Sparks and Studs

Off the heels of the big changes projects (stairs and opening the wall if you happened to miss them) the room was not ready to be framed out. With that came running new electrical (and removing that last bit of knob and tube that was in the removed wall). But less talking, more pictures…

 

Before:

 

After:

 

 

Our contractor also ran the ductwork for our exhaust hood, which we had to run across the room and run a small soffit out through the stone wall.  The plumbing in the corner kept us from being able to run it straight out near the range, plus we didn’t want to sacrifice any exposed brick for a soffit on that wall. Apparently we have two layers of stone on the exterior – he had to drill through quite a bit to get to the outside!

 

We decided to go with 4 high hats as my electrician husband calls them – or recessed lights as I would call them along with one pendant light over the window/sink. As you can see in the photo above, the guys thought of putting the outlets in the boxed out wall around the plumbing and on the new wall where the basement door used to be. (check out the floor plan HERE if your lost), however when we had our final inspection they told us we had to have the outlets on the brick wall. No problem, back to my initial idea….just had to find a picture of it to sell the guys on.  (psst – new outlets are in and they look awesome, once I found a picture I didn’t even have to say a word – hubby was sold!)

High And Wide

Who loves writing posts twice? NOT this girl! Ugh, sorry for all you who got this blog post only to find it blank. WordPress needs to get its shit together. Save should save and post should post not erase. Anyway… (sorry for complaining)

When I think of ‘high and wide’ I automatically think of Sherry from Young House Love describing how to hang window treatments. (yes, I’m an avid yhl reader; 10 am can’t get here quick enough during the weekdays) But this type of high and wide is totally different because it involves taking down our kitchen/dining room wall. Yay!

Now when I came home for lunch on this particular day the contractor happened to be at lunch at the same time. So  I walked back and forth at least a dozen times trying to figure out what exactly he had been working on. After my last pass when I was starting to become frustrated as my conclusion was that he hadn’t done a damn thing all morning I finally realized that the wall was down! Haha. I couldn’t help but hysterically laugh at myself (you thought I was kidding in my About Me write up that you’d be laughing at me with me) How could I have missed that!?  I blame it on the plastic – it totally threw me off.

 

I guess I wasn’t expecting him to work on removing the wall as I thought he’d have to wait till we removed the knob and tube from that wall first. (you can see the knob and tube wires hanging in the middle picture there). So coming home to find that he had opened up the wall was a total and sweet surprise. I can’t wait to see it without the plastic so we can really see how opened up our kitchen will feel to the rest of the house. Now that the big construction parts of the project were done including Swapping the Stairs and removing this wall we could finally move on to framing! Eureka! Good things are a comin’!

 

One more time for ya…

 

Before:

 

After:

 

Breathing easier? I know I am…

 

Swapping Stairs

Mine and Ryan’s demo work was finally done. The floor was our last major obstacle. Next up was our contractor. And wow did these next few changes happen insanely fast.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I work three blocks from my home. So when I went home from lunch this is what I found:

Mind you it used to look like this:

Hidden staircase partially removed. And we could now see from the basement entrance into the “closet”. Now from the closet perspective:

Side note: when we were working on running new electrical there was a time when Ryan lifted me into that small staircase (funny enough it was my idea and I volunteered). Keep in mind he had to stand on a staircase to lift me up onto the staircase. Confused? I would be too. Anyway, we were trying to pull wires through the ceiling and so I was drilling holes up there, but we were never able to get far enough to pull the wires. In the end my time up there didn’t help at all and was just a silly experience.

Back to staircase swap. So when I came home from work. BOOM! The staircase was already flipped! I was floored. Somehow I thought this whole process was going to take much longer.

I hope this helps explain the stairway swap. Here’s a before image below:

And now the stairs go directly back to the laundry as seen below: (yes we need to remove that old fridge!)

Today is a big day for us. Our cabients are officially ordered (we should have them in about a week) and our floor is being installed on Monday! Woo Hoo! I know I’m behind on the blogging part – but I’m almost caught up. 🙂