So, now that Stacy's father is comfortable and happy living in the area assisted living facility. Turned out to be a "why didn't I do this sooner" moment, and with our plans of renovating having been on hold for several years now possible, what do you do in February with snow and still near freezing temps still in your area?
You start a massive, going to be several months long, renovation job!
That is just what Stacy and I did too.
The holiday weekend of President's Day, we decided there was no time like the present to get started so we went to our local home depot and met with a kitchen designer. About an hour later we had a really nice designed kitchen space with tall cabinetry, and in the kitchen floor to ceiling pantry cabinet, and a large island and involving the removal of the wall between what was the kitchen to the living room area to make a new kitchen and a great room area. We love it!
More cabinets and places to put things than in any kitchen in any place we've ever lived, for either of us!
We started that afternoon with the partial disassembly of the dividing wall and have been going at it almost every weekend and sometimes during the week to towards getting it done.
We got the wall down, we backtracked all the wiring Stacy's father had done for the circuits in the house. We ripped up all the old flooring from both areas and after a few weeks of searching finally found a flooring we could agree on and a few weeks later we were installing the new floor.
Stacy had REALLY fallen in love with bamboo flooring.
We traveled to Spokane's "Lumber Liquidators" as well as shopped at the area Lowes and Home Depot stores too. They ALL sell it, bamboo flooring. All kinds too. They're all more than happy to let you spend a few thousand dollars on this flooring, EXCEPT, it is NOT recommended for areas like ours here in the North West!
The flooring 'life expectancy' is only a few years due to the severity of our region's weather. It is way too dry in the winter, with wood stoves, fireplaces, central heat, and with our near or below zero temps and snow it will always be too dry for the flooring. Drying out causes seam separation and 'delamination' in the flooring. So, it might look nice for a few years but you are looking at having to do it all again as the flooring deteriorates. Oh, and those decade-long warranties in the paperwork?
In 'extream' weather areas, in discussions with the company, it could easily be a "good luck getting that fixed" situation but that was said in so many words and read between the lines!
So, what we settled on was an 'engineered' oak flooring made of an actual plywood cross laminated base and the real oak wood top layer. None of that MDF under flooring for us! MDF will swell, equaling floor damage, if it gets wet, the wet of enough water to get down between the seams in the flooring, which is a good possibility in the winter and rainy seasons here.
Also, Stacy and I know this one from personal experience when we had redone the floors in our home in Phelan California. We took out the ugly blue wall to wall carpeting, this was a house built in 1988 after all and put down nice looking flooring.
It looked nice but with the then young kids tracking in water from the rains, and-or spilling drinks etc., the flooring was buckling in less than a year.
Anyway, that's why no postings. Really busy! Busy at work with the better weather things 'pick up' and then working hard on the weekends getting projects done. Except for the week, we both had to go down to Sun Valley, Idaho for a conference, it has been work, work, work.
Progress had been slow but steady. We both were thinking it was looking good. Now we were just waiting for the brand new cabinets which were supposed to be delivered, which was supposed to happen by May 10th or thereabouts. By the twenty-second of May, I emailed our designer and asked her what was going on? She got back to me the afternoon and said the cabinets would be the "second or third week of June or so now". Wait- what! How did the second week of May become the second week of June-or so!?
She had given me the direct line, turned out it was the phone number the retailers are supposed to use, not the consumers, as I think she didn't want to the 'middle-man' in a "problem".
So I called the number, get to the greeting about entering your store number before you can proceed anywhere, and in looking at her email I see that the store number is in her email address, I enter that number and viola! I'm getting a direct line to the company making the cabinets.
There's nothing we can do now but wait for them, but the concern is we're going to be gone for a time, Dinosaur Trail Part-2, and didn't want the cabinets delivered while we are not there.
While trying to work out a solution with the help desk, I ask about when the hold on the cabinets was lifted so they could be built. It was supposed to have been in early April.
Turned out the designer had "dropped the ball" and didn't order them until almost May, and the late go ahead, along with the increase in ordering with the spring weather, pushed back our cabinets!
We had hoped, and planned actually, to have everything done before our daughter and grandkids got here for the Dino Trail trip. Nope!
It's still a construction zone with no kitchen, just a fridge, a microwave, and lots of paper plates and bowls with plastic silverware. The bathroom is the sink and dishwashing location for those things needed to be washed.
We'd given our dishwasher to the thrift store along with many things from the cleaning and construction.
Oh well, as said, it is what it is!
We haven't put the flooring in the kitchen area yet because we don't want the cabinets to damage the floor while installing the cabinets. So there's that, the living room has the flooring down but not the entire floor.
Weather wise? Well, the snow lasted for a while, but not as long as many, including us, had thought it might at our 2,300-foot elevation. There's still some snow left in the area mountains though and only recently did the "mountain snow" stop being in most days forecasting when rain was to occur.
I remember last year, Stacy was griping "is it ever going to get warm?". Not this year! While yes, it has had some cool times, generally it has been warmer than usual with even a couple of pushing record hot days just last week.
No, everything is green and growing, well like weeds, since those are growing all over the place also. I'm already in mowing and weed eating mode. We still have to spray the area around the house for the weeds but we'll get that soon.
So, where are the pictures right? I must be getting pictures of this reno job right? Oh yeah, some photos and a lot of time lapse videos. It is so nice to see hours worth of work go by in seconds.
You start a massive, going to be several months long, renovation job!
That is just what Stacy and I did too.
The holiday weekend of President's Day, we decided there was no time like the present to get started so we went to our local home depot and met with a kitchen designer. About an hour later we had a really nice designed kitchen space with tall cabinetry, and in the kitchen floor to ceiling pantry cabinet, and a large island and involving the removal of the wall between what was the kitchen to the living room area to make a new kitchen and a great room area. We love it!
More cabinets and places to put things than in any kitchen in any place we've ever lived, for either of us!
We started that afternoon with the partial disassembly of the dividing wall and have been going at it almost every weekend and sometimes during the week to towards getting it done.
We got the wall down, we backtracked all the wiring Stacy's father had done for the circuits in the house. We ripped up all the old flooring from both areas and after a few weeks of searching finally found a flooring we could agree on and a few weeks later we were installing the new floor.
Stacy had REALLY fallen in love with bamboo flooring.
We traveled to Spokane's "Lumber Liquidators" as well as shopped at the area Lowes and Home Depot stores too. They ALL sell it, bamboo flooring. All kinds too. They're all more than happy to let you spend a few thousand dollars on this flooring, EXCEPT, it is NOT recommended for areas like ours here in the North West!
The flooring 'life expectancy' is only a few years due to the severity of our region's weather. It is way too dry in the winter, with wood stoves, fireplaces, central heat, and with our near or below zero temps and snow it will always be too dry for the flooring. Drying out causes seam separation and 'delamination' in the flooring. So, it might look nice for a few years but you are looking at having to do it all again as the flooring deteriorates. Oh, and those decade-long warranties in the paperwork?
In 'extream' weather areas, in discussions with the company, it could easily be a "good luck getting that fixed" situation but that was said in so many words and read between the lines!
So, what we settled on was an 'engineered' oak flooring made of an actual plywood cross laminated base and the real oak wood top layer. None of that MDF under flooring for us! MDF will swell, equaling floor damage, if it gets wet, the wet of enough water to get down between the seams in the flooring, which is a good possibility in the winter and rainy seasons here.
Also, Stacy and I know this one from personal experience when we had redone the floors in our home in Phelan California. We took out the ugly blue wall to wall carpeting, this was a house built in 1988 after all and put down nice looking flooring.
It looked nice but with the then young kids tracking in water from the rains, and-or spilling drinks etc., the flooring was buckling in less than a year.
Anyway, that's why no postings. Really busy! Busy at work with the better weather things 'pick up' and then working hard on the weekends getting projects done. Except for the week, we both had to go down to Sun Valley, Idaho for a conference, it has been work, work, work.
Progress had been slow but steady. We both were thinking it was looking good. Now we were just waiting for the brand new cabinets which were supposed to be delivered, which was supposed to happen by May 10th or thereabouts. By the twenty-second of May, I emailed our designer and asked her what was going on? She got back to me the afternoon and said the cabinets would be the "second or third week of June or so now". Wait- what! How did the second week of May become the second week of June-or so!?
She had given me the direct line, turned out it was the phone number the retailers are supposed to use, not the consumers, as I think she didn't want to the 'middle-man' in a "problem".
So I called the number, get to the greeting about entering your store number before you can proceed anywhere, and in looking at her email I see that the store number is in her email address, I enter that number and viola! I'm getting a direct line to the company making the cabinets.
There's nothing we can do now but wait for them, but the concern is we're going to be gone for a time, Dinosaur Trail Part-2, and didn't want the cabinets delivered while we are not there.
While trying to work out a solution with the help desk, I ask about when the hold on the cabinets was lifted so they could be built. It was supposed to have been in early April.
Turned out the designer had "dropped the ball" and didn't order them until almost May, and the late go ahead, along with the increase in ordering with the spring weather, pushed back our cabinets!
We had hoped, and planned actually, to have everything done before our daughter and grandkids got here for the Dino Trail trip. Nope!
It's still a construction zone with no kitchen, just a fridge, a microwave, and lots of paper plates and bowls with plastic silverware. The bathroom is the sink and dishwashing location for those things needed to be washed.
We'd given our dishwasher to the thrift store along with many things from the cleaning and construction.
Oh well, as said, it is what it is!
We haven't put the flooring in the kitchen area yet because we don't want the cabinets to damage the floor while installing the cabinets. So there's that, the living room has the flooring down but not the entire floor.
Weather wise? Well, the snow lasted for a while, but not as long as many, including us, had thought it might at our 2,300-foot elevation. There's still some snow left in the area mountains though and only recently did the "mountain snow" stop being in most days forecasting when rain was to occur.
I remember last year, Stacy was griping "is it ever going to get warm?". Not this year! While yes, it has had some cool times, generally it has been warmer than usual with even a couple of pushing record hot days just last week.
No, everything is green and growing, well like weeds, since those are growing all over the place also. I'm already in mowing and weed eating mode. We still have to spray the area around the house for the weeds but we'll get that soon.
So, where are the pictures right? I must be getting pictures of this reno job right? Oh yeah, some photos and a lot of time lapse videos. It is so nice to see hours worth of work go by in seconds.
Top to bottom,
Stacy making sure the rail for the 'barn door' we put in would be level with our Bosch line laser level you can see that section of wall is still not finished in the rebuild. We had actually closed off the original door and moved the doorway here then used the barn door for a better look.
The barn door stained and up the woodstove repainted, new stove pipe and the new tile pad for the wood stove. The tile is Italian brick look and is really nice.
Bottom photo, Stacy making sure the flooring is tamped in all the way together before I come along and air staple them in for good.
OK, I'm out of time, we have to get going now so this is my update!
Until next time, Tad
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