Remodel - Phase I: Flooring

We're commencing a large remodel project for the house. It's going to take quite some time, and will affect all the rooms upstairs. It particularly started with the kitchen - we want to redo the kitchen to make more room. That led to talk about moving the wall between the kitchen and the upstairs bedroom (the office), to give us a little more space in the kitchen. And if we get rid of the fireplace, there'll be more room in the living/dining room.

We don't use the fireplace anyway - it doesn't produce heat more than 2 feet from the fire, doesn't have a fan to blow the heat out, and there's no way to arrange furniture to watch the tv *and* have a fire. And since we're doing all that, we may as well get rid of the *lovely* (there's a bucket-load of sarcasm in that one word) rose-pink carpet that we've been living with since we bought the house.

We've discussed several ways of approaching this whole project and finally settled on starting with the flooring. Which means we have to demo the walls, so we can at least frame in the new ones to lay the floor.

We're going to lay bamboo - the kind you get from Costco. It's got a nice pattern and color, and it's not nearly as much per square foot as the other ones that caught my eye. (I really like the look of tiger wood with a light finish, but I really *don't* like how it'd affect my pocketbook...)

Step 1 is to remove the fireplace. (Pre-Step 1 is to move a whole bunch of crap out of the way - we've got to go through it before it gets moved back upstairs to see what we really want and what we can get rid of!) It's amazing how much cleanup is included in a demolition job. First the faux rock, then the sheet rock, then the studs & nails... not to mention the vacuuming, and I actually swept the carpet with a broom. There's a reason I don't normally do these kinds of things.

But I'm keeping focused on the end. I'm excited to get the new flooring done. If I don't think too much about all the work and effort in between now & then, I'll stay positive. Baby steps. Already the room looks bigger. We've got the first wall down, now just have to move the fireplace out - which also means some whatnot about capping something to make sure the snow & rain don't leak down the thingy.

Step 2 is to tear down the wall between the kitchen & office, so we can reposition it to expand the kitchen. Move stuff out of the way; take down the upper cabinets; move the lower cabinets; demo the wall; and at least frame in the new wall. Not sure if that's for next weekend? I know that roller derby is next Saturday - yay!! - but we may be able to get some demo in on Sunday. All the demo here happened in an 8 hour period Sunday afternoon - and we have to have a functional kitchen for the Halloween party... =)

**Note: If you remove the filter on the shop vac and then try to vacuum dust & debris, everything shoots out the other side of the machine - and then, if you had a little film (since, if you're like me, you don't dust that often), now you've got ashfall. Fortunately, I can blame it on a volcanic eruption... ;)