I say house, because it doesn’t ever really feel like home when you’re in the midst of a remodel.  We bought our house in 2000, not long after we got engaged and decided that buying a house was far more important than throwing a wedding right away. It’s a 1,500 square foot Cape Cod-ish (no fireplace = not really a Cape Cod) house, built in 1970.  The 1970 really showed, so we knew all along that this was a fixer upper.  We started working on the kitchen a year or two after we bought the place, and it took forever because we did most of the work with the help of family and without  much professional help.  This time around, we decided to hire some good friends to replace most of the floors and give the downstairs bath a major face lift while Scott and I handle simple stuff like repainting most of the rooms and shuffling our stuff from room to room so the guys can work.  Scheduling, of course, is tough. 

I’ll skip the before photos–the old carpets were beige and nasty.  The old bathroom had an odd pink tub and 1″x1″ pink and white glittery tiles, but the glitter had tarnished, and there were some obvious problems with the wall behind the shower tiles and tub. I had put a pretty cool mosaic on the old bathroom counter, but then the sink got a bad crack in it during  a party, and there was no way to replace the sink without destroying the counter.  That’s
when I started lobbying really loudly to gut the bathroom. 

I came home from Chicago a couple of weeks ago to find that our friends and contractors Mike and Ben had started demo on the bath. Now, we’re down to the finish work.  That tile on the floor is fantastic.  I love it like I love cake.  The pictures do not do it justice.  Scott and I still have some touch-up painting to do in there, and we need to add the blinds and towel bars and all those touches.

With the bathroom close to completion, the guys moved on to the rest of the floors.  We’re installing bamboo floors in all but the bathrooms, kitchen, and laundry.  I am absolutely enamored of the bamboo. 

And it looks great with our kitchen floor, even before the transition piece is in.

Now we have a lot of a paint colors to choose, and a lot of stuff to move from room to room to room as the work progresses.   It’s hard work, and I may have just broken a toe in a tragic run-in with a step stool.   Kayo and the cats disapprove of all of the work, of course.  Kayo expressed his disapproval on Thursday by running away, in fact, so we’re making cookies for the charming woman who took care of him until she could get in touch with us. 

So, back to working on our house.

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