Cleaning, organizing and ditch digging

(For those keeping track, there was a little bit of a lag here between when this happened and me posting it now. I'm a few weeks behind on blog posts. )

Soooooo......

After we ordered the cabinets, the first order of business at the house was finishing the pony wall, taking care of the drainage and cleaning / organizing the interior of the house. That was a lot for one person in one weekend. Luckily I happened to be engaged to one of the best organizers around. 

Bubba and the Future Missus came and started cleaning up the interior, while I worked on the pony wall and cleaned up the backyard. And I even went so far as to hire a worker from Casa Latina. Casa Latina is a local non-profit that helps place day workers based upon a pre-negotiated rate. It's a terrific organization that helps the community with education and outreach, along with helping people find work with dignity and respect.

Let's start with the interior of the house; as you can see, the interior was quite a mess. Even Bubba doesn't know where to start:

Working alone, it's pretty easy to start being lazy about organizing everything. Since I am generally the last person to use something, it makes it easy to remember where I put it. :)

But since the interior framing will start pretty soon, it is time to clean up, organize and throw away anything that is taking up too much space.

So, the Future Missus was quite perturbed when I came in to fetch a tool. I tried explaining it was a construction site, but she wanted to document just how easily I could track dirt into the house.

Initially, I worked on the pony wall and the Casa Latina worker cleaned up the drainage trench around the footing. But he went really quickly and did a great job.

He finished so much earlier than I expected that I realized we had the time to clean up the backyard! As you can see,  I had been treating it as a holding spot for all of my random debris from the foundation and pony wall work.

We had been debating on putting up a shed to hold building materials and the kitchen cabinets. But that also meant the backyard needs to be leveled. So another reason to clean up the backyard.

So myself and the worker started hauling everything to the driveway. As you can see, we ended up with quite a bit of debris that would need to be hauled away.

It worked out well, but it also made for quite the mountain of debris that needed to be hauled away. The Future Missus and I hauled this all to the dump the following day and it was around 1400 lbs.

And you can see the result! The backyard is dramatically cleaned up. The interior is cleaned up and organized, and the pony wall is nearing completion!

A kitchen is conceived...

It turns out that the gestation period for a kitchen is roughly six months. Or at least that is what the Future Missus tells me. Which is why the kitchen has just been purchased from Ikea!

Really, what happened, is that we came to an agreement with a new contractor, Trent Steffen of Pallet and Palette, to assist us on the project.  He's an interior designer and general contractor, with impeccable taste.

(Note: I'm still doing most of the work, but I've come to realize that I need to speed things up; and the place where this would make the greatest difference is in rough framing. One inexperienced guy working alone, means I would probably spend two or three months framing.)

So, leading up to this point, the Future Missus and I have been talking a lot about the look and interior design.  The future Missus knows what she wants, but in a few instances (kitchen, master bath, paint colors, lighting), she knows that she'll need some help getting from ideas to reality.

In particular, the kitchen was mostly a lot of ideas; but when she looked at cabinets, the prices got overwhelming fast (think $150-$250 a foot).  If you look back to our kitchen plans you can see that we have a pretty substantial U-shaped kitchen with an island.  That's a lot of feet.  And the only option we seemed able to afford were $60/ft plain oak cabinets from Home Depot.  They would require a lot of work (putting in glass fronts ourselves, paint) to look decent.  She felt pretty stymied.

Enter Trent in his black leather duster, driving his black Cadillac.

We asked to meet with Trent and get his advice on the kitchen. The Future Missus and Trent had a meeting of the minds, and chose colors for the kitchen. He suggested IKEA cabinets.  He said they were great quality for the price.  The Future Missus's only concern was that she wanted cream colored cabinets, and IKEA only has white.  But Trent showed her how you can warm up white a lot with the right lighting and she was sold.

So off they went to IKEA to plan the kitchen.  It was a 3 hour job, and she said at about 10 minutes in she realized that had she been on her own, trying to put this together, she would have been in tears.  You see, IKEA has this software to build your kitchen  (which doesn't work on Macs btw, and is a general pain in the ass to use online anyway).  In the store it works pretty well, and you can save your design for later. And of course, when you are ready to buy, it makes it easy to give the design to an IKEA kitchen employee to make your master buy list.

So they picked out the cabinet faces and got started.  This white cabinet in the middle (Lidingo) will be the perimeter cabinets.

And this walnut color (Liljestad) will be for the island.

And here's the layout they put together in a few hours! I'm stoked, I really like it.

There will be butcher block countertops on the white cabinets of the perimeter, and a white countertop on the walnut island.  This white countertop is yet to be determined because the materials we like are awfully expensive (but more on that later as we pin those details down).  

Anyway, back at the store they found out that IKEA was having a sale on kitchens - 20% off if you spent over $4500. Also, the walnut colored cabinets were being discontinued.  So those two things together led to some tough decisions.  Do we buy our cabinets 6 months before we'll need them?  Where do store the cabinets? (Remember, I delayed finishing the crawlspace so I could get a bulk deal on the foam insulation?)

The Future Missus was pretty worried about missing out on the sale AND those walnut colored cabinets.  All the other wood cabinets at IKEA are pretty red-toned.  And apparently, that just won't work.  

So I spent the largest amount at once for anything on this project so far... $4500 for our kitchen cabinets. That's pretty damn good.  Without the 20% sale they were $5600, so we saved $1100 on our cabinets that were already a great deal.

So this is good, but the downside is that we needed to take delivery of the cabinets within four weeks.  More on that to come...

Two weeks absent...

I just started a new job and spent a week and a half in CA for training. So nothing happened for two weekends.

This weekend, however, was partially spent installing 10 new joists in between the existing joists on the front wall. Then I double checked the front wall for straightness and installed the subfloor.

Hilariously there are no openings for the crawlspace right now, so let's hope nothing crawls in it and dies before that happens.

I then spent the rest of the weekend cleaning up and organizing the interior to make it easy to reframe the outer walls.

A little progress in the back

So the decision making process is still in swing.

In the meantime though, I wanted to finish up the pony wall, floor joists and subfloors.

So Trent Steffen from Pallet and Palette (http://www.pallet-palette.com), who is working with me to provide a bid, offered to bring out his carpenter to help me get it finished. The end result? A finished subfloor!

Do you like how the beams appear to curve dramatically? They don't, I slightly moved my iPhone while taking this picture. In reality the beams are quite straight.

Here you can see the 3/4 in ply subfloor applied. 

Right now the whole thing is covered in plastic as I'll be out of town for the next week. But fear not, hopefully I'll have a plan sorted out by the time I return.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Admittedly, my eyes are often bigger than my stomach. This is the case with the updated plans. I have decently underestimated the cost required to build the second story per plan. So, Bubba and I have been putting our heads together to figure what our options are.


Bubba thought it was important enough that he wear his thinking cap.

So far, we are considering the following options:

• Burning down the house and collecting insurance money.
• Finishing the first floor per the updated plans, but add a bedroom instead of the library / stairs
• then build the second story once we save up enough money
• Framing the entire house, finishing one bedroom / bathroom and finishing it as money permits.
• Getting a construction loan and finishing the whole thing now.
• This is more complicated as we need to obtain bids from three GCs and go through a bunch of red tape

Honestly, all of those options are viable (ok, well *maybe* we won't burn down the house). We are gathering information and will make a decision in the near future.

In the meantime, one of the GCs we asked to bid on the project, found some older pictures of the house. So I present them here for your viewing pleasure:

This is a picture of the house from the 1930s, when a WPA project was commissioned to document all of the homes in Seattle.

This is a picture of the house after the previous owner bought and "renovated" it by enclosing the front porch. The property was purchased in 1990 and this picture was taken sometime after that.

This last picture was taken sometime in the late 2000s, during the housing bubble.

Public Service Announcement

I feel it necessary to write this post for a few reasons. But mainly because I think people should understand the amount of financial, emotional and mental commitment necessary to deal with a project of this scale.

I'm not rich, this project will consume all of my cash reserves and I will still have a higher mortgage payment. There is a reason I'm doing as much of the work as I can.

Which brings me to the best description of the stress; I've heard *many* anecdotes about couples who've done this and it almost drove them to divorce, or it did drive them to divorce.

And so I need to remind myself why I'm doing this. I'm not doing this as a cheap way to get a new home, I'm doing it as a challenge to myself.

Sometimes in the thick of it all, with the stress and uncertainty, I need to remind myself that this is a challenge, and fuck all. I am not going to lose.

Sounds like I am trying to motivate myself. I am. I write this on a snowy day, when I can't even drive the truck down my local side streets. So nothing happened on the house today. :(

New plans!

When I started this project, the idea was to cheaply, and quickly (ha!) renovate this old home, while keeping the existing roof. This led to quite a compromise in terms of idealized living spaces, but it was what I wanted at the time.

Well, plans change and my plans have changed both figuratively and literally. Figuratively because I've met an incredible woman with whom I plan to share my life. And literally, because we have redesigned the house a bit.

As a refresher, here was the original plan, which would remove the front 2' and the back 6'.

The big change is that if there are two (or more) people living in the house, we would need more bedroom space, which could only come from a second floor. And once you consider a second floor, do you go with a simple room in attic design, or do you add a gambrel roof, or do you go nuts and add a complete, wall to wall second floor?

(Side note: I wanted the foundation designed to bear the load of a second floor. Mike, the architect, had designed the foundation / pin piles accordingly. I knew that you only get to pour the foundation once, but you can always expand upwards.)

So, that brings us to the present, we've worked with Mike to come up with a design. Mainly this involved Mike and the future missus conferring, with me occasionally whining that something was hard to build, or would add cost or complexity. I'm good at fixing problems, not so good at design, so this worked out rather well.

The design we've settled on is this one:

The internal layout has also changed significantly. The original plan was to have a completely open interior, except for the bathroom. Now, with the addition of stairs, the first floor is broken up better, with a living room in the front and kitchen / eating nook in the rear.

The upstairs is made up of three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and a small open area for movie watching and reading.

Well, there is more to say about the updates, but I'll reveal those details in the future as we encounter them. I just wanted to post an update of the new plans.