Our New Old Home

The lockbox is coming off the door, the inspection sheet is no longer on display. Crews of people are  not showing up to at random times of day, needing access to our house.

Old Kitchen

New Kitchen

 Our remodel is done and we are thrilled.

It's not just that we have a mudroom or a new kitchen, it's what that change in space has meant to our family.

New main floor powder room.

Previously, with four of us sharing a bathroom, we've gotten into a habit of wandering while preparing for bed. For example, one person uses the sink to wet a toothbrush, then walks around the upstairs to brush teeth because the next person is using the sink to wash her face. By the time the tooth brushing is done the face washing is done, but then I'm leaning over the side, getting just a bit of mirror space so I can take out contacts as the face-washer wets a toothbrush.

Now when I want to get ready for bed, I go into my bedroom, shut the door and use my own bathroom. No one else needs to use the sink. No one else needs to use my mirror. It takes me half the time because I'm not waiting for someone else to be done. Ironically, though, we are all accustomed to walking around while brushing teeth, so now we have to train the girls to not wander into our bedroom while readying for bed.

New master bath.

The new kitchen has changed our family dynamic.

I used to enjoy cooking, but for me part of the enjoyment is being able to visit with other people while I'm working. This hasn't been possible for years, as there wasn't a suitable place in the kitchen for others to be. Many times Wayne or Kristi would stand in the kitchen to chat, but would have to move while I opened a drawer or needed in a cupboard. Trying to share in preparing a meal was practically impossible. I often felt cut off from the rest of the family, alone in the kitchen while everyone else gathered in the living room or on the patio.

Now, more than one person can be in the kitchen at the same time. The girls sit at the island and do homework while I cook; I don't have to keep stopping and walking into the dining room to look at a problem or hear a question. Homework feels less of an interruption and annoyance and more a part of the evening's activities.

I enjoy cooking again for the first time in years. And I can't wait to be able to finally get some of the kitchen gadgets that I haven't been able purchase before because there was no place to store them.

The new space has also allowed Wayne and I to have much-needed couple time.  We can sit down and share a glass of wine in the kitchen while the girls are in the living room, meaning that our conversation is a not open for commentary.

Our original bathroom, refreshed for the girls' use.

Our bedroom feels like a retreat. Even though it is right next to Marissa's bedroom, it feels a bit more secluded and private. We have a chair in our bedroom -- a chair! I have sat there in the early morning with a cup of a coffee and a computer, writing. What a joy.

My new coffee and writing corner.

I am so grateful that we were able to make the location we love into the home we love. 

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Don't get me wrong. 90 percent of our remodel project has gone fantastically. And the majority of the big work, the stuff that really matters like laying a foundation, framing, electrical work, etc., has been done flawlessly and on time.

But in all projects some rain must fall, and the last three weeks it's been pouring. And unfortunately these final "touches" have everything to do with the creature comforts of why we took on a remodel in the first place, so they are hard to ignore.

It started with our kitchen backsplash tile, which I saw installed for the first time as the tiler was putting the final piece into place. I walked in and stared in utter astonishment -- were my eyes deceiving me?

"How do you like your tile?" he said, expecting a positive response.

"It's beautiful!" I replied. "But...it's not the color I picked out."

"Oh, ha ha, people say that to us all the time."

"No really, I wish I were kidding. It is not the tile we picked out."

Within 30 minutes the two people who had spent an entire day tiling our entire kitchen began the work of ripping it all out before it set and took the drywall with it. I felt badly for this small business owner to literally un-do an entire day's work, not knowing if he would get paid for it or not. It hurt all of our hearts to see that gorgeous tile in a trash can, all that beautiful greenish-gray tile, when we had selected white.

Turns out that the store we had purchased the tile from mislabeled the sample. Our designer ordered the right color, assuming that "Whisk Me Away" meant white since that's what the label said on the sample. I had set the white tile out the night before, but, in a fit of neatness, Wayne had put it away, so they didn't have a piece for comparison.

That same day our electrician informed me that the lights we had selected to hang vertically alongside our mirrors in our master bathroom were only meant to be hung horizontally. Plus...they were as bright as a fucking lighthouse lamp. He hung one up just to show me -- I can't imagine how someone could see past the brightness of that light to see their reflection in a mirror.

Back those lights went and a re-order for more appropriate light fixtures was on task.

The tiler got to work tiling our bathroom while waiting for the re-order of the correct white kitchen tile. Then the plumber came to put in our faucets -- finally, we would have a working master bath!

But alas, the faucets were set too low, the nozzles hung into the sinks themselves and the turn knob could not be turned before hitting the countertop. The beautiful tile work around the faucets was ripped out, the dry wall taken out, and the plumber raised the plumbing up and all was re-done again. Only this time the tile is not QUITE as perfect as the same time it was laid, and we can kind of see where the tile had to be taken down for this fix.

Throwing away more beautiful tile.

At least the SHOWER is ready to use! Except...the glass shower door hasn't arrived yet. And we still don't have mirrors. So we can use the toilet in our master bath, but then we have to walk to the original bathroom to wash our hands and brush our teeth, and the four of us are in a familiar bathroom battle.

Finally, the shower door arrived along with the mirrors, and the faucets were re-installed in the new, proper location. A working bathroom! I couldn't wait to take a shower in our OWN bathroom! Except...why doesn't the water drain? Not a single drop of water made it down the drain -- I had to stop my shower early or risk an overflow onto our bathroom floor.

A shower full of water.

Did you know that plumbers do an air test any time they install new plumbing? That makes sure that there are no leaks in all of the pipes that are laid. When they're done with the air test, they're supposed to take out the plastic stopper that keeps the air from escaping the plumbing during the test. And when they don't, well, then you don't exactly have a working shower.

Then this past week we were startled to get a text from our girls informing us that water was pouring into our kitchen through a recessed light. The water was from Marissa's bath in our original bathroom, NOT the new bathroom. What?!

Turns out that the construction work against the back of the original wall had displaced tiles in our original bathroom, so there was nothing keeping the water from running through the floor and out our new kitchen ceiling.

The radiator was drained, moved away from the wall and the tiler was called back again so he could fix the files underneath said radiator that had broken during the construction project.

Broken tiles (plus nasty dirt) in our existing bath due to construction on the wall behind it.

Our circuit breaker that controls our oven and frig goes off at random times, apparently due to an electric current fluctuation in the frig model itself. Fix is in order.

Our newly corrected bathroom faucets apparently STILL don't meet code. Being worked on.

Our hood vent for our oven was delivered with two massive scratches down the middle of it. The hood vent sat in our basement unopened for 2 months before they went to install it and found the scratch. We are waiting for a replacement. Seriously, people.

By this time our project manager was pretty pissed with the number of things that weren't going right at the end of this project. And for as nice and understanding as Wayne and I can be, we were rather pissed, too.

We appreciate the work all the crews have done in our house, but we just want them to leave and not come back.

Once it's all working, that is.

Learning Not to Judge Others

Photo credit SpiritualCleansing.org

While we are sprucing up much of the house, other parts of it that will remain untouched need a little work as well. The doorknob on our bathroom gets more and more jiggly as time goes on. I fear that one day it will come off in my hand and I'll be stuck in the bathroom. Wayne's tried to tighten the existing one, but it is old and tired and the screws won't hold any longer.

Wayne bought a glass doorknob that looks like others in our home, and started working on replacing the doorknob. He easily got the old one off, but the new hardware didn't fit with the original hardware in the door.

The girls and I were preparing to go shopping just a few blocks from our house. Wayne decided he had to buy a new cylinder that would fit the door, but before leaving for the hardware store, he jumped in the shower and shut the door.

The door with no doorknob.

We were about to leave the house when Marissa noticed that there was no doorknob on the door and that it was tightly shut. "How's Dad going to get out?" she asked.

Um, yeah, he isn't.

I inserted the cylinder and used the doorknob from the outside to open the door.

That would have been awkward -- we would have gone shopping and he would be locked in the bathroom -- naked -- with no way out and no phone to call anybody. I wonder how long he would have lasted before he would have bust through the plywood separating the bathroom from the addition, out of sheer frustration.

An hour or so later, we are in the dressing room at Athleta and Lindsey is trying on some items.

My phone buzzes and I read a text from Wayne:

Where are you guys? I'm locked in the bathroom.

I respond that we're close by and we'll leave shortly to let him out. I then go to the dressing room door and say, "Lindsey, we have to go, Dad's locked in the bathroom."

"Again?!" she replies rather loudly.

I bet all the people in the dressing room that day thought I married a super smart guy. I have to give him credit for bringing his phone into the bathroom before he started working on the door.

The girls left the store immediately to head home while I bought the items they had chosen, then walked home alone. As I get closer to our house I spy Marissa on the sidewalk walking toward me. I yell, "Did you guys get Dad out of the bathroom?"

"Yep," she says, "He's out. At least this time he wasn't naked."

And this is why you should never judge people based what you overhear them say.

The accursed doorknob.

Learning and Living Through Remodeling

Our remodel project sped along for a month with very little impact to our family. Sure, we couldn't use the backyard, or enter the house through the side door, but for the most part we lived in the home as we always have.

This changed when our kitchen was demolished about a month ago.

The shell of our old kitchen.

Our new "kitchen," aka desk.

Not only do we not have use of a water source on the first floor, but our house is cut in two by way of tarps over the kitchen doors. For the first week, in order to do laundry in the basement we had to go out the front door, back in the house through the side door and down the stairs to the laundry room. Talk about airing your dirty laundry.

The path to our laundry room from the side door of the house.

The first week we had take-out nearly every night. That got tiring. And expensive.

I spent a weekend morning at my sister's house preparing slow cooker recipes that could go from freezer to slow cooker, and prepping spaghetti sauce that could be frozen and used in small batches. Winner!

We accepted an invitation to dinner at my sister's house, and had a divine and relaxing evening, visiting and eating food she had prepared. Such a treat!

The girls had to move into a bedroom together while Marissa's old bedroom is converted into our new master suite.

 So what have we learned?

1. Gratitude. I am grateful that we have the resources to take on this remodel, to make this home our dream home. Nearly every evening I come home from work to a pleasant surprise. Oh look, they took out the kitchen cabinets! They put the arch up in the new entryway!

2. Appreciation. The crews working on our home have a very high work ethic. The framing crew in particular was incredible to watch. The speed and skill at which they could frame a window was amazing. I remember struggling for hours to put together a dumb shelf in shop class -- they framed a window and a wall in 30 minutes. All of the experts who come through our house do their work with efficiency and skill, and I am humbled by their talents.

3. Neatness. It only takes two items out of place in our "kitchen" to make the whole space unusable. Sure, the girls' shoes are left all over the floor because there's no room in the closet they are sharing, but for the most part everyone understands that they need to pick up after themselves so we can all live in the space.

4. Creativity. I learned how to cook pasta in a microwave, we've improvised a pantry out of a dresser, and discovered all the kitchen essentials aren't really essential when you don't have a kitchen.

5. Tolerance. The girls are getting along in their shared room better than I had expected. I hear them chatting together at night, and they negotiate the use of a favorite lotion or book. While I know Marissa will be excited to move into her new room, I suspect that both of them will be a little sad and miss the camaraderie of sharing a room.

Why We're Remodeling

It's time.

We've been living in our house for nearly 14 years. It's time that it finally fit our family's needs.

The location is amazing, the neighborhood unbeatable. And we love the charm of our older home.

What we don't love is that there is no bathroom on our first floor. There's only one actual bathroom in the whole house. (There is a toilet and sink in our laundry room downstairs, but they don't count as a bathroom, according to the appraiser.)

Did I mention that in less than a month our first-born will be a teenager? She is already up to 45-minute shower/private time in the bathroom, God help us if she begins wearing make up.

We don't love the cramped kitchen, where the main traffic pattern through the house goes straight past the stove.

Oh, the stove. Did I mention that there is no countertop space next to it? If I need to take a lid off a pot to stir some spaghetti sauce I take the chance of whacking a family member in the face with it as I search for a flat surface to place it. You can often hear "hot pan coming through!" during dinner prep. And I can't open the oven door if someone has the fridge door open -- they collide.

It's time.

For years Wayne and I have sat on our patio in the summer, looking at the back of the house and dreaming. What if we expanded the kitchen? What if we expanded the bathroom upstairs? What if...what if?

And now, we find those "what ifs" becoming reality. We are in disbelief that we are actually doing this, even as I look out at a new crawl space and framing wood stacked neatly in our backyard, about to become our addition.

"Where am I supposed to poop?" thinks Beauty.

Best of all, we are incorporating parts of our history into our home. One wall of our kitchen will be adorned with wood from Wayne's grandfather's barn, the original homestead of the Horsman family. We hope to fill the walls in the dining room with photos of the Upper Peninsula, where I spent many a summer as a child.

We cannot wait until it's all complete. But, we get to live through the middle part. Marissa will have to bunk with Lindsey for about two months. We will be without a kitchen for about that amount of time. Hopefully it'll be grilling weather most of that time.

Somehow I think we'll survive as a family; we've got our eye on the prize.