look.

In the coming week, we have to figure out what we want to do in terms of closet organization systems. We’re deciding among a number of different options, including a simple shelf-and-pole setup, which is what I grew up with; fixed, painted shelves built by Enzo and his team; or an off-the-shelf system that would give us a little more flexibility by adding adjustable shelves. According to Enzo, the price of lumber is very high right now, so the materials cost for him to build shelves makes that option more or less a wash, price-wise, compared to buying a store-bought system, so we’ll most likely end up doing different things in different closets based on what we think our needs will be.

Gallery: Week 27: Primer and Stucco