Wall Hangings

The mirror is up in the bathroom! By putting the mirror right under the lights, it reflects light throughout the room and makes it even brighter. I'm glad that I went with the darker storage cabinet. It would have been too bright with the white ones.

The only unfortunate thing we discovered is that the sink isn't quite lined up with the light fixture, which wasn't apparent until we put the mirror in the middle. We lined the mirror up with the lights since it's closer to the mirror, but it's obvious they're not all lined up when you look at it. It's not much, but it's not perfect...guh!

Also up on the wall is some artwork to fill in the breakfast bench wall.

I painted these a few years ago in my art class (which I plan to start up next month, so take note, ladies!). They were painted to be hung in a square, not all lined up in a row. But in this space it looks better this way.

The colors work well, don't they?

Here's also a close-up of the paintings. They're bamboo shoots and leaves that are interconnected if put together in the right order in a square.

Also up on a wall is the cork/white board. It fit in perfectly in the blank wall space between the door frame leading to the dining room and the shallow cabinets on the inside wall of the kitchen.
It'll be the grocery list board, honey-do list board, coupon board, etc. board....

Ideally it would be located next to the back door, but there's no wall space that wide enough to house it. Another option was to put it on the wall above the bench where the paintings are, but the hooks would have hit a head sitting on the bench.

So, out went the board to the other wall and in came the paintings, which look better here anyway!

Furniture!

Here are some views of the furniture we moved in to the living and dining room. All this furniture belonged to my grandparents and I had the good fortune of needing a dining set just at the time when they were needing to purge.

I think the wood of the floors and the colors of the walls ended up going really nicely with the dining room set!

The room looks a little bare without curtains, which are coming next! Unfortunately, the window panes and frames are dirty and moisture has seeped in between the panes, so they're unsightly, especially compared to the newly finished everything else in the room.

Eventually, the windows will get replaced, but in the mean time some nice drapery will cover up the worst of it and finish off the room. As it is now, the room is a bit monochromatic.

Tonight's project was building this new cabinet for the bathroom! I'd envisioned a blue-walled room with white sink, tub, mirror and cabinets, but decided that it would be too bright. So, I got this tall espresso cabinet for the corner and will get the matching half height one to go next to the sink. This was a Target special! You'd never know it by how nice-looking it is. The store didn't have the matching low cabinet, so I'll have to find that on line.

It looks dark in this picture, but it's a very nice brown in person. The brown and blue combination is one of my favorites...and now it's in my bathroom!

This next photo is my lovely pedestal sink (who is missing a drain plug, thanks to the chaos of the remodel) next to the mirror that will hang above it. This mirror was another inheritance from my grandparents and I love it. It didn't have an obvious home in the living/dining room (it resided above the fire place in my last house, which was perfect), so I'd been humming and hawing over where it could go.

Then Pete suggested to put it in the bathroom and it works! The otherwise very linear bathroom will now get a little softness with the round mirror. The gold frame also picks up the brown in the shower tile! This guy will go up in the next couple of days. We've found hammers, so all we need is a nail!

Theaters and Breakfast Benches

This weekend was spent getting some of the fun details done.

The little breakfast bench needed a cushion, so I went out to get some fabric and some foam and...ta dah!! We've got ourselves a custom seat cushion! The green is a little brighter than I'd originally envisioned and than the green of the kitchen walls, but it actually works nicely with the whole color scheme. Thanks to the ingenuity of HGTV and my friend, Tina, pictured here, we completed this project in a half hour. Seriously. We used some of the extra shelving boards from the cupboards and a newly acquired staple gun for a super easy, professional-looking product!

At the same time, the basement was getting set up as the theater. See here how the 115" screen looks on the wall. It's hard to get the scale in this dark image, but you can barely see the furnace door the the left of the screen image.

Since the projection can be enlarged to however big it needs to be, we nixed the roll down screen and put it right on wall! To continue with the movie theater theme, we're putting up red velvet curtains. The first one went up to cover up the little window. Also with Tina's help, this little curtain now blocks the day light from getting in and washing out the image.

The speakers for the surround sound also went up, completing the full theater effect. We currently only have two seats downstairs, so it's a bit limited in terms of seating for screenings. But then again we do have that nice, new cushy carpet!

The purple room's old wood boarded walls got a white overcoat and it looks fantastic! The iron was excavated from the piles of boxes residing in the room above the garage so I got to use my ironing board for the first time last week. The only unfortunate part was that the board cover is ripped, stained and so smelly that I was afraid my blouse would end up smelling too musty to wear! It really needs a new board cover; that'll be next weekend's sewing project.

One of the last projects was to build a platform in the attic above where the bathroom can lights rose up in to the attic floor. As they were, most of the attic was unusable as a storage space. It was also dangerous to walk around up there so for safety reasons, we put up a false floor. Here's a couple of shots of the attic, including a look down the stairs in to one of the two locations where the old linoleum remains.

We're going to have a long road ahead of us to get to where we consider the all the initial stuff done. But we're well on our way!

Final Inspection -- PASSED!!

I can't believe I forgot to mention the most critical milestone achievement of last week: passing the final city inspection! Pete gives his thumbs up this chronologically out-of-date photo. He knew good things were coming!

The very nice inspector came last Friday morning and just checked what had been done in the kitchen. He stuck a gadget in each of the outlets (maybe to check the current?), looked above the microwave to make sure there was a vent for the gas range, looked at the labels on the electrical panel outside, and then asked about the lights.

Now, the kitchen lighting was something we were a bit worried about. CA Title 24 requires the kitchen lighting to be 50% low voltage, 50% regular and we were running about 25/75. We (the GC, electrician and I) knew this and discussed all options to meet this criteria. Option one was to use low voltage recessed lights, which, other than not being wired that way, I don't remember why we didn't go this route to begin with. The other option was to use low voltage pendant to add a few watts in our favor and hope the inspector gave use credit for trying. And that's the way it ended up.

Me and my happy-to-share-everything mouth volunteered the information about having redone the bathroom also, to which the inspector raised a quizzical eyebrow and asked what had been done and why a bathroom remodel wasn't part of the permit. I truthfully explained that at the time of the permit, our lighting plan hadn't been finalized and everything else being done in the bathroom was considered cosmetic, so was told I didn't need a permit. My poor GC started sweating a little when the inspector said, "Oh, you redid the lights?" But the very nice inspector said that he wouldn't go in to the bathroom at all so that he wouldn't see anything.

Then he signed on the "FINAL" line on the on-site permit form and went on his merry way!

Now that that's done, I want everyone to be out of my house. The painters are coming back to finish up touch-ups and the carpenter is supposedly going to haul away the unsightly debris still sitting in the back yard. But otherwise we are D-U-N done!!

Yesterday I spent all afternoon and evening moving kitchen boxes out of the garage and putting things away in the cupboards. I rediscovered a lot of gems that have been boxed away for the last 2.5 years! And last night we cooked a real dinner and used real bowls and silverware - hurray! - but are still lacking any seating other than the bed. One step at a time.

I did have lots of fun with cordless drill yesterday. The cabinet holes for the shelf pegs aren't quite big enough to get the peg in without the possibility of taking out a huge chunk of the particle board if and when I ever wanted to take it out. So, I took matters - and a power tool - in to my own hands and opened those puppies up. Now I really want a cordless drill of my own. And a nail gun. And a table saw. And lots of tools!!

We didn't get a chance to move in any more furniture, but that's probably just as well. With a couple more teams coming through today (the painters in particular), better to keep those items out of harm's way.

I looked back on my previous posts and realized I didn't have one of the refinished tub! So here it is. Beautiful, isn't it?? Looks brand new!

Carpet!

The latest exciting transformation - and what should be the last big thing - was the arrival of the new carpet! A team of 5 people came on Friday and ripped out the yucky, old and now dirty, dirty basement and stair carpet and replaced it with the nice, new cushy and clean one. Here's the before and after of the stairs.

The basement looks completely transformed, not only because of the new carpet but because all the construction junk is out and because the room is painted. The only thing lacking are the baseboards, which we've decided to try to tackle ourselves.

The other room we carpeted is the third bedroom/closet, which I now affectionately call "the purple room." My ironing board also went in to the room, so all that's left is to paint the wood paneling to match the rest of the purple. Unfortunately we didn't finish painting those panels before the carpet came in, so this picture shows the interim picture. With the carpet being in, though, we were able to move in one of the dressers and other things that had been confined to the master bedroom...and suddenly the bedroom feels so much bigger!

Pendant Lights

Just when I was thinking this kitchen couldn't get any better, the pendant light went in. We built the island up and placed it under the pendants and...well...I think the picture speaks for itself! They seem to complete the room somehow. I know this is no big deal to most people, especially the contractors who do this all the time, but I am thoroughly impressed with how things have turned out.


Installation of the rest of the upper cabinet molding and handles will be on the agenda for today.

The dryer plug got replaced with one compatible with the new outlet installed in the wall, so we did two glorious loads of laundry yesterday! The dryer, come to find out, was purchased in 1990 so is pretty old, but seems to work just fine. The washer, though, is a pretty nifty little piece of machinery. It's a front-loader and is really quiet. Bonus! One of my concerns was that it would be noisy to have the W/D in the same room as the kitchen, but even running both at the same time was fine.

The electrician finished all his work yesterday, which included installing the chandelier in the dining room. Hard-wiring in a light fixture meant I had to be really, really sure about the furniture layout, so I measured all the furniture and taped out where they will be sitting on the floor. I hope it works!!

But of course amidst the glamor that is the emerging kitchen, there's still chaos reigning elsewhere...like this door that is hanging out on the stair landing, waiting to be reclaimed and put somewhere...




...or the pile of rubble sitting outside. The pile is also a trash dump where boxes have been tossed and scraps of whatever else could be throw away is thrown away here. It's $25/cubit yard to take it to the Sunnyvale dump, so whatever can fit in the trash can or recycled is being moved! Neighbors (I think) have been coming by to sort through the pile also, taking planks of old wood and whatever else they feel like taking. If it's being reused and will cost me less to haul, I'm happy!

The one thing we did decide to do ourselves was to paint the ceiling of the basement. We picked a darker color than the walls to give it a movie theater feel (side note: neither of us are experts at this and we totally made up the darker-ceiling-to-make-it-a-movie-theater-feel thing). So here's what it looks like. It's a bit hard to tell in the photo because of the flash, but take my word for it that it's much better than the white, flaky, stained paint that was there before.




This is the basement utility room where the fridge that was upstairs now resides and has sustained us since we moved in. It's been the make-shift kitchen for two weeks now and it's getting kind of old. Because the only seating in the house is the bed, we've been eating breakfast down here standing up. A few times lunch or dinner has been eaten here too.

We did manage to make pasta for dinner last night on the nice new stove, but not having unearthed the bowls or non-plastic utensils yet, we ate on the bed using plastic bowls and forks. Not for much longer!!

Washer and Dryer and Fridge, Oh my!

Hurrah!! All the appliances are IN!! The range is hooked up to the gas line and burns beautiful, blue flames, the dish washer is in, the fridge is plugged and on...and most excitingly, the washer and dryer are in!!

BUT!! As it would figure, the plug for the 220v outlet in the wall is not the same as the one on the dryer...sooooo we have to wait yet another day to do laundry. What was supposed to be finished on Saturday is now Tuesday and believe me, it couldn't come soon enough!

As you can see from the photos, though, the cabinet doors are all in and the toe-kicks went in yesterday. All that's left is the crown along the top of the cabinets and the handles.
The washer and dryer were moved to what used to be the coat closet. There was a concern that the closet isn't deep enough to house the washer and dryer, but the back door opens to more than 90 degrees and, as you can see in this photo, they fit in just fine. One trick that the plumbers came up with was to vent the dryer straight out the back, allowing a shallower vent line, whereby enabling the unit to be pushed in further toward the wall. How clever of them!

The electrican is coming today to finish up all his stuff, including a couple additions we tacked on in the end. He's putting in the pendant lights above where the kitchen island will go and adding a line to install the dining room chandelier. After today all the major work is done and it'll be bits here and there to put the cherry on top of this project.

Barring any hold-ups today, the final inspection can be scheduled for tomorrow. The carpet guy will come after that. But as long as I have a working dryer tonight, I'll be a happy camper!

Ooooh Granite!

The granite guys made our day by coming in today! They rolled up just before 9 this morning and - in all seriousness - it took them 20 minutes to install all the base granite.

We stood out of the way while two guys hefted in a total of 4 pieces that must have been heavy. One piece is this little guy to the left. This are the shallow cabinets to the left of the fridge.

There was enough granite to go with the 6" back splash, so of course we went with that!! It was all done by the time we went back at lunch to check progress.

Here's the sink area. This long counter was brought in two pieces with the seam along the vertical center-line of the sink. When we left in the morning they were just sealing the seam and when we got back at lunch we were amazed at how well the seam came out! They did a really nice job and it makes the kitchen look so finished.

The carpenter got most all the kitchen flooring in today and is going to finish the installation of the cabinet doors tomorrow!

Also tomorrow the plumber is coming to connect the sink to the garbage disposal to the dish washer to the drain line! And he's putting in the faucet - my gorgeous Kohler goose-neck faucet! - and plugging in the washer and dryer. So by the end of the day tomorrow we will have a functional kitchen and washer and dryer!!!! I don't know if I've ever been so excited to do laundry...it's been, um, two weeks since we did laundry and it's about time!

Floors, Glorious Floors!!

Wow oh wow, do these floors look GORGEOUS!! The photo on the left is the living/dining room. You can see the painted walls and newly installed baseboards. The doorway leads to the kitchen.

The photo on the right is the hallway. I took this at night so it's a little dark, but you can see how beautiful the last coat has shined her up! The floor genius came by tonight to check the status and forbade us from walking on it until the morning. Unfortunately, the furnace is still not working, so it's not helping the floor polish dry.

Here's how the kitchen is going. The laminate flooring is almost done and fits in really well with the cabinets and paint color! The recessed lights were finished the other day, along with the under counter lights...goooorgous!!


Last up: granite guys might, might come tomorrow!! That leaves the cabinet doors! The appliances will be moved in to place and hooked up...and THAT'S IT!!!

The initial schedule had us getting final inspections done today, but we're about one week behind. If the granite guys finish tomorrow, the plumber comes to connect the sink with the garbage disposal with the plumbing. Let's cross our fingers for GRANITE tomorrow!!

The last week! I HOPE!!

It's the last week of construction, or at least it should be. The tile in the bathroom is DONE!!

This photo shows the floor tile. It's a little dusty, but you get the idea. Isn't it beautiful?

The photo shows the tube/shower with the shelves complete and the shower rod in. The shower fixture installation and electrical need to be finished, but that's all scheduled to be completed on Monday, which means we will have a working shower then!!

The kitchen cabinets are also done! The doors will go on later to minimize potential damage during the remaining traffic. The granite guys are coming Monday and the flooring will start Tuesday. Also happening Monday is the sanding and first coat application of the hardwood floors in the living/dining room, front bedroom and hallway.














The next picture is the sink side of the kitchen. The little breakfast nook is to the left just outside the picture. The granite templates are in, ready for the granite guys to come tomorrow.

The next picture shows where the fridge will go and the adjacent pantry (large floor-to-ceiling one) and other cabinets. The door in view leads to the living/dining room, which received its fresh coat of paint and look faaaabulous!!

On yet another run to Home Depot today, we were attacked by a GIANT tumbleweed!! I have seriously not seen one this big ever. It must have been 2m in diameter and came rolling down he road straight at us. The car was hit from the driver's side and I think we sustained a few scratches on the side view mirror, but nothing serious. What drama for a Sunday!