More progress

They have been busy all week in our kitchen. They finished up the drywall and have been painting the last couple days. The plumbing and electrical have been roughed in and they laid the floor tile in the powder room. The replacement wood for the floor will hopefully be in sometime next week.

Light blue paint in the kitchen, as we had before. (The door is taped, not permanently blue).

 

Another view of the kitchen, with pile of supplies

The bathroom floor and peach walls.

Drywall and more doors

After some exciting progress early in the week, the crew mysteriously disappeared for several days. We learned that the foreman had gotten sick. But they were back again yesterday and were hanging drywall.

We also have our new door into the dining room, along with the outline of the old door.

A door! A floor! A wall!

Garden happenings

Spring may someday come to my garden. We are all looking forward to the spring. It has been a rough winter. Celebrating a white birthday that was not exactly on my wish list today.

I have some seeds started under a grow light in the attic bathroom. 

I started the first ones about two and a half weeks ago, but have added more as I've found or bought containers for them. My most successful crop has been clover. I was too cheap and had some bad experiences with commercial soil products, so used garden soil instead of a seed starting mix. Thus, I had weed seeds mixed in. But my plants are doing pretty well too. The tomatoes have done the best. I planted sungold and purple Cherokee and they already have true leaves on them. The alpine strawberries took a while to germinate, but seem to be growing well too. The paprika peppers and basil I have had less luck with. I've planted more in hopes that a second planting will successfully germinate. 

Outside, I've planted some spring bulbs that may not flower this year, but will be nice next year, unless the squirrels dig up and eat them all. I saw some tell-tale holes in the ground yesterday. I also dug up the daylilies and gave the bulbs to a neighbor. I didn't care for the plants last year, and they were in the way of where I wanted to put a border on my garden bed. 

In lieu of getting each other gifts, my husband and I buy birthday presents for ourselves. As I did last year, I'm buying plants. So I have ordered 2 honeyberry plants, 2 pawpaw trees, a pesto perpetuo basil, a peach tree, a nectarine tree, and two bush cherries. I may need to order and/or purchase locally a handful of other plants to replace ones that perished in the ridiculous winter we are still in the midst of, and plan to buy some annuals that I'm not growing from seed. But I have ordered most of the big expensive things now.

Kitchen remodel - week 2

The kitchen remodel was delayed on Friday of last week and Monday of this week by lack of plumber (until they pulled up the floor they didn't know they needed one this early until they discovered the radiator pipes were in the way), but they seemed to be trying to make up time by working long days and on Saturday.

The back wall is now framed, but not yet finished and the former back door has been walled over. Here are

a couple pictures of the wall and former door from the back deck:

You can see where the new door is framed. I assume it will be installed next week.

They replaced all of the joists in the addition with correctly sized joists. And now I believe they are putting the subfloor in. With insulation this time (something that was notably lacking in that part of the kitchen previously.)

Hopefully the pictures will show more progress this week, rather than more construction zone. As long as the snow doesn't slow things down too much.

Kitchen Remodel- Day 1

Our kitchen remodel started today. First some pictures.

Last night our kitchen looked like this:

This evening it looked like this: 

This is less complete than expected. They were hoping to put in the new back door today, instead of patching it with a large sheet of plywood, but found that the addition was poorly constructed such that the wall would be structurally unsound if they put in a door as-is. Among other problems, the joists are too small and the plumbing for the radiator is in the way of fixing it, so they need to bring a plumber in to deal with that before they can finish that wall.  

Correcting the problems will probably extend the project an extra week and will increase the cost above the original estimate. We aren't particularly surprised. We weren't sure what the nature of the problems would be, but knew this project would probably run into unexpected difficulties that would increase the cost and/or time. 

On a positive note, the wood floor that was under the tile is salvageable (where it exists -no wood floor in the addition), so it will match the floor in the rest of the house.