11 Years Later

We're selling the house and moving back to California. I spent way too much time this morning when I should have used the precious time between house showing to get some work done making comparison pictures between the pictures from our house listing and the pictures from when we bought the house in 2012.

The pictures show a combination of ways we have improved the house over time (we put a lot of time and money into it) and having a better photographer/better staging than the previous owners.

I'll do a separate post for the garden, because I might want to put together changes over time, rather than 11 years ago to today.

The front mostly shows changes to the yard

Ryan built us a porch swing

You can really appreciate the refinished floors in the entryway

The kitchen we made genuine improvements to. It really is a nice kitchen

The dining room is a place where we're mostly benefitting from a better photographer. Our dining room table isn't better than theirs (actually, theirs was probably much higher quality, ours is Ikea), but ours looks quite a bit better.

Same with the living room. It just looked so dark in their photos

In our room we got rid of the awful, thatch-like wallpaper and got new carpet. Just those things improved things a lot

Painting the walls white in the office is a recent improvement, suggested by our realtor. So much better than that faux wood paneling.

The back deck looks about the same (recently repainted). Our photographer got a better angle, and the sun was shining that day

The kids rooms are more colorful and less cluttered. And we removed the old carpet and refinished the floors in both rooms.

Didn't really change this bathroom at all, so once again we see the difference in photographer quality. Everything just looks so much brighter in our photos

No real changes to the attic. Just different furniture with maybe some better staging.

Picture of the basement maybe aren't even fair. It was an unfinished basement, now it's a finished basement. But it does look nice now

Almost there...

There have been some delays, edging on ridiculous. But instead of ranting about those, how about I just post some pictures.

Promised Pictures

I think I've been delaying posting pictures in hopes that I would be able to post finished pictures if I just waited a couple of days. No such luck. We are still missing cupboard doors and backsplash, along with a handful of other things.

Counters

No doors, but some of our stuff moved in. And appliances!

Our new faucet and sink

From the other direction

So far we have made chicken picatta, pasta, coffee cake, strawberry jam, chocolate cake, and beef stroganoff in the new kitchen. The first two of those were done without a sink or dishwasher. The stove, microwave and refrigerator were installed earlier in the week, but the sink and dishwasher were not installed until Saturday. When the foreman and worker left on Saturday afternoon I immediately filled the dishwasher and started to run it. Then I went down into the basement to get a load a laundry when I heard the sound of rushing water. Water was flowing from the dishwasher into the cupboard under the sink and then down into the basement. There was water all over the cupboard and the kitchen floor. I mopped it all up with bath towels then we called the foreman back. He found that a valve had broken on the dishwasher. He fixed it up for us and it works just fine now.

Finishing

The floors are done. The counters were installed today and are wonderful. Just what we wanted. Dark, to contrast against the white cabinets, but with some texture.

I keep walking into the kitchen and just turn circles looking at it. It took a lot of money and time, but it will be worth it. So much counter space. So bright and clean and fresh.

Pictures tomorrow. We took some but I haven't uploaded them to the computer yet. Tomorrow will bring appliances, backsplash, and a large number of smaller to dos.

Another setback

So, take a look at this picture of the cupboards again:

And my description from my blog post back in January of our plan for the kitchen: "We're trying to keep an older style appropriate to our 1920s-era house, so will have white painted cabinets, dark soapstone counters, and wood flooring."

Maybe you'll note that something is wrong here. We were so thrilled with having cupboards last night, we convinced ourselves that they had been delivered unfinished and would be painted later. No. The cupboards are finished. They look nice, but really aren't what we want. Our contractor came in person to talk to us about them. He's going to order new doors and they are going to sand and paint the cupboards themselves. We will be able to move back into the kitchen while we wait for the doors to arrive.

It's going to cost him, but Adem will make it right. And that's a sign of a good contractor. Not that nothing goes wrong, cause sometimes things just do, but that you can have every confidence that things will be made right if and when they do go wrong.

Cupboards!

Just a few pictures, as an antidote to my ranty post about the floor guys. The crew is awesome. They did all this in a single day.

Dishonest or Stupid?

Our kitchen was slowed down unnecessarily by the floor guys. We can't decide if they are dishonest or are idiots, but in any case, we would be in our kitchen now if not for them.

Okay, here's the story. Our crew pulled up the tile floor and several layers of linoleum and found that the floorboards in most of the kitchen were intact. We were pleased we would get to keep the original flooring. The flooring in the addition had to be pulled up, since the whole addition had to be re-structured, but the rest of the kitchen would have the original wood and we'd get something that matched it as well as possible for the replacement wood in the addition.

So, our contractor had his floor guy come look at it and the floor guy informed us that the matching wood was more expensive and would have to be ordered. Both the extra expense and the extra time seemed worth it in order to keep the original wood, so we said yes. And we waited. The work on the kitchen stopped. 

And then we were told about the stain on the floor. It's not that we didn't see the stain before, but we didn't realize it might be a problem. The floor guy came and sanded to see if he could get it up, but informed us that he couldn't. Would have been nice to know before waiting for the matching flooring to arrive.

The Stain- After sanding

The original floor couldn't be used after all. Then we had a new decision to make. Did we use the more expensive flooring if we couldn't keep the original? We decided that it was still better to use flooring that would match the rest of the house. Plus, our wait was over, so it was just the extra expense, not the extra time.

The wood arrived and Ryan looked at it, and looked at it again. I was too sick to care about wood, so he fussed over it alone. He had a whole evening to think about it and research and he decided it simply wasn't the matching wood we were promised. The wood in our house is heartwood pine, which is, admittedly, expensive and hard to get since it is only acquired through reclaiming old floors. They had gotten red pine, which is also more expensive than the alternative, red oak, but not nearly so precious as heartwood pine. And it wasn't a perfect match. And we were willing to pay extra for the same wood, not a wood that would be slightly closer to the original than oak.

When challenged, the floor guys admitted that they knew it wasn't the same wood, but that heartwood pine was even more expensive, so they didn't think we would want it, and they would have had to purchase it in a larger unit than was needed for our floor. We may not have chosen heartwood pine if we knew the full cost, but we should not have been lead to believe that we were purchasing heartwood pine.

So we made them put in red oak. And it will look lovely. 

The red oak floor

It's not a perfect match, but it looks good. It's a skinnier cut of floorboard than the red pine boards they purchased, which will fit the style of the house better. We're not quite sure how the thicker boards ever would have worked with the original flooring. The fact that the stain "couldn't be removed" seems a bit suspicious, given the logistical challenges of making the new and old floor boards fit together. Or maybe they hadn't thought that far ahead. Other interactions with them make the latter seem possible. 

One day they spent pretty much the whole day, as far as we can tell, hanging out in their van in our driveway waiting for Ryan to come home to give his opinion on the wood. Didn't bother to try calling to see if he could come by on his lunch break or come home a bit early. Just waited. They chose not to work on Friday, when they would have been out of our hair and could have gotten everything completed in plenty of time, but came on Saturday instead. And when they needed our opinion on the color of finish and we weren't there, they painted several squares on the floor and left instead of calling us first to see when we would be back (we were in the car on the way home). They had only worked for a portion of the day, starting at 10:30 and ending by 3.

Our color choices

Now, instead of staining the whole floor, they will have to do the stain around the cupboards. And they will probably disrupt our main crew's schedule in the process. The main crew is working incredibly hard and doing a great job. They did an 11 hour day today. I wish I had a completed kitchen so that I could bake them cookies.