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!