Tuesday, December 18, 2007

More Progress

If you haven't had enough of a break from all this reno talk, you should look away. I've got a few more shots of our progress on the first floor. Pretty much all of the progress happened over the weekend. My dad came to help out, particularly with the areas where Rob and I needed some expertise and were sorely lacking. Derek was around all weekend too so we had a lot of really skilled help around and it totally shows!

The bamboo was laid in the kitchen and the cabinets and appliances got moved back in. Some tile was removed from the backsplash in order to accommodate the cabinets now that they are 2.75 inches higher (that's how much height we've lost in order to install everything).


Then we moved into the living room area. Due to a bit of a debacle on the part of the contractor who'd poured the concrete in the living room and on my part for not correcting the contractor -- the living room area was very much not level. To make matters worse, there were significant high spots that should have been corrected during the concrete pour and weren't (high spots are much more difficult to correct than low spots and particularly after they are set). The solution to this problem was to grind out the high spots and fill the low spots. Let me say that again -- GRIND OUT THE CONCRETE WITH A BIG BIG HEAVY TOOL! This took about 1.5 hours of very hard work and created a dust storm like you cannot imagine. Here's what the kitchen looked like after the dust settled.


And here's a shot of the kitchen post-cleaning. You can see that pretty much everything has been moved back in. The shot of the plumbing there is significant because we've had a leak under our sink that has outsmarted me for about 12 months. At least, a year ago I tried to fix it and lost and so we've been living with it until someone could help. Someone helped. This is mid-repair but dad got the whole thing newly plumbed, showed me the trick (I'm not surprised that I never figured it out - it was entirely non-obvious) and now the sink is working great and is leak free!


We made some good progress in the living room too. Lots more since this photo was taken. The dry-core is down, the stringers are down. It's soon time to lay the heating cable in there. In other words, my friends, we are close .. very close. We're going to take a bit of a break now though, to get ready for and to celebrate Christmas. We'll resume our efforts after the holidays.

Talk to you soon,

B.

1 comment:

Karen Lew said...

Wow! It looks wonderful. I can't wait to see the final product.