Day 3, August 29th: the lure of the port-a-potty

Well, there must be some kind of magic about port-a-potties. Bring it, and they will come. They did! At 7.45 this morning, two guys came and continued to demolish interior walls. The demolishing is happening fast - there already looks like so much progress has happened. It is hard to understand why this will take close to 4 months to complete! It is so interesting to see the frame of the house, and the timbers in the ceiling.

They worked hard in the heat until 2.45pm. Here is a photo of the inside as it is today!


Our contractor dropped by today to go over the choice of doors and windows. He also gave me a copy of his schedule. Will look at it later tonight to see if I can divine where all the time goes. I suspect it is because our contractor has multiple jobs on the go at once?

Day 2, Aug 28th

.. no sign of the contractor. A port-a-potty arrives. I direct it to be placed somewhere reasonable (rather than on our front driveway).

Obviously couldn't do any more work today until they had a dedicated loo. Its arrived. Lets see if the contractor follows tomorrow.

Day 1, Aug 27th

(the day we returned from vacation).

Coool! The kitchen looks better already!

Its been stripped down to the frame. All cabinets, appliances, ceiling and floor gone. It looks bigger and better. The cunning bathroom exhaust fan installation has been revealed. Instead of exhausting through a dedicated vent, why not just put flexible pipe leading to the existing ceiling vent?? The contractor has put up a barrier between the kitchen and living room, starting ceiling height and the 3/4 the width of the living room, to avoid the dust flying through the house.

The bathroom is untouched. The bedroom has started to be stripped.

Description

I've never remodelled a kitchen before. So, what the heck takes so long? Its all timber-framed. No major brickwork. Where does all the time (and money??) go?

I have no idea. But I'm about to find out. Our kitchen was a little hell-hole. It was small. The corner cabinets were inaccessible, and so unusable. The previous owners cunningly painted the INSIDE of the cabinets, so that paint flakes conveniently fell into clean pots and pans.. meaning you had to rewash!

Besides the abysmal design, and the paint (!), there was the aging appliances. The double oven, trash compactor, cooktop and vent were all 30+ years old. They were ready for retirement! The ovens no longer maintained a constant temperature; the dials rotated over 360 degrees freely, thus making it impossible to actually set the temperature you wanted. When setting the oven to 350, it is possible the grill came on instead! The cooktop elements were wonky, and the ones that worked took AGES to heat up. The refrigerator/freezer, although 10 years old, was a bizarre shape, only because that was the specific wall cavity size.

Replacing the cabinets and appliances wasn't going to give us a spacious kitchen, so we decided to use a bathroom and bedroom to add space to the kitchen. We would then need to make another bathroom elsewhere.

After much faffing about and procrastination, we got the plans, ordered the cabinets, the bathroom and kitchen hardware and fixtures, the lighting... and now, we just need the building to be done!!