Oh, The Weather Outside is Frightful

This post was imported from a blog called Contemporation where Amy and I wrote about the renovation of our 80’s contemporary home in Atlanta. That blog is no more but I wanted the content to live on.

No, no, actually it’s been a pretty mild winter so far in Atlanta. “But the fire is so delightful!” Well, we have a fireplace on the 1st floor but it’s been buried behind our kitchen cabinet boxes for a while now and even if it wasn’t, it needs repair before we can have a fire in it. “And since we’ve no place to go, Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Oh, please, please don’t let it snow.

I’ve been meaning to post an update for a while now but our nights and weekends leading up to the holidays were spent deciding on interior finishes, assembling kitchen cabinets and wrapping presents. About 3 weeks ago though, we had a free night and invited my friend Alvaro and his wife Jessica over for our very first dinner party in the new dining room.

That was right after our insulation inspection when we could finally leave out all the foam walls that closed off the new parts of the house at night. Once the insulation was up, the drywall started the very next day. For one night, our cat thought the stack of drywall was her new favorite piece of furniture.

We used the same stack of drywall as the backdrop for our last-minute Christmas card picture.

By now though, all that drywall is hung, mudded and sanded.

As you can see in the picture, above, the old door into the master bathroom is covered up and the entrance is now on the addition side. They also covered the open wall from the bathroom into the pulley shaft. To hang that drywall, the guys had to climb out onto those LVL beams and try not to look 30′ down to the 1st floor. It doesn’t sound that bad, but I actually climbed out onto those beams one night to clean the skylight. It’s a pretty frighting view. Don’t worry though, those pulleys aren’t coming down anytime soon.

The wall on the other side of that room looks better too. They covered over the old window holes and the hall bath is ready to have a door installed. That bathroom is getting an Ikea Godmorgon vanity and the other 2 bathrooms (the master and the new powder room on the 2nd floor) are getting Kohler Persuade vanities like the one in the foreground.

We replaced the old crank out window in the hall bath upstairs with a fixed window because the old one was pretty rotten. When we left the house for Christmas, this room looked quite a bit different. It was ready for tile with hardibacker installed on the floor and shower walls.

The feature of the house that we’re still most excited about is the big front window in our master bedroom. As our contractor says, it’s the showpiece of our project.

Here’s the view from that window looking toward the other side of the room. On the left is our closet and on the right is the laundry room. We also ended up with a nice size attic space in that triangle above those 2 doors. Should be plenty of space to store all the Christmas decorations and tree that we didn’t get a chance to put up this year.

On the second floor, the kitchen and dining room are also taking shape. We’re still not sure exactly what to do with those 3 old window holes between the 2 doors. We’re considering building in some kind of horizontal slat wall or possibly using a translucent divider material like polygal that could also serve as a whiteboard.

Here’s the kitchen from the back doors looking toward the front of the house. This is another room that looks completely different already. The day that we hit the road to see family for Christmas, the wood floors were getting laid in here. Knowing that the floors would be in by the time we got back, we spent a lot of evenings assembling cabinets.

The problem was that we hardly had anywhere to put them. As you can see, all of the upper cabinets are stacked in our already-cramped living room and the base cabinets that go along the walls are currently in front of the powder room. Once those are installed, we’ll be able to assemble the pantry cabinet and the base cabinets for the island.

This picture of the garage is only about 10 days old but it also looks completely different now. All of the HVAC lines that you see in the top left are boxed in and drywalled. Also, at the back of the room, there’s now a framed wall with 2 door openings in it. We didn’t really want a wall at the back of our garage, but the city required the furnace to be framed in.

Whenever our friends and family members ask how the project is going, we have a bit of a mixed reaction. We’re still very excited about our design decisions and having the extra space but we’re also completely exhausted. Living in a house while major renovation work is going on is survivable, but I don’t think we’d ever attempt it again with a baby. Fortunately, things are moving very quickly though and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t know if we’ll ever be “done” with this house, but it’s looking like the contractors should be finished with their part by the end of the January, or so we think. We can’t wait to have a quiet house all to ourselves again, whenever that day actually comes.