Cabinets are Installed in the Study!!!

Hello everyone! I hope that you had a fantastic weekend because I sure know that I did! Matt came home from Aberdeen on Friday for a few days and my in-laws made it home safely after embarking on a two-month long safari through Africa (they are a seriously brave and adventurous pair). It was a weekend filled with happy homecomings and fantastic stories about my in-laws adventures over the pond. I also capped off the weekend at my mother's house for our weekly viewing of Game of Thrones (so freak'n awesome the week) and Mr. Selfridges (the show finally started getting juicy this week too). Good company and good times, it doesn't get much better than that! So after giving you the scoop last week about the DISASTER SET-BACK at the house, I am happy to share with you some actual progress that has been happening around the ol' casa...WE HAVE CABINETS!!!! Our custom cabinets for the study, laundry room, master and guest bathrooms, the game room and for a built-in next to the fireplace were installed and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out.  The post would be way too long if I showed you all the cabinets at once, so I have decided to break them out over a couple entries.  We are starting with the sweet new cabinets in the study/office to kick-off our little tour-o-cabinets. The study is at the top of the stairs and started out as a tiny 8' x 10' room with strange angled ceilings that made it pretty much useless.  The room is highlighted in yellow on the floor plan below.

 

And here is what the room looked like before demo started. 

 

 

Although the room was a cute and cozy, it was just too small (we could barely fit a chair and tiny desk in here) and desperately needed for its walls to be torn down to open the space up.  This is exactly what we did, and once the walls were removed, the tiny room turned into a large landing at the top of the new staircase.  You can see the new open landing highlighted in yellow on the floor plan below.

 

 Here is a view of the landing once the walls were removed and the drywall was installed. 

 

 

Since the landing was such a large and open space once the walls were removed, I thought the back wall would be a great location to put a large built-in desk.  I wanted to create a space that would allow for multiple work stations and give lots of storage.  So here is the design that I came up with:

This design allowed for us to have two large filing cabinets (the base cabinets on each end of the desk), two work stations, a large 36" base cabinet in the middle of the desks for printer and computer tower storage, four large upper cabinets to store all of our paper and office supplies and then some fun open shelves that I can fill with pictures and fun mementos.  Another goal was to keep the area light and bright (because there is not much natural light in the room), so I decided to go with bright white cabinets.  Here are some of the cabinets after they were delivered.

And here are the two filing cabinets.  I cannot wait to have one "go-to" location in the house to store our important documents.  It will make life so much easier to be organized!

And here are the cabinets installed (sorry for the poor picture quality and plastic covering over the base cabinets). I totally love how they turned out!!!

We still need to add the open shelves on the left side of the desk and the butcher block top, but this definitely constitutes progress in my book! Happy days oh happy days!!!

 Tomorrow I am going to show you the laundry room with its loverly cabinets, so I hope you swing back by.  In the mean time, thanks for dropping in and I hope that you have a fantastic day!!!

I am sharing this post on Pinworthy Projects, Inspire Me Please Link Party, Shine on Fridays and Catch as Catch Can Link Party

Long Overdue!

I sincerely apologize for the extreme lack of posts over the past two months.  There has been lots going on that has kept me away: (1) crazy work projects, which amount to crazy work hours; (2) volunteering at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo; and (3) the biggest thing of all...Matt has been back in Aberdeen for the past 8 weeks for work.  So add that all together, and you have one overwhelmed and time crunched gal.  Also, right when we felt like we started to see a tiny light at the end of the renovation tunnel when the drywall went up, we took about 20 monster steps backwards in March and had zero progress throughout the house.  Everyone tells you that a renovation will not always go as planed and to "expect the unexpected". Well, with how smoothly everything went during the demo portion of our renovation (i.e., no hidden skeletons like knob-and-tube wiring or extreme water damage somewhere), I naively thought that we were out of the woods of potential disasters once the electrical, plumbing and HVAC were complete and the drywall was up.  Boy oh boy was I wrong! One thing that I have learned is that drywall actually helps to reveal any issues with a remodel because once walls are up, you can see where there errors are hiding.  For us, the mistake involved the structural beams that hold up the ENTIRE second story and roof of our house.  Yeah, I told you it was a BIG MAJOR HUGE ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE "OUR-HOUSE-COULD-FALL-DOWN" problem!  Basically, about a week after the drywall went up, I noticed a tennis ball-sized bulge popping out of the drywall on corner of the wall where the staircase meets the second story.  I don't have any pictures...so taking a cue from one of my all time favorite blogs Crappy Pictures, I have made my own illustrations (because blog posts are always more fun with pictures).  Here is the basic rundown of what happened:

After I saw that horrible red eyed monster the bulge, I promptly issued a "Houston, we have a problem!" call with the builder. However, when the builder showed up the next day, his reaction was:

Not satisfied since bulges don't typically pop-up on their own for no good reason, I decided to call the engineer over to see if he could explain what was causing the bulge. (and P.S. this is the same engineer who reviewed and stamped our plans as structurally sound, and inspected and  cleared the beams before the dry wall went up).  However, like the builder, the engineer's response was:

At this point I decided to call in the big boys....the dreaded West U inspectors.  I felt certain they would be able to explain what was wrong or, at an absolute minimum, recognize that there was a problem.  Like the engineer, the inspector had previously inspected the beams during the structural inspection and passed them before the dry wall went up.  Well (you might start noticing a pattern), his response was:

Needless to say, I was pretty distraught after being told by three different people that bulges in drywall are (apparently) no big deal. I was beginning to think that I might be crazy or at least too picky.  This is when having Matt on the same continent would have been helpful.  So I called the next best person, my "step dad" Rod, who is a contractor. "Why didn't you have Rod do you remodel?" you ask...well, two reasons.  First, we couldn't afford him (and didn't feel right having him discount his work just for us).  Second, we wanted to have someone that we weren't related to build the house in case there were any issues. That way, we wouldn't feel guilty calling them on it...somethings you just don't want to keep in the family.  Well, as soon as Rod got there, he put a level on the ceiling next to the bulge and immediately said:

We then had a group meeting with Rod, the engineer and the builder to investigate. Once the drywall was removed, we discovered that the framers installed all the structural beams in the house completely backwards! Basically, there were supposed to be two engineered beams that would hold up the weight of the house and then ceiling joist would be hung off of the engineered beams.  Well, one misread of the plans and we ended up with (1) one of the engineered beams being cut in half; and (2) all of the engineered beams (and the entire weight of the second story and roof) hanging off of two 2x10 ceiling joist. UGG!!!! Here's a picture to help explain:

And here is a close-up of the engineered beam that was split in half. 

I'm not going to lie...reliving this whole situation and looking at these pictures again makes me nauseous considering what could have happened if that evil little bulge had not decided to show itself until after the construction was finished or worse, before the house fell down.  So the take away from this post...follow your gut when remodeling or constructing a house.  If you think that something is not right, speak-up.  And keep asking until you are completely satisfied with the answer.  Had I listened to the builder, the engineer and the inspector (cause hey, why would anyone listen to those people...sheesh!), we could have had an absolute disaster on our hands!  We are now moving forward again and making progress, so I will have some happy progress photos tomorrow!

 

Take care and thanks for stopping by (if anyone is still stopping by that is...since I haven't posted in 3 months)!

 

Houston We Have Drywall (& a LaCantina Door)!

Hello everyone!  I hope that you have all been fantastic over the past few weeks.  Sorry about being awol for so long, but Matt and I were in Florence for a week for his work's annual meeting and then I have been going 150% at my job since getting back with a big project that has a tight deadline.  However, I had to share with you the exciting progress happening at the house.  The two biggest things are that we now have drywall and exterior doors! Holla!!!!  So let's take a tour of the casa to see how she looks with walls and doors shall we?

 

First I have to show you the super cool La Cantina door that we added that I first talked about here.  This door separates the living room from the back of the house and looks like a wall of french doors.

 

 

 

However, with the flick of a few locks and tiny bit of pushing....the doors completely fold-up to bring the outside in. Can I getta "TAH-DAD"?!?!?!

I am here to tell you that these bad boys are AWESOME!!! I love them because they literally double the size of the our living room when they are open. We are going to have some serious entertaining happening with these guys during the 8 months out of the year that we have good weather in Houston.  Here is a video of them in action. My commentary does not do justice my super cool happy dance that was happening behind the camera.

 

So now that you have seen the doors in action, I want to take you on a tour of the house with drywall.  Here is the floor plan of the downstairs, so that you can see the placement of the rooms.

 

 



Here is the view into the living room from the back patio.  The wine room is on the right under the stairs, the dining room is on the left of the door, and the entrance to the kitchen is in the left corner of the picture.

This is a view standing with my back to the wine room and looking towards the backyard.  Please excuse the disastrous landscaping (or complete lack there of) because all that will be addressed once we get finished with the remodel.

 

This picture is taken from the middle of the living room so that you can see the dining room.  It is crazy how much bigger everything looks in person once dry wall is up!  I guess it is difficult to judge the size of a room when you only have the studs.  You can also see our front door.  It is all wrapped up for safe keeping...but when the plastic is gone, it is beautiful.  As you can see, it is a similar style to a lot of the door I liked here. I love all the natural light that the windows and sidelights bring into the house.  And it will be even brighter once the protective film is removed from the windows.  Oh I can't wait!!!

 

This next picture shows our master bedroom.  It was a little difficult to photograph with my Canon Elf, but at least you can get a general idea of the room's shape.

 

 

Now onto the master bathroom (A.K.A. Jenn's happy place).  This is a view into the master bath from the master bedroom.  Here you can see the closet is in the back and the walk-in shower on the right. The tub will live to the right of the shower and our vanities will live on the left wall opposite of the shower.

 

This is a picture of the inside of the master closet.  You can't tell much from the photo, but it is 13' long by 10' wide.  I will show you my master plan for the master closet in a later post.

Here is another view of the back wall of the master bathroom. As you can see, the shower will be on the left side of the wall and the claw foot tub will be on the right under the window. We have his and her shower heads and body sprays, along with a rain shower overhead.  Matt gave me so much flack about having a "his-and-her" shower...but I think he will love it once it is all said and done.

Here is a close-up of the shower layout.  Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!!!  This makes me giddy like a school girl!

This is a close-up of the wine room under the stairs.  We are going to have wine shelves in the recessed space on the right and on the back wall. I will show all the details in a later post.

Now we are going to head upstairs.  Here is the floor plan for the second floor so that you can get your bearings.

 



The first thing you see when you head up the stairs is the study.  We will have built-in cabinets and a desk along the back wall.

Next we head into the revised game room.  It's amazing how far it has come since we blew out the front wall.  This is a view from the back corner of the room looking towards the study, which you can see through the door.

Here is another view of the game room from the front side of the house.  We are going to add a built-in bar in the nook on the left.  And through the door, you can see the entrance to the laundry room.  I showed you some of my ideas for the laundry room here.

This is a view of the hallway leading to the back of the house.  To my left is the study and to my right are the stairs, game room and laundry room.  As you walk down the hall, the first door on the left is the entrance to the guest bathroom, the first door on the right is my wrapping room (which is not labeled in this picture), the second door on the right is Bedroom 3 (A.K.A. the "Blue Room"), and the final door in the middle is the entrance to the new bedroom above our master (Bedroom 4).

Here is a picture of Bedroom 4. It is directly above our master bedroom, so is basically identical.

 

 

When you turn around and leave Bedroom 4, you are back in the hall heading towards the study and Bedroom 2 (A.K.A. the "Teepee Room"). As you head down the hall, the first door to my left is the entrance to the Blue Room (which you can't see in this photo) and the second door to the left is my wrapping closet.  I talked about my initial plans for the layout of the wrapping closet here and here.  The first door on the right is the guest bathroom, followed by the study and the Teepee Room.

 

 

Here is a pitiful little picture of part of the guest bathroom. We will have two vanities on either side of the window and to the right are the shower and toilette. I need to invest in a super wide lens so that I can get better pictures for everyone!

 

 

After you exit the guest bathroom and enter the study facing the Teepee Room, this is the view you will see.  To my left are the stairs and to my right is the study.  Directly in front of me is the entrance to the Teepee Room.  Two closets flank the entry into the Teepee Room.

Here is what the Teepee Room loooks like on the inside.  It is a long (23') and narrow (11') room with an arched roof.  This will likely become our kiddo's game room with all sorts of fun murals.  It just feels like a place you want to play when you go in.  I also added built-in storage into the eaves...cause hey, if there is a possible open space, I will use it!  Our builder makes so much fun of me for that - but trust me, we will love all the additional storage at some point down the road, I just know it!  We will have doors on the front of the opening that will look like wainscoting so they won't be so obtrusive. 

  

So that finishes up the tour of the casa with dry wall.  Also, thank you so much for stopping by, I hope that you liked seeing the progress!  Have a wonderful day!!!