Demo Day

There is no turning back now. Today, Carl and Angie helped us demo the kitchen. Drawers, counters, ceiling, range, sink and microwave.... gone, gone GONE!

Moving Day

Thursday, June 11 was moving day. Everything in the kitchen went to the its temporary place in the basement. Over the last few days Don re-purposed our old TV cabinet into kitchen counters. Last week, Sami sorted through and packed up all of the books in the bookcase and cleaned up the canning cupboard so there would be room for kitchen stuff.  Don and Carl moved our garage refrigerator to Carl’s house and moved our kitchen refrigerator out into the garage.

With the fresh paint, a new TV and coffee tables the basement is looking cozy. That is where we will cook, eat, and hang out for the next several months while the main floor is remodeled. The cats are getting over having their food dishes moved.

First attempt at baking using the table-top oven. Perhaps a little brown, but the blueberry pie smells mighty good!

The floor is worn through, the dishwasher defunct, and the paint is scrubbed off. Its about time to remodel.

The temporary kitchen is almost finished, complete with mini-fridge, counter top oven, and a hot plate.

Working Hard

We have a long, long list of things to do before the remodel begins. First, was to finish the current big house project. We began last September to build a brick and paver walkway around the front of the house and a patio adjacent to the driveway. We worked at it all winter, and now it is done. Our porch is a mighty nice place to enjoy morning coffee, and there is no more stepping onto muddy grass from the driveway. Now on to doing the fifty other things that must happen before the first hammer is swung.

Backing Up To Move Forward

   We began our journal-blog five and a half years ago. The original goal was to update and improve our kitchen. Much has been accomplished since we began; a new upstairs bathroom, insulation, a new front porch, and an awesome front walkway. All this in spite of Don’s cancer diagnosis and treatment.

   But, the kitchen remains a scruffy mess! We have decided that the time has come to reach our goal. In those five and a half years some things have changed. We are no longer as able to design the details and carry out the entire project. So, it is no longer a complete D.I.Y. project. Our needs have changed a little too. Our first plan sacrificed space in the main floor bedroom to widen the kitchen. Now we are older and we think we may need to use that bedroom ourselves when stairs become difficult to climb. So we have gone back to the drawing board. To that end we have hired a new architect, because the first one moved to Alaska (the cad!). Together with the new person we have roughed out a new plan. Coming up with the full-blown, detailed plan has had a few surprises. Portland has adopted new tree protection rules which have impacted how things are done (ka-ching!) as well as new seismic rules that impact the permit process and construction (ka-ching!!). Our architect, together with a structural engineer, inform us that new structural supports must be built in the basement, reaching down to the foundation (ka-ching!!). A basement wall must be torn out, a hole cut in the cement floor, columns and posts built and the wall rebuilt. (ka-ching, KA-CHING!!).

  There has also been a lot of back and forth with the architect about how best to get the look and functionality we want. We are finding out that when you pay someone else to do something that you have always done yourself before, there are consequences, in terms of time, money, and frustration.

   So, we focus on what we can do to get things ready for the work to begin; cleaning out the kitchen and dining room, researching products, shopping for appliances, brainstorming solutions to problem areas. We will move cooking and eating activities to the basement while the work is in progress. That necessitated fixing up the basement. More about that next time

Sami is painting everything in the basement so it will be a clean place for our temporary kitchen. When she sanded one of the doors, paint fell off in sheets.

 

Some of the paint contained lead. Removing it wasn't easy. There were at least five layers. The paint from one side of the door weighed several pounds! More backing up to move forward.

The Summer Project Has Begun...

Just in time for fall. We had hoped to get to the front walkway and patio this summer, and we did... just barely. We know we won't finish before rain and cold weather sets in, but we are going to see how far we can get.

Our goal is to make the walk to the front doors inviting..

We had several pallets of bricks delivered. Don shoveled a pick-up load of sand. We are building a red brick pathway over the old concrete path and will lay square gray bricks to fill in the area, so people will not longer have to walk through muddy grass to get to the front doors..

The work begins with a trench for the solider bricks.

Don is the brick layer and Sami is the Sherpa. We are getting lots of exersise.

Return to Our Remodel Project

We have resumed our remodeling project.

In Multiple Myeloma lingo, Don is at "Day 171." That means the transplant happened 171 days ago, nearing a half a year ago. From the beginning they said it would take between six months and a year to recover from the transplant, and that is just what we have experienced. Our life seems almost back to where it was before Don began treatment. We are busy, busy, busy. For the last two weeks Don has worked hard most days to finish off the inside of the front entryway, a project began a year ago. He has wired in a new door bell, which involved work at both front and rear doors and in the basement, added insulation, put up new sheet rock and new window trim. Much of the trim he hand-made to match the window trim in the rest of the house.He painted the wall about three times, due to the fact that paint that was supposed to match what was there, did not. All that is left is to refinish the door.

Don has had some lower back pain, probably due to being so inactive for so many months. But that is lessening with the passage of time and exercise. Don can't push as hard or work as fast as he did before, but what the heck, there aren't many men his age (68) who can do so much as he does.

A couple of weeks ago we attended Don's 50th high school reunion. We led the group in dancing to some great 60s rock and roll. Last week we took grandson Oliver on a little trip to Enchanted Forest and the Oregon State Capitol.

We'll stop bragging now! Its enough to say that we are feeling marvelously blessed. Next week we will celebrate our 47th wedding anniversary with a motorcycle ride out to Edgefield and a couple of days of good food, music, and pampering. As Poo Bear wold say, "Life is nice and round."

Don and Oliver take a popcorn break from riding Salem's riverside Carousel.

P. S. we will post this blog entry to both this blog and our Stem Cell Transplant blog. http://donsunfortunateincarceration.blogspot.com/

Time to Regroup V2.0

The return to remodeling mentioned in the last blog entry is now starting.  We’ve held off while learning what to expect with Don’s chemotherapy.  It turns out we were somewhat optimistic in our expectations for what Don can do, but our plan allows for that.  We are now starting our porch remodeling, pretty much as described in the last blog, with most of it hired out.  We are hiring a contractor friend of ours (Corey...his wife is Sami’s exercise teacher) to build a new front porch.  Here is our rough concept sketch (which we did):

 

It will provide a more inviting path to the front door from the driveway, and also adds some interest to the front of the house.  We have signed up for two small parts of the project…removing the shrubs in front, and opening the inside wall around the front door (to permit adding the sidelight windows and to move wall switches).  We removed two of the shrubs today in about an hour of work together (on the left side of the house near the garage).  That used up Don’s allotment of energy pellets for the day.  We’ll continue to whittle away at the shrubs.  Corey expects to start his work at the end of June, and to take less than a month to build the porch.  We’re pretty confident that that fits within the window available before Don’s stem cell transplant, which will keep him out of the picture for a while.

 
Here’s a ‘before’ picture, to record what we are starting with, and a couple of pictures of the hard-working laborers.  To tell the truth, Sami (and the pickup pulling on the stumps) did almost all of the hard work.

 

 

Cheers!