We have entered the phase of the remodel I think is best described as “Zeno’s Paradox.” Stuff keeps happening, we’re definitely approaching being finished…without ever actually getting there. I am beginning to despair that I’m ever going to live in this house, just when I’ve discovered that the remodel is completely and totally excellent and I really WANT to live there.

On to the house:

The porta-potty isn’t staying. It doesn’t fit with the color scheme.

A closeup of the tilework:

After you walk in the front door there’s the entry way, and the coat closet, and the powder room:

Let’s get straight to the kitchen, because that’s the room everyone talks about.

Yes, there it is, folks, the stove I have talked about endlessly. Let’s get a closeup of that, shall we?

The hood:

The backsplash:

And then the part of the kitchen that makes everyone who sees it go, “Ooooo”… The pantry. There’s the outer bit of the pantry, which has the china closet (directly ahead) and the cookbook bookshelves (to the right)

Then there’s the part of the pantry that goes behind a door:

Down the hallway is my office:

And the guest room, including the guest bath:

Upstairs there’s our room:

and our bathroom:

A closeup of the wall tile:

And the tile around the mirror:

The shower’s pretty good too:

All of the doors in the house kind of look like this:

The handles are excellent:

Out in the backyard, among the variety of landscaping, the barbecue area is finally coming together:

And the gate to the backyard quite nice, with a cool detail in the wood—cut-outs of leaves from the tree in our front yard:

The cabinets are in! The wood floors are in (and hand-scraped, and stained, and coated with whatever they coat hardwood floors with). Lots of interior painting and staining and what have you is happening.

This is the current front of the house. And…this is pretty much what it’s going to look like (save some wrought-iron work that needs to be added, and lights.) The plaster is up. The color is great. We are loving the look of the house.

Here we see one wall of the kitchen. The big hole is where our fridge will be going. Since this picture was taken, the island has been installed, so it looks a little more cramped now.

The other side of the kitchen L. The space is for my range, still sadly unpacked.

Just to the right of the above picture is the pantry/built-ins corner. For example, the built-in china cabinet.

And the pantry. This is one wall of the pantry. The other wall is shelves from floor to ceiling. Yes, my pantry rocks.

One wall of my office. Just look at those bookshelves. If you have to have built-ins, make them gorgeous, you know?

The other side of the office, a.k.a. the side I’ll look at every day.

Most of the cabinetry (shelves, cabinets, bathroom vanities, etc.) looks like this:

The painted stuff looks like my office. The stained wood (like the doors, or the windowsills), will look like this:

Yeah. ROCK.

This house is going to be great. I CAN’T WAIT.

Biggest changes: we have drywall! And stucco! And lots of canned lighting installed in the ceiling!

And here is the front of our house, all nicely stuccoed, although not as of yet plastered. (Last week they put up two sample plaster patches for us to choose, and one was clearly the right one. Of course, I do not have a picture of this.) I myself don’t care for the roof tile arrangement, but I’ve been told that I’ll come to enjoy that as one of the key features of the remodel.

A closeup of the front steps—concrete and stucco oh my! Those red bars sticking out are going to connect with the wrought iron railing that’s going to be installed. The bit of wiring sticking out at the lower left will be for lighting that will be installed.

The front door. Isn’t that molding cool? Also, the rafter tails above it? Well, we certainly think so, and we’re paying quite handsomely for them, so I certainly hope we like the look.

More of the front of the house, with a detail of the porch railing. Again, wrought iron will be installed in the middle of the U.

The kitchen. If this were a more recent picture, you’d see a gigantic crate on the right hand side, underneath the stove ventilation hood (and doesn’t that look like it’s going to be cute!), and that gigantic crate contains my new stove. Which weighs 700 pounds, so I don’t think you should try to steal it.

The living room, not yet drywalled like the rest of the house. That large white rectangle marked “TV” (actually marked “Clay’s TV,” after Clay, who’s been working on the project almost a year) is a mockup of the TV we’re going to have hanging there…in all three dimensions. The architect didn’t believe we could have a TV that is that thin; we told him that living in the future is really cool and he’ll like it a lot. The fireplace chimney frame has also been installed, but I don’t have a pic of that.

What posting would be complete without a look at the stairs? Well, actually, the stairs haven’t changed too much from last time (except there’s drywall!). Those wooden railings are going to be replaced by wrought iron…but other stuff has to happen first, like the floors need to be installed.

And that’s it for this month in our house remodel!

Let’s recap: This is what the house used to look like:

This is what it looks like today:

And here’s a bit of the side of the house. You can see the new bay window over the kitchen sink peeking out:

Half of our new living room (fireplace is the same):

(Apparently I took no good pictures of the old living room. Which should tell you how often we used it. Oh well.)

And here’s one of my favorite new bits. Remember the old stairs?

We ripped those out entirely and put in a new staircase (the only addition to the house) that’s filled with windows to let a little bit of light in:

Here was our bedroom—that would be with all the furniture and bookcases removed and some detritus left:

Here is the new room, which swapped sides of the house with the bathroom, so as to take advantage of the light. Which is why we have these gigantic windows. Yes, we’ll be getting curtains: stop that.

While we were there for a remodeling meeting the construction guys discovered they couldn’t get the big window up the stairs, so right outside the kitchen they built a scaffold on the fly (seriously—one guy held up a 2×4, the other guy banged a nail into it without even looking) and hoisted the window up the side of the house. I turned to Darin and said, “We should get getting a police chase through here any moment with a window like that around.” And then they installed it:

I am still completely stunned that something as big and permanent as a house really turns out to be nothing more than extraordinarily expensive Silly Putty (well, in the right hands).

It now fits in to the spirit of the season more:

(Hm. I clearly need to visit only on days when I can stand in the exact same place to take pictures, which I couldn’t do on this particular day because there were construction trucks everywhere!)

And now you can do fun things as look in the front door and see the back yard:

There used to be a coat closet/pantry blocking us seeing anything through the front door: gone, gone, gone.

That bit of construction on the second floor that you can see above the front door: that is the extension we’re getting to our master bedroom.

I couldn’t get into the back yard, but I hope to get pix of the new staircase for next month.

They had to stop for several days because of a hellacious rainstorm we had that came through. The contractor said they put up tarps, which lasted all of about 20 minutes.

Our house, with small boy

The front steps, then and now

The front door, then and now

The kitchen

Ooo, that was a little messy. Let’s try that again. The kitchen, then and now

That pile of wood? Is all of the wood flooring we had put in a few years ago. Easy come, easy go. We’ve donated almost all of our appliances and much of the interior—flooring, drywall, wrought iron—to Habitat for Humanity, which apparently can use all of it in new projects they’re doing, which gives us a three-fer: a warm fuzzy feeling, satisfaction knowing we haven’t exploded the landfills more than we normally do, and a tax deduction. Yay, team.

The back deck

That bit where the red-handled pole is coming out of the deck is where they’re laying the foundation for the new staircase.

Since I’ve taken these photos, they’ve also removed the front porch and the roof. But those pictures will have to wait for next month’s entry.

What’s weird about this whole process is seeing that our big, solid house is nothing of the sort. Easy to change the facade, easy to change all of the details. As I said to Darin, we could have gone from Mediterranean Revival to Tudor if we’d wanted to. (His response: “No, no we couldn’t.”) It’s just a big framework with plaster stuck on the outside.