Remodel - Week 4

Week 4 of the Remodel Project was a week of demo and consultations - Steve doing the demo and Jason having multiple conferences with the plumbing and HVAC sub-contractors. This week's crisis was the location of the existing HVAC vent in what will be the new bathroom (seen in pix below in the wall to the left of the existing door):



Directly in front of this vent is where the toilet was to have been placed - which would mean that the HVAC and plumbing would be fighting over that real estate between the floor joists. This week's elegant solution resulted in flipping the toilet and the shower locations. That will allow us to have heating and a/c in the new bath and bedroom - always a plus! These relocations will also result in the shower becoming a rectangle, rather than having a diagonal shower door opening. The pix above also shows the framing on the floor for the pocket door between the bathroom and the hallway.

The pix above shows the entrance into the new bedroom. Another change this week was moving the transition step from the hallway to the entrance of the bedroom - saving beaucoup de $$ by not having to raise the floor in the new hallway and bath.

The above pix shows where the arched entrance from the existing hallway will be. Steve will do that demo tomorrow (in between snow removal - weatherman is predicting 8-10 inches).

(Above) - Our intrepid demo-man working on removing the plaster from the closet; Jason hopes to demo the chimney this week, freeing up space for the washer/dryer as well as a chase for pipes, etc.

On Friday, Steve and I packed a picnic lunch and headed for points west and south looking for subway tile and possibly a vanity (which begs the question: Why is EVERYTHING ALWAYS so far away?) We visited 2 tile stores - the first one was very high end - we got some good ideas but amazingly they didn't have the basketweave stone floor tile that we wanted. But we were able to find EVERYTHING we wanted (floor tile, subway tile, decorative frieze tile and top molding) at store number 2 (which is the tile showroom for company that supplies Home Depot et al). What luck as these tiles are MUCH cheaper. My favorite kind of design - champagne looks at Diet Coke prices!

Then we headed down by the airport to the 2 Hobo stores - what a gold mine! We found a furniture style vanity (above) with granite top and faucets for $899.00!!! When Jason saw it today he said that it would have cost at least $3K+ to get something custom-built like this. We don't like the faucets that came with the vanity - they are a dark bronze. But we can easily pick up faucets at Home Depot later and will sell the bronze ones on Craig's List. So we were really pleased with the results of our Friday outing! We had originally planned on having only one sink, but we think that having two will be terrific: