The
combination of historically low interest rates and house prices made
2012 a great year to buy a
home
if you could. Realizing this, we spent the first half of the year,
trying to figure out a way to sell our townhouse and “trade-up”
to a single family home. By June, we realized it simply wasn’t
going to work ; we
couldn’t
get enough of our equity out of a sale to use for a down payment on a
new place.
Accepting this was made easier by the fact that, after a
year of searching, we had never found a single family home whose
features and location we preferred to our present home. In the end,
we are happy to be stuck with our townhouse.
But
there was one thing in our home that we had always wanted to change:
the kitchen. The same conditions that made it a good year to buy also
made it a good year to remodel, so by July we set out to do a major
kitchen remodeling. By “major” I mean (beside replacing the old
kitchen) tearing down a weight-bearing wall, engineering new support
to take its place, changing the location of doors and closets, re-routing the plumbing
and electricity
and installing hardwood floors throughout the entire main
level.
I packed up
the kitchen and most of the main
level in mid-September anticipating a
4-week project. Demolition
began
on time on October 8th
and we turned our living room into
a makeshift kitchen with the fridge,
a microwave, a digital pressure cooker
(a gift from heaven!) and
our dining table (which didn’t leave
room for anything else).
President Gordon B. Hinckley, talking about construction projects, said it always costs more and takes longer than they said it would. So true.
After an impressive start during the first week, when the kitchen and dining room had been gutted out and
stripped down to the cinderblocks and our crew had successful figured out a way to support the top floor with the wall, the reconstruction hit a snag right after the county inspector came for the first time.
Our project manager had submitted his own drawings of our kitchen, which had been approved and stamped by the county prior to the inspection. He had not anticipated that the county would start a new trend and require new architectural blueprints to be made of our entire main floor, which delayed the work for 2 full weeks and took a toll on our plans to have our main floor put back together before we left for our Thanksgiving vacation (see page 6). Living without a kitchen got old fast, especially washing the dishes by hand in the half bath! Most of the remodeling was done but since we had already learned that our supervision was key to getting the results we expected, so everything was put on hold again for our trip.
The workers came back upon our return and finished our project the first week of December once I had painted the hallway. The Christmas season was already well under way when we finally started our preparations for it so we had to scale down our lights and decorations for a simplified holiday season. But we LOVE our new kitchen!.
The workers came back upon our return and finished our project the first week of December once I had painted the hallway. The Christmas season was already well under way when we finally started our preparations for it so we had to scale down our lights and decorations for a simplified holiday season. But we LOVE our new kitchen!.
