In February, we started work on a cosmetic remodel of our main living space upstairs, with a few changes in other parts of the house as well. We hired someone to rip out and replace the flooring in the kitchen, dining, living, front entryway, and office spaces as well as replace all of our wooden blinds upstairs. Next, we had a new cabinet installed in our kitchen to house our brooms and mops. Then, we hired another company to refinish our kitchen cabinets, laundry room cabinets, downstairs cabinets, and stair railings. We also ordered new couches and a recliner, and hired yet another company to refinish our wing-back chair and build an ottoman to match it.
Here's our official before pictures:
This first task was to send our couches to their new home. My sister Chelsea wanted them, so we loaded them up in our trailer and took them up to her house in Ogden. While we were coming, she single handedly got her old couches into her truck and over to D.I. I was pretty impressed with her toughness. After the couches were gone, it looked a little lonely upstairs:
We rolled up our rug and wrapped it in plastic wrap and put big leaf bags on the ends to help protect it for the month that it would be stored in our garage. Since it was the only "furniture" in the room, it got played on a little before we could take it out.
Then, things started reminding us of the day we first saw our house.
Our garage became our temporary storage facility.
And then they came and took out all of our flooring!
The machinery was really loud, and Gabe and I hid out in the basement while they were doing it. He was often distressed about the really loud noises he could here overhead!
We went without flooring for a few days.
Our new flooring was delivered, and I helped my friend (whose company was installing the floors) to haul in most of these boxes of flooring. They were really heavy, and we were really tough!
The company that allegedly installed our cabinets when our house was built crafted a new cupboard to go along with the other cabinets. I was a little giddy when they came to install it. It was like a fine dance trying to orchestrate the timing of all this. The cabinet couldn't go in until the flooring was out and the new flooring couldn't go in until the new cabinet was installed.
Ta-dah!
Finally, the new flooring started going in. It took a couple of days for them to get it all finished, but we love it so much!!!
Next the guys came to re-finish our cabinets. They spent a few days carefully taping up everything, and I didn't envy them the task! Our flooring guys had notices a knick in our dishwasher hose, and so we had a plumber come out to install a new hose.
On Presidents' Day, we went to a movie with family, and when we got out of the theater, we had a message from our painters saying that they had heard water running, and they weren't sure where it was coming from. We got home and started getting our kids in bed, and Michael, who had been downstairs, came up to tell us that there was water in the family room. Sure enough, our carpets were drenched and our baskets of clothes that I had hauled down there (but thankfully hadn't folded yet), were all saturated with water. We got the kids in bed and started drying to get the water up with towels, but then I decided that we had home insurance for a reason and called my insurance company. They immediately sent a team out that arrived after 10 p.m. We watched and helped them take apart our carefully designed basement to work on cleaning up the flood mess. Thankfully, our furniture wasn't damaged.
Our house now had all of its common living spaces basically decommissioned. We were hoping that we would only have a week left of no usable kitchens and no living room, and then we found ourselves with another construction project. Our patience wore really thin and our cabin fever intensified during those weeks of extra construction, and the worst part was that I couldn't really leave the house because I needed to be around to let in the various workers. Our living room got consolidated into piles.
The clean-up crew were at our house until about midnight.
We are hoping that in the next life we will find out what actually happened, but near as we can tell, someone somewhere along the lines turned our dishwasher water back on, and it ran quietly back behind our upstairs kitchen sink and then flooded down through the wall, into the ceiling downstairs, and onto the floor. Miraculously, it didn't do any damage to our new floors, except for a small piece that is under the dishwasher.
We aren't sure who turned the valve on, but our painters were kind enough to take some responsibility. They knocked off the cost of their work to help cover the insurance deductible. It was so great of them, especially because there's no proof that it was them. We highly recommend Telisa's Refinishing!
Our couches were delivered in the middle of the painting and flood clean-up. We took them out of the plastic for a day or two before tucking them carefully back in while the painters painted. We LOVE them! So many people have told me that I'm brave for getting white couches with little kids, but because they are leather, they clean up really easily, much easier than my brown microfiber couches that showed EVERYTHING and wouldn't wipe off very well.
The restoration guys came and cut out our wall. We didn't think we'd see these studs again, and it was so disheartening seeing them. We kept reminding ourselves that we didn't have to do anything to fix it...someone else was on top of it, and thankfully they were.
Finally, everything was taped up and ready to be painted!!
And when the tape, paper, and plastic came down, what we saw was beautiful!
They took another week to finish the doors, which they had taken back to their shop.
And then the restoration guy sent his drywall guy out to rebuild our wall.
Our chair arrived, and it was even lovelier than I had envisioned!
We bought a pantry from IKEA, and built it into our pantry. We could finally do it because we didn't have brooms taking up space in there. We love our shelves and drawers, but it was tricky putting it together in that small space!!
Finally, downstairs was painted...but the color was slightly off, so he had to buy a new brand of paint and repaint it.
And then we finally got our cabinet doors and spirits lifted.
Everything is white except for our island, which is light gray. They also installed boards to create a raised panel look on the front of the island. You can kind of see it if you look through the chairs above.
The stair railings and new white blinds!
The painters installed trim on the top of our laundry room cupboards before refinishing the entire thing. We've loved these cupboards since we installed them a year or so ago, but now we REALLY love them!
The after picture for downstairs was sad because our basement was still a mess. The flooring and cabinet refinishing took about 4 weeks. The basement flooding from start to finish took over a month to get back to normal, so all in all, we had our house torn up for about 2 months.
The carpet was the saddest part. We had picked this amazingly soft carpet when we first finished the basement, and it couldn't be saved. We watched this nice 2-year-old carpet just get ripped out, and we had to move everything out for the new carpet to replace it. We tried our best to match our old carpet, but it's not nearly as soft, and every time I really look at it, I feel sad. I know it's just carpet, but still, it makes me sad. The other frustrating part is that when we first bought the carpet, they salesman told us that it was nylon, and so we were really upset when the restoration company brought us polyester samples. We found out that when they ran an analysis on the original carpet, the analysis revealed that it was actually a polyester carpet. So in addition to having our house flooded, we felt incredibly betrayed by our carpet company that we had loved so much before that.
Finally, by the end of March, we were able to have our basement completely put back together, and life resumed again.
We absolutely love our new house. It took us a while to get used to the changes. Whenever we'd come home after, we'd walk in and go, "Wow! I forgot!" Somewhere in the months afterwards we must have gotten used to it because as I was catching up on our blog these last several weeks, all I could think was, "Oh yeah, our house used to look like that." I love having all the flooring in our great room be the same instead of having slate, laminate, AND travertine, all within visible distance from each other. It feels more open and bigger somehow, despite the flooring being darker. We've just about got our house to the way we want it!
