First Week

Well, we've been staying in the house for a week now. Whew. We have survived! We went ahead and went full throttle and had some walls knocked down right when we moved in. The thinking behind that decision is that we will never do it if we wait, which would probably be the case. We talked and talked about doing that in our Deer Park house, but we lived there for 6 years and never touched it or even painted the kitchen (and we left the dated wallpaper up)!

Here are some BEFORE pictures. We ended up taking out the small pantry you see in the picture below too.

We also had this beam repaired. The previous owner apparently took out a wall and it was not braced properly and had begun to sag.

This wall is being removed from the countertop up. And all of the upper cabinets along the wall where the sink is along with the soffit.

And this wall straight ahead is being removed as well. This entry going into the formal living/dining area. We will set-up a table in there and it will be our main homeschool area.

Here we go...in progress.

All of the sheetrock is gone!

Walls are gone, beams are up, pantry is gone, and upper cabinets and soffits are out.

Another view.

It took them about 10-11 hours and once they finished up, plumbers came to reroute the gas line for the stovetop. Since then we have had an electrician come out and give us a quote on hiding all of this electrical and putting in some more lighting. We are currently waiting on his quote for the work. Today we also had a foundation guy come out and inspect it and we are all clear...NO ISSUES! That was a concern.

Our current (and I say that loosely) plan of action is to get in contact with someone to work with us on putting the kitchen back together. We want to do some of the work, but some of it we will leave to the professionals. We need to pick out paint colors for all of the bedrooms and start painting them. Once they are painted, we can having floor installed and put the rooms together.

We are only a week in and this has been a journey for me already. This has been a huge change in living conditions for all of us. The kids have been very flexible and have barely complained at all. In fact, they have been outside playing so much that it confirms this was the right decision.

And we could end up in a hotel at any minute if I'm being completely honest. I'm trying to hang on until we really need to be out (like when we have workers here) to get a hotel. Until it all gets finished we are trying to live with minimal items in the house, which is nice in a sense of keeping it simple and basic, but on the other hand you feel like you are camping! Just keeping it real over here.

We've had a few meals on the back patio and the weather has been super nice, which has been a blessing.