Out with the pine pretending to be oak

In the kitchen looking into the hallway. The mudroom is the light on the right at the end of the hallway. When the renovation is complete, the entrance to the 3/4 bath will be in the mudroom as well as the back door.

Today was comparatively quiet in part, I suspect, as our project manager juggled the time on task for multiple subcontractors. The wood floor subcontractor planned to be here in the morning to rip out the old pine flooring in the kitchen and hallway, which meant the drywall subcontractors had to call off their final day on the job. Unfortunately, the wood floor guys weren’t able to get here until after noon. When they arrived, they made quick work of removing the pine from the hall and the kitchen and cleaned up beautifully in only three hours. The new hardwood flooring is acclimating in the kitchen and is scheduled to be installed Monday. This will be great because the exposed subfloor is a little creepy with small gaps between them that means we can see into the basement. This is totally normal, but it will be great to not see it (and see nice flooring). Unfortunately, it looks like for most of next week, we won’t be able to use the back door because the hallway between the kitchen and mudroom (and thence to the back door) will also be replaced, as you can see in the photo above.

We also got our long-requested rough timeline of the project, which is already somewhat out of date because of the need to juggle the subcontractors today. (We know this is going to happen all the time.) The next few weeks will have some days of nothing happening as things like finishing the oak flooring and letting it cure are in progress. We get that because of our experience renovating Dan’s parents house–a year-long DIY (mostly) project between me, Dan, friends, and Dan’s brother, who is a kitchen renovating professional himself. In that project, we hired someone to refinish the floors and they did a great job, but then “protected” the floors from ongoing work in a way that left marks on the floor. I don’t know exactly what happened there (tape too early?) but I’m confident that our reno team will keep that from happening. If that takes a day or two, goodie. The plan suggests that most of next week will be dedicated to the new floor install, finishing, and curing.

The week following, at least according to the current plan, will start to be exciting. Crews will paint the walls, install the bathroom tile, install the cherry cabinets, and measure for the new countertops! That will take the bulk of about two weeks, but we will really start to get a sense of our future.

We did decide on paint colors, finally, but I’m keeping them secret for now!