T O O C U T E T U E S D A Y

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this is our friends Dave&Karen's doggy Hafez...a super cute wippet. we were at their house on christmas day for an amazing meal and lots of doggy snuggling.

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C H R I S T M A S P R O J E C T S

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with 5 days off around the christmas holiday we got a chance to work on a few little things in the kitchen construction site. The guys were here christmas eve and made some progress on the sheetrock. with the back wall still open (awaiting the plumber...what else is new) we got to do some much needed insulating with some spray foam from foamitgreen.com.

you've all seen this on all the home improvement shows...well you can buy small setups for diy application...and it was so easy (tyvek suit and goggles/gloves included!). You could really feel the wind blowing in from the uninsulated back wall before...these house were just the brick and the plaster...no insulation! Even though we were only able to cover a few sections it seems that they were the important ones as i can really feel the difference (especially with the blizzards howling winds).

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W H I T E R A D I A T O R

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....i'm dreaming of a white radiator....ok. after much debate we going with one of these traditional yet sort of slim radiators that costs $150 over a custom built european style runtal which costs $900. yes there was great debate. the runtal is 2 inches...this one is 5 inches...in a house this size every inch counts! jon the plumber bought this at the plumbing supply store. you buy 'em matte black (primed i guess)...and they look like hell. but with some spray paint at the perfectionist hands of chris, this baby's looking good decked out in white.

you can see the one she's replacing in the background...looking kind of sad.

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M E R R Y C H R I S T M A S

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hope you all had a great christmas. thank god i got these new snow boots from my sister in law Linda! I've already gotten tons of use out of them with this crazy blizzard that

delivered 18 inches...our street still isn't plowed 2 days later!

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L I V I N G I N I T

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It seems like we've been at it for so long already...but when i just typed 2.5 weeks i think it's great progress! I guess when you're living in the middle of a major renovation and it's filth, it gets old fast. this little kitchen/bathroom reno has taken up our entire house! we thought we'd have our downstairs bedrooms as our safe dust-free haven but then our plumber told us he had a lot of work to do in our large bedroom closet which is where alot of plumbing runs through. so the entire closet had to be emptied into the second bedroom which was packed to the ceiling with stuff already. this is also where our 2 cats are locked up during the day.

so downstairs is mess.

upstairs, where the actual work is happening is a wreck. with our dining room and living room right outside the kitchen this has become a real work zone with appliance storage, central command/work table (with tools & plans), 2x4 storage, the plumbers entire van load of pipes, fittings, doo dads, connectors, and ominous looking tools...etc.

i am learning great patience in this process...and even with the mess i am grateful that we can even do this ;-)

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P R O G R E S S

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we're 2.5 weeks into this kitchen/bathroom renovation. most of that time spent ripping things OUT and assessing the awfulness behind 100+ year old walls.

finally things are going IN...not the prettiest things and most will never be seen again

(we hope), but things are happening!

the plumber is done with all the rough-in and repairs which wound up being alot more than anyone thought.

the electrician has put in 97% of the new outlets, switches, recessed lighting, bathroom fan etc. the new subfloor is mostly in (after our contractor's foot went through our bedroom ceiling which is underneath the kitchen) along with new insulation/soundproofing

in the kitchen ceiling.

some framing is complete with a bit more waiting on the plumber testing his lines. once he's out the sheetrock can go up! can't wait!

bathroom framing


kitchen cabinet/stove wall
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W E E K E N D A C T I O N

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we had a full house on saturday with 2 plumbers and 2 electricians all working with a 10 foot space of each other. luckily no fights broke out (just some rude comments).

with them here saturday it meant that for about 8 hours straight on sunday we cleaned up after them. the place was a complete mess...pieces of pipe, chunks of wood, wood shavings, old outlets, and scraps of wire all ending up all over the floors or within our joists. so we vacuumed everything out, replaced some insulation (recycled denim!)...and felt much better.

sorry guys ... my walls are not your garbage cans. i was so infuriated to spend an entire day on this that i put a not-so-subtle sign up to tell these guys to clean up after themselves. really?

on the bright side, we did buy a new shop-vac which made things a little more manageable. no more earplugs!

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O V E R H E A R D . . .

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here's a little gem of a conversation that i heard our polish plumber having with our albanian contractor as they debated the use of pvc pipes (imagine this with heavy accents).

plumber: i will not use pvc in chris's house...say what you want...no pvc in this house!

contractor: they use it in new jersey

plumber: new jersey is nothing

contractor: pvc is easier...what your problem with it

plumber: listen...if there a fire, the pvc melt and the fumes will kill everybody

contractor: the smoke will kill them first!

art unrelated to parties involved

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L O V E I T / W A N T I T

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how cool is this? i'm loving these "landrugs" designed by florian pucher. beautiful area rugs based on aerial views of farms in places like europe, africa, the u.s. (these areas pictured below) and the netherlands. cows not included.

i'm particularly loving africa...love that warm mustard color and those gorgeous organic shapes!

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L E S S M E S S

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yesterday our plumber came and worked his butt off to do more in a day

than most people do in a week! He replaced 2 floors of waste line, replaced all of

our 2nd floor tenants bathroom plumbing from below, installed all the venting, installed

the new kitchen faucet drain piping, and had a few meetings throughout the day. whew!

his work is really well done, though not pretty.

here's some shots of the new lines and the old waste pipes sitting in our backyard. now i see why the drains were so slow. for one thing they had so much old gunk in them...and about 6 feet of wire someone tried to snake the drain with...which then snapped on them.

i knew it couldn't just be all my hair slowing those drains!

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H E L L O G O R G E O U S

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all the plumbing fixtures have been pouring in via ups and fedex. the kitchen faucet is

particularly gorgeous...nice and weighty.

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T O O C U T E T U E S D A Y

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the kids got an early christmas gift from aunt linda...it took all of 20 seconds from the time this thing got out of the box for the full craziness to start. thanks!

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H O T S T U F F

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this weekend chris was feeling out-of-sorts since he's not involved in the demolition/renovation like projects past...he just had to get in there a bit.

i think he feels better now ;-)

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S O M E D A Y . . .

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wouldn't it be so cute to put up a modern cuckoo clock in the kitchen (when it's done,

of course)? yes, half our house is in a shambles and looks like a bomb hit it and here

i am thinking about a six hundred dollar cuckoo clock. looks like i'm a little cuckoo!

snap out of it!

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A B E A U T I F U L M E S S

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demolition started at 9 am on the dot monday morning. our contractor and his guys are doing a fast and furious job pulling everything done and or course discovering bizarro things along the way...like some the worst plumbing in history and entire sections of support beams chopped out to accommodate the worst plumbing in history. looking around on the internet i've found this is quite common for plumbers (aka: butchers) to just chop away at peoples homes for their own convenience...because hey...who's gonna notice?

oh and that big column in the middle of the room is a jack that had to put in to hold up the second floor til a new support wall is put in.

the good news...that we have someone else doing this! other good news is that the joists at the ceiling haven't been touched by termites like downstairs. that was the moment of truth for me since the downstairs joists were pretty much a vegas buffet for termites.

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B I Z Z A R O W O R L D

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while we undergo major demolition and rebuilding in our kitchen and bathroom, the other parts of our house are serving different and multiple purposes. the cats are now eating in the bathroom, the litterbox is under the desk, and i'm doing my hair etc in the laundry room where there's also a chopbox and table saw stored. i'm sure the novelty will wear

off very quickly.

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G O O D B Y E

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Goodbye you ugly beast of a kitchen. I most definitely will not be missing your green formica countertop, your permanently sticky cabinets, your lumpy floor, your cloudy windows, your continuously clogged drains, your smelly sink, your wobbly faucet, your dusty pantry, your sad singular ceiling light. None of this was even charming in an old house way but just skeevy in a "the previous owner was a dirtbag" way. I've dreamt of this kitchen being sucked into a creepy black hole since the day we saw it...so less dramatically today is demolition! Good riddance!

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