Work continued at a frenetic pace in week 33 of our remodel. By the end of the week, the house had a paved driveway and garage; finished floors throughout much of the ground level; light fixtures, albeit without a connection to power; and, somewhat to our surprise, actual locking doors.

The doors caught us off guard because, although we sent over the locks we intend to use a few weeks ago, Enzo didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to install them, despite his previously expressed interest in making the site secure. The gaping hole where our kitchen window is supposed to be may have played a role in the slow pace of progress on this front. Additionally, we knew from a mid-week visit that the front door wasn’t actually installed: the crew had removed it
so that the painters could paint it. It’s hard to lock a door that isn’t there.

With all that in mind, we were shocked to find that the house was locked up tight when we swung by for our customary visit on Saturday. The roofers were there, continuing their work from much earlier in the project, but they didn’t have access to the interior, nor could they tell us how to get in. The garage door was secured with an obviously temporary deadbolt, and the front of the house was closed up with an even more obviously temporary door. We were a bit pressed for time, so we couldn’t do much more than peek in through the windows before leaving, but there was no obvious way in. Luckily, Enzo responded that evening when we texted him asking for instructions, and we were able to make a successful return visit the next day.

The driveway and patio turned out more or less exactly as we’d expected and hoped. Whether or not we’ll have room for me to park and charge my car inside the garage—a question we still haven’t resolved fully—just being able fit both cars side-by-side in the driveway is a tremendous upgrade over the old configuration, which all too often required one of us to move our vehicle (often in our pajamas) so that the other could leave for work or school.

The patio is definitely going to be a bit tight. We’ll have to do what we can to optimize for the available space and see how things work out. If it’s simply not workable, we can always fix it by expanding the surface, but we’d like to avoid an outcome that could end up costing us thousands of dollars.

I met with the electrician, Jamie, on Tuesday to walk through our plans and nail down a few decisions, such as the number and placement of outlets on the kitchen island. We decided to hold off on installing the interior surface-mounted fixtures for the time being so that they wouldn’t end up covered with dust as other workers installed the floors, but by the end of the week, the recessed lighting was in place throughout the house, as were many of the wall plates for switches and outlets. Some of them ended up a bit askew, but Enzo assures us that he’ll take a look at them.

The installation of the laminate flooring also progressed surprisingly quickly. I stopped by in the middle of the week to drop off some hardware and fixtures we had purchased, and they were just getting started in the living room. By the time we visited on Sunday, the living room, front hallway. and laundry room were complete, and only a small portion was still unfinished in the great room. The office wasn’t done yet, but Enzo tells us that things will be far enough along that we can actually start bringing over appliances this week.

As the floor was being installed, work also began on adding false treads, or end caps, to the stairs. The idea is to provide the appearance of full hardwood construction under the carpeted runner without the associated expense.

In the meantime, true to form, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of reading about how to to care for laminate floors. There are a surprising numbers of dos and don’ts, and, as always, people on the Internet have very strong opinions about the One True Way to keep them looking clean and new. I’m sure it will work out fine, but a part of me remains worried that I’m going to dump a full pot of hot spaghetti on them in the first week, turning them into a stained, warped mess.

The week’s developments weren’t without wrinkles. As I mentioned, a number of the electrical wall plates aren’t level, either with the floor or with other nearby plates. That seems relatively easy to fix; a bigger mystery is the appearance of a mysterious bulge in one area where our master bathroom wall meets the ceiling. We have no idea whether this is a purely cosmetic concern or indicative of a more significant structural problem, but we’re counting on Enzo to let us know.

Perhaps most disappointing was the disappearance of a wall-mounted bookcase from Joe’s room that we’d saved from his old bedroom downstairs before demolition started. We kept it in storage over the winter, and took it back to the house a couple weeks ago when Enzo gave us the OK to start bringing things back. Our best guess is that someone mistook it for trash and either tossed it in the dumpster or took it home, but even assuming that there was no ill intent, it’s still a bit disappointing.

Gallery: Week 33: Floors

In week 32 of the remodel, Enzo and his team continued to make rapid progress on the house. The interior painting is very nearly done, including our bright, cheery, and very yellow laundry room, and the office, which we switched to blue at the last minute. The upstairs bathrooms haven’t been painted yet—we think they want to wrap up the tile there first—and we have a few questions about some trouble spots in the master bathroom, but otherwise the painters seem to be wrapping up inside.

Likewise, the countertops seem to be finished and installed just about everywhere. They’re largely covered up, presumably for protection, but you can see them peeking through here and there,

There’s a separate set of people dedicated to working on tile, and they’ve been chugging along, as well. Julia’s shower is mostly finished, other than the alcove for shampoo and soap, and they’re off to a good start in the boys’ bathtub. They haven’t started on the bathroom floors yet, but we’re looking forward to those being finished soon.

As smoothly as things are going, we did run into a bit of a hiccup regarding the tile color for Julia’s bathroom. Initially, we had picked out a green that we thought would play off the green color on her bedroom walls, but that shipment was unexpectedly delayed for reasons that are unclear; for all we know, we can attribute the holdup to recent problems in the Suez Canal. As a fallback, we decided to go with white tiles, but we encountered shipping delays for those, also. Finally, we settled on some tile we had initially conceived as a backup for the boys’ bathroom. Although they weren’t the strong green color that we had originally aimed for, we thought that they might read as a greenish blue in context. This may have been a bit optimistic: the bathroom isn’t finished yet, but to my untrained eye, they look pretty darn blue. They do look very nice, however.

Toward the end of the week, the crew began setting up to pour concrete for the driveway and patio. Happily, we were able to preserve the existing front porch and sidewalk, which will save us a bit of money, but the driveway and patio by themselves are fairly expensive items.

For the driveway, we’re keeping the current, narrow opening to the street, which saves the tree in our parkway that would otherwise be in the way. About twelve feet after the sidewalk, the driveway will gradually widen to line up with the full width of two-car garage, leaving enough room for us to park our cars side-by-side with sufficient clearance for either one of them to back out without having to move the other.

In the back yard, the new patio will have the same basic shape as the old one, but it will be much shallower, because the we’ve moved the back of the house much further out than it was before. The new patio’s size is a compromise aimed at preserving as much of the yard as we could, and it’s distinctly possible that it will feel a bit tight once we set up our table, chairs, and assorted plants. Happily, however, we were able to put in a request for brick trim around the border of the patio, which will make it look a little more finished and also provide a subtle callback to the look of the old patio.

By Saturday, the team had cleared out the areas to be paved and set up wooden braces and rebar to shape and support the concrete. The plan was to pour the concrete early the next week so it would be safe to walk on by the end of the week, if not to haul in heavy items on dollies and hand trucks: Enzo wants to make sure we given it sufficient time to harden before we do anything that might scratch it.

As you’ll see in the photos, one sticking point that we haven’t yet overcome is the window over the kitchen sink. Or, more accurately, the lack of a window over the kitchen sink. The salesman originally ordered the wrong size window for the space; he subsequently put in a new order for a window with the correct dimensions, but that order has since been delayed. In the meantime, our old living room curtains remain nailed up over the opening to keep the elements at bay—it’s fortunate that we have very predictable weather here—and various other aspects of the project remain on hold as a consequence of the missing glass, including: completion of the stucco; exterior painting; sections of the kitchen backsplash; interior paint in the kitchen; and the installation of exterior electrical fixtures. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s a clear resolution in sight, which is a source of frustration for us and for Enzo.

I wish I could say that this would be resolved by the end of next week, but I’m actually writing this at the end of next week, and at the risk of spoiling next week’s post, I can confidently say that it is not, in fact, resolved.

Gallery: Week 32: Countertops and Tile

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

Incremental progress was the name of the game in week 26 of the remodel. Work continued on the drywall, with the downstairs areas that hadn’t been tackled last week mostly taken care of, and the application of drywall tape and paste to fill in and smooth out the seams. There are still a few areas that need work—mostly sections of old drywall that were damaged or removed during construction—but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for this phase of the project.

One thing we noticed when we visited is that there’s a fair amount of noise transmission between Julia’s room upstairs and our bathroom downstairs. In fairness, the bathroom ceiling was wide open, as that’s one of the sections that hasn’t been patched up yet, but it’s something we’ll want to keep an eye on: providing Julia with a quiet retreat where she can focus is one of the main goals of the project. Hopefully finishing up the drywall and installing carpet upstairs will help quiet things down.

Gallery: Week 26: More Drywall

As shown in the bonus photos and bonus-video we posted earlier this week, week 25 of the project brought a significant change: the installation of drywall throughout the second floor and in major sections of the first floor. The drywall radically changes the feel of the house, as individual rooms are now closed off from one another, whereas before you could see from one end of the house to the other by looking through the wall joists.

The installation of the drywall also served to highlight the look of the recessed lighting in all of the new construction. I like the clean, modern feeling the new lights provide, but Julie isn’t a fan. We’ll continue to have lamps in some of the public spaces to add visual interest and atmosphere, but it will be nice to be able to turn the built-in lights up when the situation calls for a bright, evenly lit space.

While the drywall work was underway, we spent some time working with our designer, Lesley, to pick out paint colors for the public areas of the house. For the living room, stairwell, hallway, and great room, we’re going with a relatively neutral color called—and I am not making this up—Mawmaw’s Pearls. By choosing a single color for these areas, we’re hoping to provide a sense of continuity as you move throughout the house, and to let the brighter accent colors we’ve selected stand out.

For the kitchen cabinets, we’ve chosen two different colors. The upper and lower cabinets along the wall will be Swiss Coffee, and the island will be Sea Pine, which will complement the tile we’ve selected for the backsplash. We contemplated doing all the lower cabinets in Sea Pine, but ultimately thought that might be too much.

The laundry room will be yellow, calling back to our old living room color, with gray cabinets, and the upstairs bathrooms will reuse the Mawmaw’s Pearls color from the hallway, with brightly colored tile in the tub and shower areas to liven things up.

The kids are choosing the colors for their own rooms. Julia is going with a green named Goddess of Dawn, and William has asked for a “Star Wars room”, so he’ll be getting a shade of blue that will go well with Star-Wars-themed decor. Joe hasn’t decided what he wants to do yet: one possibility is for us try to recreate the bright colors he had in his old room, but we’d like to give him the opportunity to shake things up or shift them around if he’d like.

We also still have to figure out what we’re going to do in the master bedroom. Now that our old green carpet is gone, Julie is agitating to move in a different direction, but we need to sit down to hash that out. That should be an interesting conversation.

Gallery: Week 25: Drywall

In addition to the photos in our last update, the professional photographer hired by our architect also shot video of the interior of the house. The footage is pretty rough in the form in which it’s presented here: it’s a set of raw takes that I imagine Lakshmi will stitch together into a coherent whole for her web site. But it’s a very different perspective on the project, and we thought it might provide a better sense for the spatial relationships among the rooms than the discrete photographs we’ve been taking.

Gallery: Week 25 Bonus #2: Drone Video