October 2012 – nicole.groudasfamily.com

Kitchen Demo

The plan this weekend was to do demo, lots of demo. Mom came out to watch Alex on saturday so I could help out a lot more than normal lately. Ryan got the rest of the kitchen and back hallway all demo’d so we’re ready to start putting it back together. He got 3 trips to the dump before it closed but with Obama coming to Nashua it took forever to take each trip.

With that in mind we decided to wait on demolishing the upstairs bathroom because we have no place to put all the debris. As it is the truck is loaded and we have a huge pile of wood and bags. Probably 3 more loads just to get rid of the kitchen debris. Next weekend we’ll have to demo the upstairs which means the electrical we planned on doing next weekend needed to get started this weekend.

So Ryan got the holes drilled for the electrical and so far the outlet boxes have been put in on the exterior wall. I’ll get the outlet wires run tonight or some night this week. Then we have to get the recessed lights up.

the hidden staircase to no where… nothing interesting hiding back here except for some old wallpaper 🙂

kitchen view from the diningroom (see the staircase to no where)

The exterior wall is a jig saw puzzle with a cut header. The kitchen was remodeled at some point maybe 50 years ago and it wasn’t well done.

So we have next weekend to get the upstairs demo done and the electrical done (at least the outside wall and lights). Then the 17/18th we have to get the kitchen floor up and the range hood vent installed out the side. Any other prep for insulation. We hope to get insulation the week after thanksgiving then on to drywall the first weekend in december and cabinets the weekend after that.

Ambitious – absolutely. Let’s hope we can manage this so we have a usable kitchen by xmas!

Painters

Well the painters are officially on the naughty list! They haven’t been over in more than a month, since Ryan’s paternity leave. They never finished stripping, we hired a carpenter to replace the wood they took down when they kept messing it up (and wasting tons of supplies). On top of that they never followed any of the laws with regards to lead paint removal after discussing it with them multiple times.

The bad news:

At the very very least we need to do a few things our selves, we’ve kind of given up hope after leaving multiple messages and trying to get a hold of the owner…

We have bare wood they stripped that needs primer before winter!
We have stripped wood that needs to be sanded before it can be primed, the person stripping was new and did a kind of terrible job chipping into the wood over and over!
We have new primed wood installed that needs caulk before winter!
Our new siding needs to be caulked (4 new sections)

The good news:

We only paid them a down payment of a 1/4 the amount wanted and they have done about a 1/4 of the work if you include materials purchased
We know never to hire them again!
We ended up finding a good carpenter we like for future work

So Ryan is going to spend some time Saturday doing some prep work on the porch (there’s still paint to be stripped, then it all needs to be sanded). We’re really in doubt that we could find anyone that is available next week to get primer/paint on the house! We did put out feelers to some people we know/trust to see if any painters they know happen to have a couple days available but it’s very very unlikely.

I may take a day off (monday) to caulk and do what i can (prime?) if the weather is nice. It gets cold by next thursday so we don’t have long to get this buttoned up. We’ve weathered winters with just primer before but we are trying to be better about this, surely starting at the beginning of august was not too much to ask to get this job done before winter!

6 months old

A little late but I’ve back dated the post. Alex is now 6 months old!

She is 14 lbs 9 oz. 25 1/4″ long and her head is 17″ diameter. She dropped JUST below the 50th percentile for height and weight. The nurse didn’t tell me what she was for head this time. The doctor said she’s doing great (I was concerned about the drop in growth) but he said she most likely had just had a growth spurt for her 4 month appt and hasn’t hit her 6 month spurt yet.

What has she been up to this month? Rolling rolling and more rolling! She rolls all over and squirms around in circles to get to toys etc. Also new, she’s been trying to sit up by herself! Also new is she’s working on learning to eat food – so far she’s had oatmeal, banana and avocado. Next up is sweet potato.

oh hello, you didn’t know i could sit up on my own? tada!

she definitely hasn’t mastered the sitting thing 🙂

Cabinets ordered

Well they cost a small fortune (especially after we added some more to our design) but both cabinets and counters have been ordered! (Home Depot was having a 10% off sale!). It took 2 trips to home depot (our first appt started late then we got booted so I had to go back over to finish up and order the cabinets).

We went with Martha Stewart cabinets from HD in their ‘Maidstone’ style with Maple cabinets in ground nutmeg with rum highlights for coloring. They come standard with slow close doors, drawers and full extension hidden drawer hardware. We got pull out drawers/shelves for 3 of the base cabinets.

So on Friday (actually thursday night this started) we were discussing final plans and looking at fridges. We decided to look into counter depth fridges, not loving that a standard fridge would stick out so far. They are significantly more expensive though but we actually found a really nice one on craigslist on sale for less than 1/2 it’s original price and barely used. We’ve never actually purchased anything off of craigslist but this seemed like an okay scenario (ryan talked to the woman). So friday night, after Alex’s bath we put her to ‘bed’ in her carseat and headed up to Epping, NH where we got a new (to us) fridge! We also got some lights she was willing to sell pretty cheap since she was trying to clear out a bunch of stuff.

What fridge did we end up with? This monster: Kenmore Elite Fridge/Freezer combo with trim kit. It’s a full size fridge and next to it a full size freezer. So it looks like a side/by/side but it’s 6 feet long 🙂 So a little kitchen re-design was needed, plus we wanted to make it look fully built-in so we’re doing floor to ceiling cabinets around the fridge on that wall. It’s large but awesome. Ryan even managed to clean out the fridge good last night so we are already using the fridge!

So this weekend we bought a fridge and some lights, then we bought cabinets and a counter. Work wise I’ve been working on painting windows since we had some decent weather. First I primed the inside of all the window sashes (4 windows), then I got 2 coats of exterior paint on them. The nursery windows got a coat of interior paint on them as well.

Windows are ready for winter now and attention can be refocused back to the kitchen!

A very busy weekend

(This is from LAST weekend, finally have pictures but it’s written from last week’s point of view).

Aimee, Jason, Jason and mom all came out this weekend. Jason came to work, the rest to play with the kids. So while Ryan and Jason worked (although I did do some electrical and cleanup), Aimee, Mom and I played with Little Jason and Alli-boo.

So while we played with the kids, some actual house work got done. Jason did the rough in for all the drains for the new master bathroom we’ll be putting in as well as got ready to do the little bathroom upstairs (we have to demo it before it can be done completely) and the laundry room next to that.

New drain on the left, the drains on the right will go away once we demo the little bathroom.

While Jason did the plumbing, Ryan put in the new kitchen window (which is where i light was so i had to put in a quick temporary light over head but at least we have a switch now!). The window is smaller overall but before it was 2 small windows with separation, now it’s just 2 casements together same amount of light.

While they worked, the carpenter was here and finished up the siding on the driveway side of the house so it’s ready to be painted!

One side of the house has all ‘new’ siding!

It’s nice having work get done while you’re doing other things. We like this carpenter, he does good work and after our horrible experience with the painters, it’s nice working with someone who knows how to work. FYI the painters haven’t shown up in weeks or stopped by when promised.

Plans

I’m still working on the post about last weekend (we got a lot done!) but I haven’t taken pictures yet so I will hold off on that. Hopefully tomorrow i’ll take pictures since this weekend we’ll be making more progress!

In the mean time we’ve been getting things ready for this weekend, doing plans, finalizing decisions because this weekend we will be making at least 2 of our huge purchases. Appliances (the 10% off sale ends monday) and Cabinets (10% off sale ends Wed).

So the kitchen layout has changed a bit, we fit in more cabinets and we’ll find out this Sunday how much these changes will cost us! Then I also planned out the electrical because this weekend we hope to get the lights installed (recessed and boxes for pendant lights etc). I can also get the electrical outlets for the fridge and microwave installed since that wall is demo’d. Actually the fridge outlet will be what is currently the microwave outlet, just shifted a bit.

For fun I also grabbed some 3D shots from the program i’m using for these layouts. Keep in mind the cabinets are generic and appliances are not accurate looks wise, just size wise.

KitchenCabinets — Kitchen Cabinet layout with details for ordering the cabinets.

KitchenElectrical — The electrical layouts (for lights/switches) in the kitchen.

3DKitchen_From_Backhallway — The kitchen as viewed from the back of the house ‘entrance’ hallway

3DKitchen_From_diningroom — The kitchen as viewed from the diningroom

3DKitchen_From_livingroom — The kitchen and diningroom as viewed from the livingroom – a very open layout.

We actually haven’t finalized on our cabinet look yet. We are going with Home Depot/Martha Stuart cabinets but are going back and forth between ‘painted’ cabinets (they use a shrink wrap, not a paint which is making us very wary) and stained cabinets. If we go with stained we’ll do a tile floor, if painted we’ll probably refinish the wood but there’s some major patching between kitching/diningroom that will have to be done that won’t be fun. Decision will be made on Sunday!