Mouse On A Stick

Busy day today. As you can see, I've only got a few more boards left to pull up in the kitchen.  I moved the fridge which was NO fun because the doors kept opening and it's beyond disgusting in there.  I saw dark colors and smelled decomp every time they peeked open. So gross.

I've got a good floorboard removal system going so the work is much faster now and pretty damn gratifying.  I'm confident that I can get the rest done in one day.  Then it's just lifting up the sub floor and moving on to demoing either the bathrooms or the kitchen cabinets! To pay someone else to remove those boards would be $4/square foot which means I'm saving us at least $1200 by doing it myself.  Not bad!

When I got to the boards that had been under the fridge and stove I saw one with a clump of dustbunny on it.  I shook the board before starting to throw it in a pile and just before I did I realized that the dustbunny had a tail and an ear...poor lil' mouse! Who knows how long he's been stuck on that board in under-stove purgatory!

That experience highlighted two things for me- 1. we're definitely getting a farm cat and 2. I really need to work with the windows open in there, I'm sure I'm breathing in all kinds of grossness even with my mask on.

By the way, the floors are oak just as I suspected.  That means they cost $7-8 foot which makes me even angrier that someone would pay good money for nice oak floors and not take the time to make the floor even. Ugh! Such a waste! Now we have to pay that all over again to reinstall them annnd my back hurts. Thanks anonymous lazy person with indifference to detail. Thanks.

Back to the topic of contractors- picking one is hard.  It's like I'm on a dating game but the stakes are much higher because there's 10's of thousands of dollars involved.  The fear of not choosing wisely has me stressing just a bit. My biggest beef with the process so far is that most places won't give you a quote   until you sign up for their "design process" that allows an interior designer to fully measure the house and THEN talk to you about what every idea and material would cost...this design process is $2-5k and no you don't get that back if you decide that after seeing their numbers the markup is too high for the company you chose.

We're certainly not in the position to burn $2-5k just to fully vet a company and find out if they have reasonable prices or not. I'm hoping the people I met with this morning can give me ideas on pricing per job before we go forward.  The multitude of potential projects for this place is overwhelming so we really need that budget guidance before we get into a contract with anyone.

In all honesty, we could probably install our own kitchen cabinets and appliances. I'm tempted to do it ourselves and leave just the technical stuff for the contractor in both the kitchen and bathroom areas. If we can't do it we can always hand them over and write the check, no harm trying though right?

Whenever I say "remodel the kitchen" every contractor looks at it with raised eyebrows, looks at me (eyebrows still raised) and says, "you can burn $45k just doing a basic kitchen remodel"....umm yeah maybe you can but we don't need elephant tusk knobs on brazilian cherry, ripped from the rainforest cabinets. I know most people want high end but I don't need it, not for this fugly house anyway. I may have to eat my words but I just can't see spending that much on a basic kitchen.  We're not even reconfiguring the layout, just clicking in new cabinets. End of story. What's the problem?

Sidenote, the wall is baby pink where the oven was which means the kitchen used to be baby pink just like the guest bath. Gross. Did they only have a handful of paint colors in the 60's? Is that it? I'm really not looking forward to taking that glass wall down.  It's going to be a mess. A dangerous one at that.

It just occurred to me staring at the above photo that I might be able to sell or donate a lot of things we're gutting- I'm going to put anything salvageable on craigslist and see if I get any takers.  That hyper little lady on HGTV does it so why can't I? I'll shotgun a Redbull and try to hock the staircase banister (buyer must remove), the glass wall (buyer must remove), the cabinets (buyer must remove) and whatever else I can find...if this works it'll be Huck Finn painting a fence level of brilliance!

I mean, c'mon, wouldn't you pay top dollar for unique lighting fixtures like this one?? *crickets*