What a mess!

It's late...I'm tired...this will be short.

Yesterday, I moved the furniture from the dining room upstairs to the guest bedroom/staging area in preparation for beginning the demo. This leaves me with plenty of room in the dining room to store things from the kitchen.

Today, I finally started demo on the kitchen. I started with scraping the ceilings in the sun room and half-bath.

Then, I moved on to tearing out the wall where the frig will go.

Later this week, I'll finish scraping the remaining popcorn from the kitchen ceiling, mud the ceiling, sand it, and hopefully get it painted before the weekend. After that, I'm planning on installing the new lights!!

Good night

A little side-tracked

Well, that big weekend I promised everyone...it, um, well, you see...

Needless to say, it didn't happen as I had originally planned, but then again most things typically don't for me these days. Instead, I decided it was time to go ahead and get gutters installed on the house because I was worried that the new doors that we had installed this past Spring would start to rot like the old ones if I didn't get gutters installed soon. The purpose of the gutters being that they would divert the runoff from the roof instead of dumping it onto the ground in front of the doors, and then splashing back up onto the threshold and frame of the door and eventually causing it to rot. However, before the gutters could go up, I needed a way to handle the additional drainage from the downspouts. To make a long story short, I ended up renting one of these

yep, ain't she a beauty!? You're looking at 1015 lbs. (yes, a HALF-TON) of solid, honest-to-goodness, earth crunching, root tearing, mud slinging power! That's right, I rented a 24" trencher to dig a 110' long, 4" wide, 12" deep trench from the house, across the backyard, and down the slope towards a small stream. What would have probably taken me a good 2 days to dig by hand, ended up taking me only an hour and a half with this baby. If you have any need to dig a trench anytime in the near future, I highly recommend renting one of these!

So with the drainage and gutter work done (oh yeah, they installed them today...I would recommend these guys for anyone looking for gutters), my focus is back to the kitchen and downstairs. This weekend, I plan on removing all of the popcorn ceiling in the kitchen and sun room, tearing out the base mouldings, and hopefully reconfiguring the walk-in-closet in the kitchen so that the frig will fit in there. I'll post pictures as they become available :)

Everything including the kitchen sink...

With the master bath now complete, and a little one due in March of next year, my schedule for completing the kitchen/half bath/downstairs/stairs/upstairs landing remodel just got seriously compressed!

So, without wasting a second, I started on what I am currently referring to as "Phase 2 - Everything including the kitchen sink." That's right folks, take a good long look at her, because in a few short months, she's going to look completely different...and no, I'm not referring to my lovely, pregnant wife Suzanne, rather our ugly, outdated, and cramped kitchen! Here's a picture for you to ponder...oh, what will he do, what will he do?

O.K., o.k., I know, the suspense is killing you right?! Well, for starters, I'll be installing this (yep, all 37 boxes of it!)

throughout the downstairs, including the kitchen, sun room, half-bath, back hallway, family room, dining room, and foyer. And as if that weren't enough, I'll also install this up the stairs and in the upstairs landing. But before I can do that, I have to scrape the popcorn ceilings in the kitchen, sun room, and half-bath, and also tear out the existing kitchen cabinets. Things should start rolling later this weekend...I'll try and post an update late Sunday night!