progress…sort of

We’ve done a lot of work (mostly more demo and cleanup) since my last post…of course I’ve slacked and haven’t taken any photos, but I will next time.

Let’s see…we finished removing all the kitchen and bathroom tile floors, rem

these are all metal cabinets – they have been made for decades

we love this new line from ikea

this is the san fran based option we like

more san fran based pics

oved all of the wood laminate flooring on the main level of the house and gave it away on craigslist (I love craigslist!), removed all of the baseboards which will be replaced with thicker, more modern ones, removed a few more carpet pieces that were in closets, removed those associated tack strips, moved all of the debris into the garage which was quite a task, and had some of the debris hauled off.

We had a horrible experience with the first “contractor” that we hired. We found a guy on craigslist who seemed friendly and professional and cheap to do haul off, and he underbid the job (after seeing it in person at that!) and in the middle of haul off told us it was gonna cost more. We reluctantly agreed, we had no other option. He took off with 1/2 the load and never showed back up again for the rest. We made an appt with him for another day to complete the job (after trying repeatedly to get in touch with him) and he never showed. My fiance got very angry and a lot of very unprofessional emails from him ensued. I’ll just say please save yourself the hassle and don’t hire Southside Hauling – Brandon is his name. We did learn some lessons from this experience – get bids in writing, and don’t pay in full and with cash until the job is completed. And, if it seems too good to be true it probably is. Recommendations from friends and colleagues are probably the best way to go – even if they cost more.

Anyways, we’re pretty much done with demo. Our next main task is to get the downstairs (master bedroom and 2nd living area) ready to move into in case we rent our house or sell it. We are trying right now to rent it out…because paying 2 mortgages is ROUGH. On Sunday we worked on priming the downstairs living – it looks so much cleaner and brighter already! We’ll do the same with the master bedroom next, and then we’ll hire someone to refinish the concrete flooring down there. There are more things we want to do down there, but for now those are the main things that need to be done to make it “liveable” for us.

Just last week we received the final designs on the kitchen and living areas remodel from Eric. So, right now, we’re meeting with cabinet makers and trying to flush out the kitchen remodel options. Picking out kitchen cabinets is difficult! The options we are considering are IKEA (the cheapest option and possibly what we may have to do based on budget and ability to use credit to get them), custom (we’ve been talking with three different custom makers), and some options sort of in between – a company based in San Franciso that does some cool cabinets that may be affordable, M8, and a company that does cool metal cabinetry, St Charles.

It is looking like IKEA would run us about 5k for the kitchen, custom walnut cabinets by a local cabinet maker would run around 10-11k, and St Charles would run around 11-12k. I’m not sure on M8 yet…

edited to add, we just received the quote from M8, 38k! wow!! IKEA is looking REALLY good right now…

Thats all for now…I’ll post some updated pics next time!