I’ll try and get some shots of the stucco and get them up.

We are slated to have the cabinets re-stained tomorrow!

• Art is laying the kitchen tile, he will be done tomorrow
• Appliances are getting delivered between 12 and 2 today.. they’re going to be staged in the garage for now.
• Stucco color coat is going on tomorrow or Thursday.
• Cabinets are going to be re-stained Thursday or Friday
• Counter templating is just about done.

Very exciting stuff, I’ll post some pictures at the end of the week once some of the stuff is done.

They’re the wrong stain, but they’re going to fix that next week.. the install looks good though.

The painting for the kitchen is all done, but we don’t have pictures just yet.
Below are some pictures of the “Brown Coat”, coat 2 of 3 for stucco.

Also we got the firs of three layers of stucco on.. we got the scratch coat, just waiting for the color coat.

Our rooms are starting to look like.. uhh.. rooms again!

Things are moving pretty fast and the project manager said they’re only going to me faster!

The outside doors and windows are in, the electric has started to go in and we have no kitchen…

They told us they wanted to start working on the kitchen, so if we wanted to save anything we needed to clear it out this weekend.

So I spent the whole weekend demoing and removing cabinets and appliances.. it was actually kinda’ fun but a lot of work.

The electric is going in, they’re running plumbing to the new kitchen and the got approval to wrap the house. Things are really moving along.

Here are some pictures of the demo after my work this weekend, they’re in the gallery as well:

We now have a frame, a roof and the windows and doors are ordered.

They said they’re going to tear down the inside (what used to be outside) wall and start working on the inside stuff.

It’s going so fast, but still such a long way to go.

One step closer, now instead of a moat in the front yard we have a large concrete slab, but as far as our little guy is concerned “The man fixed the garden” so we’re all good.

Read the rest of the post for the pictures:

When we were leaving the house yesterday we saw this:

Then when we got home, we had this:

The yard is dug out and it looks like the forms are pretty much up.

Below are some updated pictures, sorry for the quality.. I took them with my iPhone this morning.

– Update –

Well, I just got home and we now have rebar!

This is before any construction had started, but after we cleared all the “crap” out of the front yard where the new addition was going.

I’ve also started a gallery for the project, you can access it via the link at the top or at : http://buhboo.com/remodel_gallery

We played with the idea of going up over the back of the house, but that was too expensive. We looked at going up over the garage, but didn’t really like the idea.. and it was also expensive.

We couldn’t go back because we have the pool in the back, so going forward was our only option.

The only issue is that the kitchen is at the back of the house, then the living room is at the front. If we add and addition on to the front we can get two rooms, or one big room, out of it but then we have very little light in the living-room.

If we use the new addition as the living room, then we have a dark room in the middle of our house.

Then I came up with an idea; add the addition on to the front and move the kitchen from the back room to the current living room (in the center of the house), then use the new addition as the living room,

That would give use a perfect room (where the kitchen was) for an office, family room, multi-purpose room, whatever…

Here is a link to what my initial drawing looks like, the final plans are pretty close to this initial one:

Since this is the first post in the category, here’s a little back-story as to how we got to this point.

It all started around November 2007, we decided that our 1200 sq ft house was feeling a bit small and the landscaping we had wasn’t good for  our little guy to run around on.

We have native vegetation in the front and brick in the back next to our pool. We were thinking about re-landscaping the front, but then he’d be playing in the front yard and we wanted someplace safe to play in the back.

We decided to put our house on the market and buy a bigger place / more yard. We saw a couple of places while we were interested in and one REALLY jumped out at us. We got our equity line of credit increased to 20% of the new house and we were going to buy it without selling our house, an obvious risk but it was a REALLY good deal on a short sale.

The bank went with another offer so we missed out on it, and now I am SOO glad we did.

In the meantime, the market kept tanking and we had an agent that just didn’t have the experience selling in a bad market… he was relying on signs to bring people in, basically no other advertising.

We ended up firing the agent and decided to look into remodeling.

We met with about six different companies and started the decision process with our top three. They all said they could do what we wanted within our budget, so we got our equity line increased a little more.

The problem is, we could only get increased for about $30,000 less than we thought, but this actually made our decision process easier as only one of the companies could still do everything we wanted for our new budget.

The good thing is, this will come out to a little less than the budget we originally had for a new house and we absolutely LOVE where we live, so it all worked out.

In the following posts I’ll talk about the process and post updated pictures, if anyone’s interested then please check back.

If you want to know what our top 3 contractors were (in San Diego) send me an email and I’ll let you know.