kitchen on a truck

We said a fond farewell last night to our lovely dining room light fixture and harvest gold oven. By lunch time today, everything was gone. A complete kitchen was in the truck's trailer- some assembly required. Removing the dining room cabinetry revealed a 3rd level of linoleum we hadn't seen yet- each layer worse than the one above it. They put in 2 windows and wrapped the addition yesterday, and today got in the last window and the slider. Tonight we had our first grilled meal. It was an easy one- hot dogs and sausages. We'll save the pancakes on the grill for the weekend.

Views

It's been hazy recently with the field burnings, but when it is clear we will have this view of Sisters from the dining room and over the sink in the kitchen (the mountains aren't THAT close- you do need a good camera lens).

Bye Bye Birdie

Our lovely bird tiles are leaving. We lost some on Monday, and the remainder of the tiles, and the remainder of our kitchen will be taken out on Thursday. I think if we quit now, our kitchen looks much better than it did a week ago- removing the cabinetry over the peninsula makes a world of difference. Also removing the plastic shielding for the florescent lights, which covered the entire kitchen ceiling, helped. They didn't intend on removing the kitchen window yet, but apparently it wasn't attached to anything and came out after removing the molding. Today more work was done on the roofing. Richard and I have emptied out the kitchen except for 2 cabinets of food. Richard spent time tonight emptying closets. By Monday, everything upstairs, including Owen's room and the spare bedroom (otherwise known as my "closet") needs to be packed up and moved downstairs for the ceiling guys. Fun weekend ahead! All the lights were ordered yesterday. The remaining decisions are around paint colors, but that isn't urgent.

Top and Sides

The trusses were put up on Friday, and the third wall was framed. We will have our great view out the window in the dining room. This morning we emptied most of the kitchen while Susie and Todd took Owen to the park. We are setting up a temp kitchen in the laundry room- we have lots of room in there, since it's the same size as our current kitchen. Richard has some ambitious plans of gourmet grilling each night. I have some plans for take out. Likely we'll do a bit of both.

Good-bye slider

This morning, Owen and I enjoyed the last morning in our dining room with lots of sunlight from our sliding glass door. By our lunchtime progress meeting with Dean and Martine, the designer and project manager, the door was gone. By dinner, the room was plywood'ed in, and the addition was partially framed.

This weekend we need to empty out part of the kitchen, and by next weekend we need to have all of upstairs emptied out for the ceiling work. We have begun moving downstairs- the computer, fish tank, and some shelves so far. Still a lot more to go!

Posts and Subfloor

This week, they demo'ed the section of the porch that will become the dining room. Then Dean and Buddy put up the posts, the beams, joists, and subfloor.

Footers

Day one through day four of work included Dean, the lead carpenter, digging huge holes in our backyard. The original plan was for small holes, and wheelbarrows worth of cement. The soil engineer and the city of Corvallis intervened, and we ended up with 52" square holes, 2.5 feet deep. And a cement mixer and pumping truck.

Before

Richard and I bought this house in Corvallis in October of 2006, after a 5 month search for houses in the area. We love this house. The location is perfect- on a cul-de-sac, on top of the hill with a great view of Corvallis and the mountains to the east, and 0.2 miles from my sister. We have a quiet street and wonderful neighbors. The house is reverse living, so most of the time we are upstairs in the kitchen, dining room, living room or bedrooms. Downstairs is a daylight basement with a large play room, and even larger room without a title, and a guest room. The size and layout is exactly what we wanted.

HOWEVER... once we sold our house in San Diego (after a year on the market) we began to get serious about trying to remove some of the 1970 from this house. After 5 years in our San Diego house, we left it in beautiful condition with wall colors and style that fit us perfectly. After a year in this house in OR, we had yet to paint a wall. There are so many little things that we wanted to do, but so many large ones too, that we felt paralyzed.

We met with several designers and builders, and chose to work with Powell Construction, who does full service design/build. We took the process of deciding what to do very slowly- it has been more than a year since we started talking to contractors. A few times, Richard and I got cold feet and decided to just get new appliances and not bother with the big stuff. But we ultimately signed off on the design and wrote a big check, and 2 weeks ago Powell broke ground on our remodel.

Here are some "before" pictures. For a house our size, we have a ridiculously small kitchen. We discussed lots of ways to enlarge it, none of them very feasible or functional. The current design compensated for the small kitchen by adding lots of cabinetry and even an oven into the dining room. We definitely use the space, but absolutely hate the design.

We decided to put the kitchen where the current dining room is, and then bump out the house to put a dining room on our existing deck. We will also be removing the popcorn ceiling from all of upstairs, and putting in hardwood floors in most of upstairs (except for the bedrooms). We will be painting all of upstairs and all of outside (Richard's painting the inside, a professional is doing the outside). We initially were going to replace the windows, but that is a project for another year. The time table is 2.5 to 3 months, the planned end date is the first week of October.