Catching up

So I am gonna attempt to catch this blog up to real time in this one  single post. We left off at the end of week one, which went as planned and almost smoothly. I say almost because of a little incident  that happened on Thursday (May 9th). As we got to the building that night to see what had been done that day, we noticed that the garage door was stuck half way opened. We thought, “well, that stinks, glad we are not staying here”, parked at the Locust street garage, checked out the apartment and then left. 
The next day Jerry found out that it had been one of our workers that had hit the garage door opener with a ladder that was sitting at the back of his truck . Ooooops! Thankfully the guy took responsibility and even took care of getting it fixed the next day.

Week two also went as planned. However it didn’t feel to me that a lot got done, mainly because all they did was electrical work. Physically the space didn’t change much. They cut wholes in the ceiling for our new can lights, ceiling fans , moved outlets around, added new outlets, wired the living room for surround sound and probably did a lot more than I know or care to understand. Jerry could tell you all about it!

By the end of week two we were given our estimated moving day - June 3rd! At that point it meant we only had two more weeks to go! I got super excited!!

On week three the HVAC guys came over and relocated and replaced our round vents with rectangle ones.  This one is in the master bedroom:

This one is in the living-room:

 Also, all the blocking got done during week three. If you don't know what blocking is, don't  you feel super ignorant.  You are not alone! I had never heard of it up until a few weeks ago. It is those pieces of wood attached to the metal framing that you see on the picture above and it's there to provide support for things we are going to hang on the walls, such as TVs, furniture, and (maybe) electrical fireplaces.  

This one is for the guest bedroom TV:

And here you see the top one for the master bedroom TV and the bottom one for an electric fireplace (if we can find a cool one):

The pocket door to our walk-in closet also got framed. That's right, we'll only have one walk-in closet for both of us. Originally we were gonna divide the laundry room/pantry in half and that was going to give us the ability to have 2 walk-in closets in the master. But, it turned out there was this huge, massive, metal pipe running in the wall right where we needed the door to the closet to be. So, Jerry literally went back to the drawing board and re-designed our closet configuration. This is the updated floor plan:

So this is the framed pocket door for the closet:

 And last but not least, the sheet rock arrived on Thursday. I was there and saw them bringing them up one of the elevators. I was so glad to see that they fit in there. We thought they were gonna have to carry them up 6 flights of stairs!! Those guys were sweating hard just bringing them from the elevators to the apartment!

       

                                                                       

So this past Friday (May 25th) they put the sheet rock up. Now we have walls!!!

Master Bedroom

Living Room

Guest Bedroom showing opening to closet on the left

Dining Room to the left, Master door opening to the right

Everything was going according to schedule until we had the inspection on Friday. It turns out that we won't be able to put new sheet rock on the ceiling to cover up the horrendous popcorn finish. We decided to do that because not only do we have "popcorn on steroids" ceilings, but also the previous owners painted over them, which made it impossible to scrape the popcorn off. So our plan was to just attach new 1/4'' sheet rock to it. However due to fire code the ceiling sheetrock needs to be fire rated and the fire rated kind only comes in a much thicker- and heavier-  size (can't remember exactly precise number). So mister inspector said "no, no". Now we are waiting to see what his suggestion will be, but most likely they'll have to rip off the old ceilings and put the new smooth sheetrock up. Bottom line is: we are not moving back into our place on June 3rd. We rescheduled our moving day to June 11th. 

Oh well, what's another week or two, right? We've only been "moving" since the end of February, when we started packing up our old house. 
No biggy! It's all good! It will be worth it in the end! (Repeat three times, five times a day!) 

So stay tuned for more updates! We are all caught up now!

A Thousand Words

We didn’t stay in the hotel for very long. In fact we only spent one night there. After that we “moved” to my brother-in-law’s and sister-in-law’s house, again. We had stayed with them for 2 weeks  (March 2nd - March 16th) right after we sold the house but were still not done with the closing process of the apartment. They always knew we were gonna have to move out of the apartment again eventually and they kept the invitation open for us to come back anytime we needed to. So we did :-) 

We really enjoy spending time with them and with our nieces! Those two girls are super cute, smart, funny and full of joy!!  And we are soooo thankful for their hospitality!! 
Thank you Tim and Polly for letting us crash at your house and take over your guest bedroom. You’ll have free baby-sitting for downtown date nights for life!

So on days 2 and 3 more floors were removed and on days 4 and 5 they got all the framing done! Due to fire code, they have to be metal. Here are some pics

These are the original terrazzo floors from 1929:

And since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, I suppose I've given you more than enough to read in this post!  

Demo time

So we spent the weekend boxing all of our things again and taking them to our storage unit in the building’s basement. And we each packed a bag of clothes to grab and go, that way we would be able to stay until the dust got too deep and we were forced to leave. But on that first demolition day -Monday May the 6th - when we got back to the  apartment at the end of the day, it was clear to us that there wasn’t a chance we would be spending the night there. 

Let me tell you, the workers hadn’t played around! They had knocked down walls and ripped a big part of the floors up. Jerry was there for part of the day and captured some of the work in progress: 

And this is what the placed looked liked by the end of day 1 :

                                      

The dust was just too much for my lungs and throat to handle. It only took about 10 minutes in there for my throat to start scratching and for me to start coughing. So, after looking around for a few minutes marveling at how quickly a space can be transformed by the power of sledge hammers, we grabbed our bags and off to a hotel we went. 

First Decisions

Like I mentioned on the previous post , after two long weeks of waiting ,only  two contractors got back to us with quotes. They were two very reputable and well established companies in the area. Since their quotes were not that much different from each other, it wasn’t really a super easy decision. But  after some consideration and research we decided to go with McCamy Construction. They have done some work downtown and ultimately the fact that they said they could deliver what we wanted a bit faster than the other company tipped the scale in their favor.

We have been so pleased with them so far! They handled all the permitting issues with the city. And believe me, there were some silly bureaucratic issues that delayed the start of our renovations for another 3 weeks! 

Due to the scale of the project - basically gutting the entire thing! - we are doing our reno in phases so that our savings don’t get totally depleted. In this initial phase all the floors in the apartment, with the exception of bathrooms and kitchen, will be removed, walls are coming down, new walls are being built, electrical is being rewired, the popcorn ceiling is being covered with new sheet rock and we are getting all new doors, trims, baseboards and crown. 

So while we waited on the permitting process, we already started making some decisions, starting with the floors. I’ve always been a fan of very dark hardwood floors, but since we’re talking about a small space, we agreed that light would be the way to go. After visiting a couple of flooring showrooms we decided on this Natural Maple:

You'll be glad to know the floors are ordered and on their way!

We've also picked our crown molding:

And we are hoping we can get 3 panel doors like these:

Working on these first design decisions definitely helped me cope a little better with the delayed beginning of construction and kept me sane during the "limbo" phase. And by the way, thank God for Pinterest and Houzz!

So, just when I had adapted to living in the midst of boxes and suitcases and sleeping on a mattress on the floor and eating dinner lying on the living-room rug seemed perfectly normal   and acceptable behaviors, we got good news! On May 3rd, a Friday, we heard from McCamy that we had gotten everything straightened out with the city and demolition would start on Monday, May 6th.

Well, time to pack....again.

Limbo

One of the first things we learned about renovating in a building downtown is that we were going to need permits from the city. After a little investigation Jerry found out that he needed to do some drawings of the existing floor plan and then of the changes intended to be done. Here are his first drawings:

Current floor plan (except for double vanity in master bath. Ooops!)

Desired floor plan (this is where double vanities should be!)

We also used these drawings to show contractors what we wanted to do with the place.  About 5 different contractors came over to the apartment to look at the space and give us a quote. We could tell that some of them were a bit overwhelmed with the project. I guess the main intimidating factor was our location. Being right in the middle of downtown and on the 6th floor brings some logistical difficulties, such as parking, transporting large construction materials (framing, sheet rock...) and disposing of demolition debris. 

So I actually wasn’t too surprised when 3 of the 5 contractors we interviewed never even called us back with a quote. And it took nothing less than 2 WEEKS to hear the quotes from the other two contractors. Remember how we wanted renovations to start ASAP? Well , so much for that!

This is how we were living while we waited for that first strike of the sledge hammer into our walls - I call it our “limbo” phase:

It didn’t take long for us to start getting a little impatient with our “limbo” situation, so to feel a small sense of accomplishment we started doing a few things on our own. We knew we wanted the windows to match all the trim in the house, and since we are going to change them to white, we got ourselves some white paint, a couple of brushes and started painting the windows on the weekends. Let me tell you, those are some massive, intricate windows! We are still not done with all of them!

We also went ahead and painted the walls that were not going to be demolished. It’s kind of silly because we know they're probably going to get dirty and damaged with the construction chaos, but hey! We were just trying to trick our brains into thinking we were making some progress here!

The blinds that were on the windows were super old and kind of pink, so we replaced those too. Check the new ones out:

And one more thing we did a lot during this , let's say  "transitional phase", was just enjoy downtown living!