Kitchen Floor Finished and New Colors for Living and Dining Room

This past week the floor in the kitchen was finished with 3 coats of poly and we painted most of the 1st floor

Finished Floor...

Eat in area...

All we have left is to do the backsplash and hang the lights over the islands...

Dining room with a new color...grayish/purple

After many different tries, we finally decided on "Restrained Gold" for the living room color.

Kitchen is Almost Done!

This was another busy week in the kitchen.  The floors will get their poly tomorrow and then we will be almost done with the kitchen...the only things left will be to tile the backsplash and hang the lights over the islands.  We are very happy with the results...

Looking from pantry towards eat in...

Looking from eat in....

Wade installed the hood this weekend...

He also worked on creating the casing/molding around the pantry door and window next to the cooktop...

Kitchen Cabinets and Countertops are In!!

Lots of progress in the kitchen this week. The cabinets are almost done and the countertops went in...

Main cooking area:

Bookshelves, recycling and broom closet:

Looking from the pantry out:

Looking towards refrigerator wall:

Island countertops:

Prep sink in 2nd island:

Refrigerator wall:

Sink in main island:

Crown molding close up

Kitchen Cabinets Are Going In!

This weekend, Bob made good progress on installing the kitchen cabinets...it is starting to looking like a real kitchen!!

More Progress in Kitchen

This week the islands were installed in the kitchen.  The first picture is looking from the eat in area....

This is looking from the pantry towards the eat in area...

The sheet rocker also finally finished this week so we have gotten rid of all the green...and are enjoying all the fresh white walls!  This is from the living room looking towards the dining room.

This is looking upstairs...

Kitchen Floor!

We're excited to see the kitchen start to come together. This week we painted and had the walnut floor installed. The first couple pics show the floor installed before the sealant.

Now, with the sealant...

We're hoping to have the islands in the beginning of next week and possibly the perimeter cabinets next weekend. 
 
Jose continues to make progress with the rework of the upstairs bedrooms.  The next picture shows the headboard wall in our bedroom.  Originally there was a walk in closet on the right side...we've flipped the door so that it will now belong to the bedroom next door.  We are also closing off the entrance to the "jack and jill" bathroom since we are creating the master bath/closet.
 

The rebuild of the roof continues as well...
 

Kitchen has Sheet Rock

We're a little delayed in posting our progress.  We're hoping to see a lot of changes in the kitchen in the next few weeks.  The first few pics are from a couple of weeks ago when we got the insulation in the kitchen and the plumbing and electrical were being finished up.  We had all the plumbing and electrical updated and re configured to match our new kitchen design.  Wade and Jose did the framing for the pantry wall and set up the venting for the hood which you can see in the first picture. 

The next few pictures show the kitchen with the dry wall up...it's starting to look like a real room!  The first picture is looking from the eat in area out into the main part of the kitchen and the second is looking in towards the eat in area.

Our main focus has been the kitchen but we are starting to think about the plan for the upstairs master bath/closet area.  The next couple of pictures show the continued demolition upstairs:

Tons of Demolition

Most of the last 2 weeks have been spent taking apart the kitchen and upstairs bedrooms where we are going to create the master suite.  The above picture shows the kitchen looking from the pantry towards the eat in area (purple at the end) which originally had a wall separating it.

The next picture shows the upstairs bedroom that will be turned into the master bath/closet:

We've also been making good progress skim coating the walls throughout the house...this is the front entry.

And this is looking up to the landing on the 2nd floor:

This week we also made good progress figuring out the plan for the kitchen (cabinets, tile, etc).  The plumber and electrician have also started.

Kitchen Demo Begins!!

Wade has spent a good part of this week working on the kitchen demolition with Jose (one of his tenants in Newport).  So, they have made great progress getting down to the original brick and flooring.

This first picture is looking from the back entry looking towards the eat in kitchen area...

This next picture is looking from the eat in area towards the back entry. 

This is a picture of what we are guessing was the original tile where the stove would have been in the kitchen...

This final picture is of the windows facing the backyard.  The brick arches are beautiful...

The sheet rock/skim coater and plumber have also started work this week.  Wade has also spent quite a bit of time starting to organize the permits and figure out how to get the city to de-register the building as vacant.  As part of this effort he moved Samson over to the third floor so that when the inspector came there would be evidence that we were really living there...here's Sammy on his first night at the new house...

This week our goal is to finalize the kitchen plans so we can get the cabinets and appliances ordered.  We also need to work on the master bath plans and my mom and I will be working on getting more stuff moved over so that we can officially start living over there within a couple of weeks. 

A Day of Firsts

Since closing we have started to work on the plan for the kitchen and Wade has started to do some demo in the kitchen on the wall between the current kitchen and what will be out "eat in" area. After further consideration of the wallpaper removal project throughout the first floor (i.e. all the green walls) we decided it wasn't worth it to try and remove the painted over wallpaper.  So, our plan now is to skim coat, sand and repaint the walls. This leads me to our first successful project.

My dad and I tackled taking down the wallpaper in the 2nd floor hallway bathroom. It looked like this bathroom had recently been redone and the wallpaper looked relatively new. So, we tried the fabric softener method to remove it. And it worked great!! We used the Paper Tiger to score the paper, sprayed on the fabric softener/water mixture, let it soak in for about 5 mins and then we were able to pull sheets off almost intact. So, we had our first little accomplishment. Here's a before picture of the beautiful wallpaper...

Here's Mike Willey taking the first piece down...

And here's the after.  It still needs a little more work to remove the rest of the glue but overall we were very relieved that it was as easy as it turned out to be.

We also had our first little crisis. As we got towards to the end of our day, Wade's parents and brother and sister-in-law stopped by to visit and get a tour of the new house. As they were getting ready to leave, we got word from Tina who was helping work on the 3rd floor that there was no water. So, Wade got down to the basement to discover water pouring out of a pipe in the laundry room. Luckily it was in the cement room where there was a drain. So, a quick turn off of the water main and some quick sweeping of water saved most of the carpeted areas and prevented what would have been a major disaster had we gone home for the night. After further investigation, we figured out it was a result of a steel to copper pipe connection that didn't survive.  Here's a pic of his clean up efforts....