Hello, poppets! Sincerest apologies for the delay in weekly updates! As some of you know, we were jaunting about Europe for most of April. We’ve returned and mostly readjusted to regular life stateside. (The trip was completely and utterly amazeballs and we are still processing it all…)

So then! Back to our wee house and its tranformation! We left it in the capable hands of the crew at Crescent Builds, still meeting weekly thanks to technology – from our houseboat in Amsterdam, a laundromat in Venice, our room in a Tuscan castle and on the sidewalk outside a bistro in Paris. Yes. That all happened.

It wasn’t all good news, unfortunately. That damn original plumbing keeps coming back to bite us. Besides the main water line replacement, they discovered the laundry waste water pipe wasn’t connected to ANYTHING apparently AND was cracked and full of roots. I believe the phrase “I can’t believe you don’t have a giant sinkhole in your backyard” was used. So yay! Another big change order on not fun things. On the plus side, fingers crossed that the discovery of all hidden things is now complete.

In the meantime, more demolition in the form of tearing out the chimney and framing for the fireplace and kitchen walls!

We’ve passed inspections for plumbing, framing and electrical. Insulation started last week, so next will be insulation and cover inspections, I believe. This week, drywall starts! It will be so strange to see it with walls and white again.

While all this has been going on inside, Alicia and I were nailing down the final cabinet design with Kerf. Our original plans came in $20K over the estimate, so modifications had to be made. I decided I could live without the built-ins in the bedroom (we’ll do a closet system instead) and we let the big built-in go in the bathroom too (we’ll use a premade cabinet there so we’ll still have storage). A couple of other small changes in the mudroom and living areas that we could live with means we’ll “only” have to be over budget by $8K. Damn my caviar tastes.

We’ve also started the sofa search, which has killed off a significant portion of my remaining brain cells. I have a hard time spending thousands of dollars on something we’ve never sat on, so these online-only places are not really an option. (Though if I were to go that route, Apt2B seems to be the best choice.) Room and Board has good quality for a price I’m ok with, even if the style isn’t necessarily my first choice. The Morrison sectional is comfortable and one of the stock fabrics is acceptable, so we’d have it when we moved back in instead of having to wait months for a custom fabric. We went up yesterday to mock up what that might look like in the space.

Next week, hopefully a whole new perspective on what the finished space might look like!