Waking to Hammers

Wow. I was woken up to hammering this morning and was thrilled! Things have been going a little slowly (hence the lack of blog posts). Demo took longer than normal and now they’ve been waiting on our engineer for drawings (we needed a structural engineer because we’re taking out the three walls in our unit). Apparently doing this causes our house to be more unstable in an earthquake so the drawings are important. Totally worth it though, right?

We had an interesting morning last weekend when the garbage truck and five guys showed up to haul all the trash out and there were two cars parked in our parking spots so they couldn’t start working. I would like to think I would never tow anyone, but seeing 5 guys stand there for over an hour literally killed me. They found one of the car owners in a restaurant down the street and were able to get started after 1.5 hours of standing around. Our parking notices aren’t ‘official’ yet, so we technically couldn’t call a tow truck on the cars even if we wanted to.

So, we were happy to hear hammering this morning, when it’s been QUIET the last three mornings. They’re framing out the closets and the walls where we’re closing the pocket doors between the bedrooms on both floors. This should take only two days and then they NEED the drawings to go any further. Unfortunately, our drawing guy is swamped. So far, only two weeks behind (and we started three weeks ago). 

Our Kitchen

The good news is that we’ve almost decided on the cabinets for the rental. The woman we’ve been dealing with has been awesome. It’s been fun seeing our kitchens come to life. In some drawings at least. We decided not to go with the cheap guys for the rental. Paying a little more to have this woman / designer draw everything out for us (she owns a counter top store as well) seems worth it. The cheap cabinets look… well.. cheap. Especially when you get up close. We weren’t too impressed with the IKEA cabinets either. We want to get top dollar for this rental, so are going with a little more style. I also bought appliances and washer/dryer for the rental this weekend. 

Rental Kitchen

Jimmy had a small victory at the building department as well. We didn't notice that the permit guy corrected the type of windows we wanted to do. SF has really strict building codes and generally only allows wood windows on the front of buildings. We tried to go for fiberglass and that's what we got bids for in the front (wood is a lot more expensive and we have 11 front windows). We realized yesterday when ordering the windows that he wrote this change in. Thankfully we saw it before we ordered the windows. Jim was able to go down to the department and have them change it. They even pulled up Google Earth and looked at our current windows and said they looked great (thanks dad!). That was the deciding factor.

Headed up to wine country for the 3-day weekend. We agreed to not speak about the renovation. That seems to be all we’re talking about. At least in the last 24 hours it’s been more movement and decisions than me complaining about how slow this is going. We even tried good cop/bad cop with the contractor. I was the bad cop last night and it didn’t work. (although they were hammering at 7:30 this morning) = maybe it did work! 

Peace out. - Bad cop.

Demo Update: Is it time to start building yet?

So, the place is officially ripped apart!  See our kitchen behind Jim!  Only one mistake, the built-in bookshelf was ripped out of the rental downstairs.  Oh well.  They're going to try to put it back in, or take it out of ours and put it in downstairs (that wall is coming out in our unit). 

Here's some footage:

Our Unit - Demo Update

I'm bummed I forgot my hard hat for this video...

The hole in the wall where the bookshelf was!

So sad..  Such beautiful trim. 

Cabinets: So Many Choices!

This kitchen designer was recommended to us.  Her instructions are to look through her portfolio of jobs and pick kitchens we like:

http://www.timelesskitchens.com/

Now that's a fun assignment!  It's so weird that we're doing two kitchens with different goals (or doing two apartments with different goals I should say).  With the rental, we are focused on mass appeal and budget.  For our kitchen, we're basically trying to get the sweetest kitchen possible with the budget we have afer everything else has been accounted for.  Our appliances are the last item we're going to buy.  ie - the price of our stove depends on where we are with our budget in three months.  {man.. I really want that nice stove!}. 

Feel free to chime in on your favorite cabinets!

Demo: First Reaction

Gulp.  So we did an initial walk-through after the demo has started and here's my first reaction. Pretty funny.

Demo - first look video!

I'll have a full demo report this weekend.  Also, a little sad that the box trim had to be taken out in the rental living room, which you see where the wall is basically missing (where one of the walls is missing I should say).

Here's a look at the two soon to be baths.  The room next to me was the kitchen pantry:

Also, here's a look at the front two rooms:

Week 2: Pre-Demo Walk Through

We made a quick video to explain everything that we're doing in our unit.

Pre-Demo Walk Thru

Week 1: It just hit me

Why do I always feel the need to have a project? As if remodeling two units down to the studs wasn’t enough of a project. I’ve decided to write about it. Thanks for the idea Lindsay! When I brought this up to Jimmy, he insisted that it would be fun, that I keep talking about wanting to start writing again, get more creative and learn something new (here goes). 

So the story… We’ve lived next to ‘the duplex’ for the last six years. When we heard the owner was moving out, I decided to put a letter in the mailbox saying that we were interested in buying the house. Long shot, I know. Lindsay and Marion were in the car with Jimmy when I called him and asked if it was too ‘aggressive’ of me to do it. He thought it was a great idea. A couple days later we see some workers in the house. We stop by and see my letter on the floor. Jimmy asks them to give it to the owner, which they do. A week later, I get a call from the owner’s niece / agent and we decide to meet at Denny’s in Berkeley to make an offer. The rest is history. Actually, 75 days under contract, a lender who was impossible to please, and the rest is history.

We’ve been in the house at least 20 times while we were under contact because with the rehab type of loan we got, we needed bids from EVERYONE to submit to the lender, which means 2 plumbers, 2 electricians, 2 contracts, 2 painters, 2 window companies, etc. had to walk through. And of course at various happy hours, we walked through it with 10 other friends.

We walked into the house for the first time this week as owners. Let’s just say I was completely freaked out. Throughout the bidding process while we were under contract, we were really idealistic of what we really could do with the place. Now, it just looks like a ton of work! I’m glad that we went through all the bidding process already, because we could just be at that starting point now and work wouldn’t actually start for another month.

The first day of 'rehab', we had our first wake up call, which we decided was the start of working on our patience. I met the contractor at 8am, thinking there would be a demo crew, but he explained that he only needed a set of keys, that he didn’t have a demo crew until Monday. Uhhh. First surprise. Jimmy was already at the building department pulling the permit, which he spent hours doing. We both came home pretty stressed out that we were already running 3 days late and pulling the permit was really tough.
First lesson – every time we walk into the house, expect that something will be wrong. Be pleasantly surprised if nothing is wrong.

Second lesson - be ready for the time commitment. We had three 7-7:30am meetings this week and three other lunchtime meetings and haven’t started any work yet.

So.. starting on Monday, which is really exciting. We’re shooting for getting a renter in by August to help with August mortgage and hoping to get us moved in by September 1. Wish us luck.  I’d love to use this to get feedback on ideas (we have so many!), share our story of a summer of rehab, and get creative!

Here are the before videos I took on our first walk through.  

First Floor Video

Second Floor Video