Our New Old House

Our kitchen floor is finished! Doesn’t it look great?

The contractor didn’t bring enough tile to completely finish the bathroom, but he did the areas under the tub and toilet. The rest will go in on Monday.

Things are finally coming back together.

[tags]clawfoot tub, contractors, photos, flooring, bathroom, kitchen[/tags]

 These are pictures from the day I wrote the two “S.N.A.F.U.” posts about. Once Brandon got the kinks worked out with the flooring contractor they got to work.

(These pictures aren’t of the same quality as my usual pictures because Brandon took them with his phone’s camera, but I think it gives the whole thing a certain romantic antique look.)

The bathroom, sans toilet and sink pedestal:

The bathroom, sans bath tub:

The bath tub plumbing:

The toilet base:

Installing the subfloor in the kitchen:

Installing the subfloor in the bathroom:

Check back soon for pictures of the finished floors and some adventures with the bath tub!

[tags]ceramic tile, plumbing, contractors, kitchen, clawfoot tub, bathroom, photos, shower, flooring[/tags]

First of all, I’d like to thank the members of the Des Moines Rehabbers Club who kindly offered me advice this morning.  I sent a rather panicked email to the mailing list this morning and got some really excellent responses.  It helps so much to have someone to turn to in a crisis like this! 

The flooring company has secured the right color grout, but they didn’t order enough tile for the bathroom.  They will finish the parts under the tub, toilet, and sink and finish the rest when the tiles are in.  They’re going to cut the tile to fit around the pipes in the floor, rather than some other way.  I’m glad of that because it didn’t seem right to have to cut all the pipes down and redo all that plumbing. 

When I talked to Brandon (who’s at the house today while I’m at work) he said they’d laid the subfloor in both the kitchen and the bathroom and were going to get the kitchen done today.  That was earlier this morning, so I hope there’s been some good progress made.

 While the flooring guys were working in the house, Brandon took the ladder out and broke the rotted fascia off the roof and removed as many nails as he could to prepare for new gutters being installed.

 Our quote from the gutter company arrived.  It is over $2000, which for a single story, 1000 square foot bungalow seemed ridiculous.  Our neighbor down the street with a similar house had theirs done for $450 or so.  Will keep looking.

We’re heading out to the Iowa State Fair this afternoon to blow off some steam.  Pictures coming soon of all our adventures!

[tags]gutters, thanks, ceramic tile, bathroom, Des Moines Rehabbers Club, contractors, plumbing, kitchen, flooring[/tags]

We’ve hired a professional flooring company to install tile in our bathroom.  We worked with them for several weeks, stopped in at the store twice, and had several phone discussions in setting all this up.  He told us we’d need to have our clawfoot tub disconnected so they could move it out of the room, which was fine.  The sink is wall mounted, so that’s not a problem.  They didn’t say anything about the toilet.

 This morning the crew arrived for installation and informed us that not only were we supposed to have the tub disconnected, but that the pipes needed to be cut down below the floor.  Also we’re supposed to have a plumber to re-set the toilet because they need to remove it. 

Was this stuff I was supposed to know already?  And even so, shouldn’t they have checked to make sure this was done before showing up for the install?

 Oh, yeah.  And they showed up on site and asked Brandon, “What kind of grout did you want for this?  We don’t have it on the order.”  DON’T HAVE IT ON THE ORDER?!  We discussed this in the store!  Pointed to the one we wanted and the guy wrote it down.  So they showed up with the wrong grout and will have to see if they have the color we wanted before going ahead with the job. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the gutter company that was supposed to stop by at 8am to give me an estimate didn’t come.  I left for work and half an hour after our appointment was supposed to be, the guy called me.  His scheduler (who I confirmed the address with three times, once by my entering it on their website for them) had given him the wrong address, several blocks up the street from my house.  When no one came to the door he spent half an hour working up an estimate on the wrong house before he bothered to call me. 

This is going to be one helluva day.

[tags]flooring, ceramic tile, contractors, bathroom, shower[/tags]

Brandon thought he was getting a day off when his flex schedule worked out that he didn’t have to go in to work today.  I fixed that in a hurry!

At 8:00 this morning, the storm window company, Corn Belt Aluminum, began removing our old storm windows and installing our new attic windows. 

At noon, Joe Kemple is coming over to tune the piano.

Sometime between noon and 4pm MidAmerican Energy is sending someone over to check our gas meter.

At 4pm Brandon is taking the car in for some work on the tinting. 

Kinda makes my day at the day job seem boring. 

I’ll have pictures of the storm windows when I get home this afternoon.  I’m so excited!!!

[tags]attic, windows, contractors, storm windows, awning window, gas [/tags]