Demo

Our day of demolition got pushed back a day here, a week there until we weren't sure if we would ever begin this insane project we decided to embark on about a year ago. Finally, the day finally came. As a reminder, this is what our kitchen and bathroom space looked like before the real demo:

And of course I had to take a minute to blow off some steam and, I mean really....How often can you take a hammer to a wall?

Sadly, we were unable to be there the day of the demo (this little thing called WORK got in the way for both of us), but when we came onto the back porch a few little treasures from within our walls were waiting for us:


These were really cool treats, but there was nothing better than the picture I was able to capture as Aubrey walked into what used to be the kitchen for the first time:

We then gave ourselves a tour of our new, beautiful space:

Aubrey in the old Kitchen The old sink


The Air conditioner remains WE FOUND A HUGE WINDOW!

Our old kitchen waited for us outside the house.

But the biggest surprise was the amazing brick wall that was hidden behind our drywall in the kitchen. If we had known going in, we may have tried to incorporate it into the design, but our budget was already quite high and cleaning up the brick would have been time and money we were not currently willing to lose.

It is beautiful though and who knows how we can possibly incorporate it into some future design.

Now that Demo is done, what's next for our kitchen?
This demolition was done on the final weekend of June. As I type this it is August 17th. How much could possibly get done in 6 weeks? You will see all of July in my next post.

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

Wow, it's been literally months without an update here, but surely not for no good reason, right?  Right.

Seems like super old news now, but we've actually completed BOTH bathrooms and boy are they looking spiffy! The pictures here don't even reflect the final product - this actual post has been half-written since June when we were still waiting to have the little accoutrements put up, like towel bars and toilet paper holders... our gracious contractor refused to install those until we were able to "give it a test run", aka, sit on the bowl and determine how far we are willing to reach for the paperwork. This is now an interesting exploration in editing past content to sound current.

Anyway, here's a little time-lapse fun to see what has happened to them:

Bathroom #1 was this:

Tub of old.

Quick before (from hallway)

Previous vanity area

And has become this:

Tub and tile of new!

The after (from hallway)

New vanity area - A little rough around the edges without the
trimmings, but she's mostly there.

And then of course there's Bathroom #2 (AKA The Bathroom That Never Was... That Now Is!)

So... it used to look like this weird thing....

Then a little wall went up...

And behind that wall there's now this!

And this!

She needs a good scrub after being installed, and I'm still not sure that I did the right color, and her walls have left the bedroom much more cramped and spatially awkward than was ever anticipated, but I love her all the same!

And so that's pretty much everything up until early June. Since completing this job and starting the kitchen a few weeks later, there's been virtually no time to devote towards updating this thing, but I'm going to attempt to recapture the last couple of months over the next few posts.

 

It's been a long, long time...

Hello loyal readers and home remodeling lovers. This is Mitch signing in for the first time. I have asked Aubrey to update the blog, and after so many times of her simply saying "You do it!" and me saying "Maybe I will!" as an unheeded threat, I've finally decided to update this myself.

Well a LOT has been done, but I do not think I'll be able to update everything at once. So consider this part one of the catch-up blogs.

Aubrey finished the Upstairs bathroom blogs, but while that was being finished, we continued pulling our hair out trying to figure out how to fit a kitchen into the space that we had downstairs. After several scrapped ideas, we finally bit the bullet and met with and finalized plans with a Certified Kitchen Designer. (Yes, there is such a thing).

He came back with a plan that we would never have considered and the more we thought about it we decided to go with his plan (I shall not be revealing that plan in this post though-- we'll save that for the big reveal later).

We did a lot of preliminary meetings, figuring out the cabinets, deciding on the placement of the sink and stove, ordering our appliances we finally had a day for demo planned for June 15.

BUT - before we could do that Aubrey found out a way to first bring some life to No. 92 before we brought about so much destruction. New York City is in the middle of an initiative to plant One Million Trees and they were giving away trees to residents of Forest Hills on the weekend of June 12. We showed up an hour before they begun giving away the trees and were 25th in line, but since they had over 100 trees, we were guaranteed to get some. We chose the Cherry Tree and the Plum Tree since we had just had to chop down a dead Weeping Cherry Tree and the Plum tree had such beautiful purple leaves that we couldn't resist it as a compliment.

It was even better when the City of New York handed me a tag with a certificate of the name of my tree. They are trying to name each tree after someone famous from the section of New York they were in. When I picked up the Plum Tree and they handed me a tag with Forest Hill's famous son closest to my heart, I knew she was mine. That's right: My tree's name is none other than Peter Parker.

Next up: Demo!

Now where were we?

Oh yeah - bustin' out hammers 'n shit!  Well, not us specifically, but they've definitely been in the hands of the people we hired!

That's right - demolition began! It has actually long since ended by now, but we've been so darn tootin' busy the last month, there haven't been any updates.  So this post will be of the "time lapse" persuasion.

First, let's do some quick before and after shots:

Existing bathroom

Same area of bathroom, different angle

Can you guess my favorite part of this? Amidst all the chaos,
the toilet paper remains intact and unruffled. Stallion!

Several days and yards of new plumbing later...
Toilet paper roll remains!

This became such a running joke amongst us that we actually got a text from the contractor the day they ripped it out....

Sad day indeed.

But don't worry.. we saved all of that gorgeous bathroom floor tile for future projects!

Then we have the old master bedroom nook of weirdness:

"I'm so tiny but you're going to put a whooooooole bathroom in me!"

Fun fact: When we opened up the walls and floors we discovered a complete and utter lack of ANY kind of insulation throughout. There must be some toros in the atmosphere in there.

 So while all the dust and rust was flying, we were out running around town trying to get all our tile and fixtures. Y'know, the ones first made famous here.  This was particularly challenging since this happened to our whip:

Stole all 4 of our tires, but left the nuts...

...and over $9k in body damage. Groan.

 Since we were left without wheels, we spent 3 weeks between borrowing a friend's car, paying for a rental, or just plain hoofing it to all sorts of extremely spread out stores to procure all of our things.

 And slowly but surely, things started coming together!

No, this isn't the charming interior of a woodsy cabin...

We've got tub!

And where we once had a super drafty nook...

We now have (dry)wall!

We've got electric!

We've got framing and new pipes!

We've got high hats!

And we've got the makings of a shower!

 And after making many sacrifices and offerings to Our Lady of TBT...

We've got tile...

...and tile...

...and even MORE tile!  These particular pieces are leftovers from a house that our tile rockstar Evan recently did for Tom Clancy!  You can only imagine the "clear and present danger" bathroom jokes that will be told til the end of our days...

Of course there were some hiccups along the way- for starters, once the walls of the new bathroom went up in the bedroom, we quickly realized that we'd made a pretty serious error in measuring and will now spend the rest of our lives trying to rearrange our bedroom furniture to fit properly. Not to mention the fact that all of our hopes and dreams of ever having a king size bed have been dashed to oblivion.  Then there were the delivery issues, the contractor taking an unexpected week off to work on his own leaky roof... and the ultimate: having not one but BOTH medicine cabinets arrive in complete shattered ruin.  Good times!


But I tell you, it's been frighteningly amazing to see all this work unfold little by little every day. We just wish that the pause in work had come AFTER the tile was laid since that's what we're most anxious to see.  But we're getting there!


Up next: the kitchen gets fully designed, appliances get chosen, and we start the whole danged process all over again!