Remodeling Journal: Demo Day, Part 1

I’ve been back and forth and back and forth again. Do I want to post all while this is happening or not? So many questions. I finally decided I’d love to have a journal of it all and why not post it here. So we’re going backward, back to November 29, 2018, to be exact. That’s the date that we closed on our house.

Hubby and I may have been a little excited to sign on the house if you can imagine. We got to the place early and there is a coffee shop around the corner so I convinced him to get coffee. A morning coffee date :). He also sent our realtor a message asking if she’d like coffee. She said she was good. Can’t say we didn’t try.

Finally, it was time to go in and sign our life away… haha… just kidding… sort of. It sure feels like it when you’re signing for a house. This is our second house after all… We sold the first back in 2016. Wow, that seems like forever ago.

One thing to note… poor Stephanie threw her back out the night before. She was walking in like a decrepit old lady. Probably something she doesn’t care to remember, but I like fun little facts.

One other thing to note here… These pictures are from the first 2 days.

Let the Demo Begin

The first thing we did was head home and change the locks on the door. Then I walked around and took a crapton (yes, that’s a word) of before shots. Even more than the few that you saw on the house post. In fact, I took 94 photos of the before. Sad really… but I might have been excited.

I told hubby that if we have a housewarming party, we should print off the before pictures and place them in each room to show where we came from. Just a thought… might be silly.

The Kitchen

One of the first things that had to be remodeled was the kitchen. The wall to the right of Jared initially was going to be taken out. After hubby crawled up in the attic, we realized it was a load bearing wall, that wasn’t properly supported, so we decided to leave the wall.

The dishwasher still had dishes from the previous owner. In case you missed some of the backstories, the guy passed away in my parent’s fence row and was found a couple days later. Kind of a sad deal. Then his kids and possibly ex-wife came in, got what they wanted and left the rest. They had a sheriff escort and everything. It was a weird deal.

We wound up selling the dishwasher and the stove. As hubby and Jared were delivering these items to the same lady, just a couple miles from their turn off someone slammed on their brakes in the middle of the road causing hubby to have to also. The stove slammed into the cab of the truck and busted the oven door puller (not the door, just what you use to open it). The lady still bought it anyway. Yey :).

So after 2 days: here’s what the kitchen looks like.

What I was doing

I hung a wreath. Why not? So the front storm door was sprung and wouldn’t stay shut. Initially, we decided to tie it shut, but that wasn’t really feasible so we took the storm door off completely.

I also hung Christmas lights. I got made fun of for this… But I didn’t totally care. I threatened to put my Christmas tree up there… I didn’t, but I did threaten. They weren’t going to keep me from putting up Christmas lights though.

1. Because I was so darn excited.
2. To help people know the house had been bought and they’d hopefully quit snooping around.

Zulily still showed the house for sale so people kept looking.

We also had a roll off brought in for demo day. I swear it’s become a permanent yard ornament :).

The Bathroom

We really wanted to get the bathroom demoed and put back together so we’d have a bathroom at the house. So far, here we are in January and still no bathroom. haha. Jokes on us.

Plans were to do away with the bathtub and make it just a shower. New toilet, new vanity.

Initially this closet had a water heater in it. The house had 2 water heaters. We’ve combined them down to 1 water heater and decided to tear this closet out. It opened up the bathroom quite a bit. I guess since I can’t have 2 bathrooms, a bigger one at least helps make that better.

After we condensed it down to 1 water heater, this was going to be a room for the HVAC, but as I mentioned above, we got to tear it out. The HVAC went into the ceiling.

She even got to help with her new toolkit. We bought her her own pink tool kit as a welcome home present.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ytqj3S2hgA

See how that opens up the bathroom. Now, there will be a door so some of that area will be condensed back down, but it gave room for a bigger vanity, which I have and all put together sitting in Abug’s room right now. Everyone laughs when I show them the bathroom pieces/parts because they are scattered all over the house.

When the bathtub came out, we saw that it wasn’t secured down like it should have been and there was a lot of water damage. In fact, you could see the back side of the siding through the inside of the bathroom. Not such a good thing.

Then the ceiling wasn’t initially coming out, instead it was coming out of the kitchen, but they decided to take it out of the bathroom instead.

Stay tuned for more because this isn’t the end of demo day!!