Inspections are like the big toll bridge and the inspectors are the trolls. If you fail your inspections you cannot pass go or collect (spend) $200. The next month is huge for us, because I actually have two weekends off to work. So in theory we could do insulation the first weekend, an insulation inspection during the week, and then drywalling the next weekend. Then the spackler could come in, followed by the floor guy, and some quick painting which would allow us to install the cabinets after Christmas just before the new year. That would be a level of completion that we thought was impossible just a couple of weeks away.

But this whole schedule rested on the decisions of inspectors who could ridicule the slightest problem.

Plumbing came first on Thursday afternoon- FAILED, but we could go forward with our work and the inspector was available late the next day to check the two easy things that needed to be fixed. One part needed to be replaced and a test needed to be run to make sure there weren’t any leaks. I couldn’t really complain about any of that. Unfortunately, the plumber wasn’t able to fix it the next day, which meant we had to wait another weekend to get our new toilet installed after I had busted my butt to get in the tile for him. But all in all I’ll take the inspection as a success.

Electrical came second on Friday- Passed, but there was much discussion about how the under the cabinet lights would work. It didn’t seem that hard to me, especially since they are low voltage lights, but the inspector and electrician really seemed to work something out for a pretty common feature that nobody seemed to do right. Now we can set up our new service.

Framing came late Friday afternoon and was for the whole kit and kaboodle. This was also the one the Martin Boys would have to take all responsibility for. Or would we. The most frightening moment came when the inspector scrutinized the beam over the opening between the kitchen and backroom. The beam rested on about 8 inches of masonary wall on either side of the opening, but the electrician had gone and beat out every single block from about 5 feet down to get some conduit through the wall. If that beam wasn’t setting on a solid part of the wall, we may have had to start all over again and build a post further out into the opening and narrowing the passage between the wall and the peninsula of cabinets to something less than three feet, not good. But the inspector got up and saw with a flashlight that the beam set on the wall a miniscule couple of inches and let it go. Matt saw this and I think had thoughts of killing the electrician. I counseled against such action. We ended up FAILING, because the inspector thought the plumbing wall was not supported enough (it was chewed up by all the plumbing pipes after all). He also thought the new cast iron tub was not supported enough by the floor (ridiculous, but fixable)

However, the framing inspector said we could go ahead with insulating and he would check the two things he commented on when he came back the following week so we were back on track. Working kitchen hear we come.

All in all the inspectors were very nice, diligent, and not in the least bit arrogant, which was in contrast to the Village reviewers and some of the front desk employees. I’m sure Oak Park is so strict to make sure they have the highest quality of housing stock.

After some back and forth, we had decided to go with DSL. Even though it’s slower, it’s so much cheaper than Comcast, who I feel like they sucker you with their introductory rates, and their customer service sucks. We’ve been happy with the customer service at AT&T so far, and they’ve been very accommodating after we canceled (when I learned that we would have to install the DSL ourselves, and I thought we could get a better deal somewhere else) and then promptly reinstated our service 1/2 hour later when we realized how much Comcast was charging.

However, we are still facing the challenge of the self-install. The set-up package arrived yesterday and I’m going to try to get it running tonight. Although I am a pretty tech savvy person, these things never go smoothly, and I know that there will be some problem. Problem number one will certainly be that we demo-ed all of the walls that had phone jacks in them, so there are currently no phone lines anywhere in the house. After that we’ll see how I do following all of the technical bruhaha.

If I can get the internet going tonight, tomorrow the cable people are going to fix our initial install (right now we only receive local channels, cinemax, and about 50 home shopping channels. Anyone needing to buy gemstones, I’ve seen a deal or two for you!), by Friday we should be up and connected to the world again. I hope I haven’t missed much.

To keep on track with that goal we have set up a tentative schedule with no real dates yet, but we just keep trying to plug away at things on the list. Here is the rough sequence of things that need to happen.

There is limited things we can do without a permit like floors, demo (under the cover of darkness), painting, and trim. After that things SHOULD be done by permit. Often they are not, but if you get caught you can face some heavy fines and when we sell the house we want to be able to say everything is up to code and we did it right.

So assuming a permit is obtained, the sunroom needs to be framed so that we can do the electrical and the plumbing should go before electrical as common construction courtesy. That leaves us with all the set up to squeeze in between the major work weekend that the sunroom will require before we turn it over to the pro plumbers and electricians. The tricky part will be trying to minimize the amount of time we are living in the house without a bathroom- demoing the tub right before the plumber drops in the new tub and shower and then putting up the tile quickly. All said and down I expect three to four days without a shower.

The other thing to squeeze in is the inspections. You can’t cover up any walls without letting the inspector see it. We will try to keep the bathroom operational by covering one side of the walls with sheet rock and leaving the other side open to inspection.

After plumbing, electrical, and framing inspections, we can throw up the drywall, spackle, sand, and paint. That of course will not be as easy as writing it and will probably require the third of our big work weekends when our Dad comes up to help. The first allowed us to get all the gutting finished and almost resulted in a collapsed sunroom roof that was waiting to cave in but got some help from Randy Kelso, kidding. The second work weekend being the sunroom roof, windows, and door project.

Once the cabinets and countertops are in the plumber can finish installing the sinks, we can do the trim work and set up the appliances.

A final work weekend will entail putting on the back porch hopefully sometime in Mid-late November.

The biggest thing we were up to this week was taking bids from plumbers and electricians.  Matt sent out the plans last week and set up the interviews and I stuck around the house to meet with the bidders.  I saw two plumbers including a new company we haven’t worked with before and our trusted electrician from the Rice house.

While I was waiting around I painted the trim in the office (white) and covered up the hideous pink in the office closet with white.  It took two coats, but everything looks real sharp and now the office is well along to being finished.  All it needs is the quarter-round around the base board.  Liz is turning the closet into an a craft corner for her sewing machine and jewelry making.  We might also move in a chair and bookshelves to make a nice little library for reading.

I also spent a good part of the day cutting wood, again.  The wood pile is nearly all cut up with about half a dozen piles six feet long and three feet high lying around the yard.  If anyone needs firewood, please stop by the house.

I also cleaned up the garage because we are getting materials delivered Saturday morning for the sunroom, sheetrock and cement board for the kitchen and bedroom, various lumber and roofing materials, insulation, and new baseboards, quarterround, and crown molding for the LR/DR and Master Bedroom.

Being home during the day also allowed me to take delivery of the new refrigerator and dishwasher.  The DR will be serving as our makeshift kitchen for the time being.

Most importantly, we are ready to move in and live through the construction!

The first condition was a refrigerator.  It is hard to call a place home, when you can’t relax and provide yourself with the basic sustenance of food.

Of course the house need to have a modicum of cleanliness too.  But we will see how long that lasts when I start gutting the bathroom walls and we tear off the sunroom roof.  Bless Liz for her patience.  I kid you not, two of the contractors I saw this week cringed at the thought of newly-weds living through construction.  They new of several marriages that were strained from remodels.  But Liz knew full well what she was getting into when she married me.  I will try to make it better than the Rice Street bedroom remodel that covered the kitchen in an inch of dust for five weeks.

I also had to install a new shower head because the old one just let a single stream like some fountain.

Lastly, I’ve been steadily moving over more and more boxes of unopened wedding gifts from Pat’s basement, where they will quickly take up residence in our basement.  The beds are furnished, the DR table is set up and the cable guy comes on Friday.

So this weekend is the official move in which gives us three days to acclimate our cat Ink to the new surroundings and get used to the place before work starts up on Monday.  Wish us luck!

After an expensive and hurried trip to Kinko’s, I went down to the Village Hall with Matt. He claims that once those people find out you are an architect, they love to start giving you a hard time, where as home owners can basically get away with anything.  We took a number and sat down to wait. 

Once our number was called, we brought up our plans and started to figure things out.  So to start off, you just submit an application for plan review, and all the information on this is basically your own.  The electrical, plumbing, and building permits come after your plan is aproved.  I was relieved since we didn’t have those filled out yet.

We are applying for a kitchen/bath remodel and addition of a deck.  We took them through our plans to make sure that all the details they needed were there (Matt had to make a few notes about rail height on the deck), but I was very impressed and proud of my brother-in-law with the detail in the drawings and how much he had thought of.  Matt had stamped and signed all 3 copies of our plans which each included a plat survey and gave them a copy of his architect’s license.  Then the moment he had been waiting for, they wanted the license of his company as well, even though he is a home owner doing a private project outside of his company on his own home.  We were told if he hadn’t stamped them, they wouldn’t need any information at all, and as a home owner you can draw the plans yourself.  I could have brought them a picture I came up with myself on a piece of printer paper and they would take it.  But because he’s an architect…

Matt very calmly explained that he is a home owner drawing plans for his home that he didn’t feel he should be penalized for being more professional (more professional than any drawings I would do, I can tell you that!).  While they went to check on this, we contemplated another expensive trip to Kinko’s to print them out again, and we would just leave the stamp off this time. Ridiculous.  Fortunately when they came back, it was all okay, and the plans were accepted!

100 bucks later, and that was it.  It will be 4-6 long weeks until we hear, and longer to get a permit if we have to make revisions.  By then we will have our electrical and plumbing information together and hopefully can just move forward.  In the meantime we will leisurely paint and strip every wood surface I can get off the walls.

I am tired.  I don’t think I am ready to submit.  It is all just rushed and I haven’t started the forms.  OP doesn’t not have necessarily a good website for submittal requirements.  One requirement that I saw required a site plan the site survey probably won’t be enough.  There are gaps in the drawings but it is hard to say how hard they will review the stuff.  I am hearing some bad things from other architects, but I think we just need to get it into the system and take our hits.

Demo plan

new floor plan

Electrical Plans

West facing exteriorSouth facing exterior

north side exterior

Bathroom idea

Here is some more work. The tub move currently is only giving us a 30×60 tube and requires us to make the door 30″ and move it closer to the toilet and generally is pretty tight. It will be import to verify the exact location of the toilet. I am showing a short depth toilet like in the basement here to minimize the interference with the door. But we will need to verify the location of the collar to confirm that the small toilet will work.

I didn’t include a sketch but the plan is helped maybe by flipping the toilet and sink. This might not be necessary or desireable. But I did a drawing with the toilet and sinks flipped and I liked how it made the toilet more private or at least not immediately viewable from the hall. The double sink configuration is very tight on a 7′-0″, but it is close to working. Another 3,4,5,6 inches would be a big help. I again really think the tub wants to be as big as the tub downstairs here which is 34×66. Does the linen closet want to opening off the bathroom (I think it does) or does it want to opening of the little hall area where it could be larger and more usuable than the way I have it laid out.

Kitchen version 1, floor plan and elevation

I am liking the kitchen. I will find photos of Micah’s house but Mark Bebbe a classmate of mine centered the stove/range on a large window and had a nice contemporary exhaust hood “floating” out in front of the glass.

I really like the separate doors up at the top of the 42″ upper wall cabinets. Again I thought the little LED display case light was really nice at showing off nice dishes that we saw at Troy’s showroom. It really makes that upper shelf of a 42″ cabinet, I think, more “usable” given that it is just really too high to use the upper shelf on a 42″ cabinet. Again please warm up to the exhaust hood idea. Thoughts and comments are welcomed.

Appliances will start to be very important. For example. The fridge probably wants to be 36″ wide. Also I am just showing a 30″ wide stove. We could go with a wider stove and take advantage of the window opening more and still make the 15″ door units work. I really like standardizing as much as possible on a 15″ wide door/drawer unit. I think 30 and 15 inch units work much better than 12 and 24 units. They just seem to proportion better. Also I like to not have 24 wide units mixed in with 30″. Also base cabinets want to relate to the layout of wall cabinets.

I will try to make some time tomorrow to draw up what we sketched on the deck and respond to any comments that come back.

So in order to get a head start on things before we move in, Thor, Matt, and I met tonight to draw up plans and, well, make a plan. First project is definitely going to be kitchen remodel.

The Sunshine Nightmare

There are no appliances in there right now, and the whole thing looks like it came out of a lemony sunshine 70′s nightmare. But… how to do it? and how will this fit in with our long term goals for the house? and what are our long term goals?

Our thoughts right now are to redo the kitchen and bath, back porch, floors, paint, ect, and then evaluate where we’re at, either then creating some living space in the basement or adding on a second story. And right now it seems that every decision we make will affect how things turn out down the road.

Matt drew up some plans, and we got out our tracing paper–art hour for adults!! I was tempted to use crayons instead of pens.

I am a big fan of the more modern open floor plan, with flow between the living spaces, and then a separate private space. This would involve tearing down walls, and putting up new ones. Basically as much work as possible. Thor seems to want to do as little as possible to the floor plan while still revamping the space (not that I blame him since he will be doing most of the work). Matt is doing his best to mediate between the two of us. As the professional in the group his opinion generally holds more weight. He uses words like “dynamic” to describe asymmetries created in a room by moving walls around.

The possibilities seemed endless and overwhelming, I won’t go into the round and round.

Final decisions, at least enough to get going:

• Kitchen: blow out the pantry. Hold out on putting in a permanent central island, open up the kitchen to the sunroom with a peninsula, move door to backyard from basement stairs to sunroom. New cabinets, appliances, ect.
• Back porch: do a deck, and not screened in porch (I will only be denied for so long, though), and then a patio in the back yard. Room for porch swing and grill.
• Bathroom: blow out one wall and make it bigger. Put in bigger bath and double sinks.

Now we’ll see how much of it will actually happen