Day 1 with the contractors.

The contractors came in today to start on three projects. In the first project, we're turning what is essentially a second pantry into half of a second pantry, and using the rest of the space for a butler's pantry. We already have a wine fridge and a beverage fridge for the space, but they can't go in until the wall is removed and pushed back. You can see here that they've already removed the wall. I'm standing in the dining room looking thru the removed wall, into the family room. Once that wall is built, they're going to do some electrical work before we bring in the cabinet guy. We still haven't paid him because we haven't decided on the cabinets, but we're close. We thought we had it all figured out until we went to pick out our slabs for the fireplace face and kitchen countertops. Turns out, we will have extra from the fireplace, so we might use that in the butler's pantry. It's a good thing because we really like the stone we picked out.



Speaking of fireplace, the second project is filling in the annoying TV hole. I thought about doing this one myself, but it's just too much drywall work. As you can see, they ripped out some dated detail work, and the old tile face and hearth. basically all of that exposed stuff on the lower half will be covered by the granite we selected. The hearth and the firewood box will as well. We weren't going to do the firewood box initially, but because we had to buy two slabs (they're smaller than normal granite slabs), we'll have some left over. We figured we should use it ourselves rather than let the fabricator sell it to someone else. Actually not all of the lower half will be granite. We still have to pick out a mantel, and that will go right above the granite. We want to get the granite in first so we know what style mantel to pursue. At the moment, we're thinking that a piece of reclaimed wood would look cool (and be green).

The third, and easily the hardest to live with, project is the kitchen. We're having new countertops, appliances (you can see the boxes to the right), lighting, sink, faucet, backsplash, handles, and window treatments installed.

There's a lot, but we're thinking that it'll go somewhat quickly because we're not replacing the cabinets. There will be a little bit of woodwork on the island because we want the seating area to extend a bit farther (long Aquino legs) and that'll require that we install corbels.

So far, they've removed the oven (and microwave!) and the range top. So, it looks like we're going to be eating out for a while.

You can also see the flooring removal I did this past weekend.

I'll try to post picture updates every day. They really did a lot more today than I thought they would, so I'm expecting there to be visible progress every day. The contractor said we should be done in about 2-3 weeks. Of course, I just jinxed us with that visible progress comment.