Remodeling Progress Report - still drywalling
Our drywall misadventures have set us back about a week, maybe more. But... progress is being made, slowly. Our contractor had promised to come back to finish up on Friday. He never showed, and today, Monday, mid-morning his helper came and did some more work. He also had been under the impression his boss was going to finish things up Friday, but today when he got to work he was told to come here. He said he would probably be out of here tomorrow. I'm not so sure... his boss had also promised us a sand-texture on the parts of the new drywall that touch some of the old drywall we did not take out, so the texture would be more consistent. When is he planning to do that? Nobody knows! But until it gets done, we cannot paint. And until we get the painting done, we cannot put down our laminate flooring. And until we put the flooring down, we cannot move out of what is going to be the new kitchen and dining room, but is currently being used as our office/living room/temporary kitchen. And we can't start demolition on this side until we get all our stuff out of the way. So, everything is on hold depending on these drywallers finishing their job.
I mentioned to the helper guy that we'd like them to give us a quote on the other side of our house here, but this guy looked like I asked him to change my daughter's poopy pull-up or something. He made the comment, "This house doesn't look like it could be that old," as if you only replace drywall when it gets old? If they don't want the job, we have another contractor that does.
The concept of overhauling the floor plan seems to be foreign to our drywaller and some of the other contractors that have been in here. Our mouse-proofing contractor indicated he thought we were nuts for not just building a brand new house. Does he think we never thought about that? Believe me we spent all spring and the beginning of the summer driving around looking at land, and were close to putting an offer on one property. But the reality was that it was not a smart financial or practical move. Our current location is in a nice suburban-type neighborhood. There is a park across the street. We have a nice wooded lot with a back yard for the kids to play in. We are within a couple minutes driving distance of a brand new shopping center (which includes Lowe's, conveniently enough - we are keeping them in business), and close to grandparents and church. It works for us.
Additionally, to sell this place without fixing it up first would not have been possible, at least the way the market is currently. Our little city just doesn't get that many newcomers looking for a circa-1987 home to buy. At the prices our neighborhood gets, people could probably justify forking out not that much more to buy land and build their own brand new place. There's plenty of land around the city. And nicer houses than ours in this neighborhood have sat on the market all summer... they're still there.
So this will have to be our dream home! It may take 5 or more years before we achieve it, but we are well on our way toward the goals of Phase One. If we can just get these drywallers to realize they are HOLDING UP OUR LIVES, we might actually get there.
