By Living Room Realty, September 29, 2022
At my house we are always talking about: “what we should do.” You know, trying to make the best use of our space and the whole project is an evolution. Sometimes we want to move and other times we want to do nothing. We love our house, love our neighborhood and couldn’t dream of leaving until the kids are out of school. BUT our bedroom configuration doesn’t quite fit our family.
In January of 2022 I came home one day and said: “here is the deal!”. We are going to blow the roof off the garage and add a suite that could either be our bedroom or a giant family room. At the same time we would remodel the kitchen and tidy up the entire main level. This would also involve building an ADU, tiny home or something on a property that we have at the coast. The idea is that we would stay there for the summer of 2023 while the house was a full-on construction zone.
I had an architect over to talk through my idea. “Drew, that is a really dumb idea” is the executive summary. Then I had a contractor buddy over to debunk him and didn’t get what I wanted (give me a call if you want to here why). Long story short, we landed on a kitchen remodel. I’ve got enough carpentry, construction experience and contractor connections to be my own general contractor. In April I sat down to map it all out and get my sub-contractors scheduled. On paper I was like: “this doesn’t look very hard and it really shouldn’t take that long”.
Demo started in early August and I had a pretty aggressive schedule to minimize our time with a destroyed house. Sitting here today in late September I’m really happy our progress. The floors are being refinished now and we’ll be moving back in soon. The contractors mostly hit it out of the park: on-time, prepared and flexible for changes. I was filling in the gaps with the cabinet install, tile work and the multitude of other details.
But, my goodness, there were some bumps along the way. I was naïve about so many pieces of the puzzle; I’m too embarrassed to publish all the sources of my sleepless nights. If you want to hear the full story, give me a call. At the end of the day we are going to have a rad kitchen on a fair budget.
