Category: House

Construction has finally started! Here’s what the house looked like before the demo started.

They have already taken off the railing, and ripped off the stucco on the front of the house. I’ll take another picture this afternoon after they finish for the day. I plan to take a picture each day to chronical the progress. The majority of the weekend was spent clearning out the rests of the garage and bonus room.

Here’s what the garage looked like this morning.

The bonus room.

Here’s what the room looked like before we cleared it out.

The boys have been glued to the front window watching all the activity.

I’m so excited that the construction has finally started! It will be so nice once it is done. Although it will be a big pain while the work is going on.

The storage unit we will use during our remodel/addition project arrived today. We have till Monday to get all the stuff from the bonus room and garage moved into it. Demo starts 8 am on Monday!

Some pretty spring flowers from my front yard.

We finally got all the permits from the city and a start date from the contractor. Demo will begin on Monday April 2. That only gives us two weeks to get all the remaining stuff out of the bonus room and garage. We’ll be ordering a mini-mobile unit soon to store all the stuff during the construction.

Yesterday Dan went to pick up the plans from the building department at they city. They would not give him the plans because we have to pay a “sewer addition fee”. Apparently this is due to us adding bedrooms to our house. So, Dan drove over to the sanitation district office to pay the fee. They told him that they could not give him an amount without the plans. So, he had to drive back over to the city and ask to “borrow” the plans to give to the sanitiation district so he could pay the fee and then bring the plans back and have them give them to him. The plans are now with the sanitation district so that they can analyize them and get back to us on how much money we have to pay them.

I just got a call from the city planning department letting us know that our builing plans have been approved and that we could come down and pick them up. The next step will be to get the permits and start demo. I have to call the contractor and see how his wife’s recovery from knee replacement surgery is coming so we can set a date to start the demo.

We closed today on the loan for our addition/remodel project. We should have the check sometime next week. We got an awesome rate thanks to Quicken Loans. They gave us a rate a 1% less than the next closes quote and over 2% less than the rates some of the other places were quoting. If you need a 2nd mortgage, I highly recommend going with them!

We got the plans back from plan check yesterday. They have a few minor “corrections” that our planner will have to take care of. We will then have to resubmit them. Hopefully it won’t take as long to get them back once we resubmit them.

The plumber was able to isloate the leak to a pipe running under the kitchen floor. It’s the pipe that supplies hot water to the kitchen sink and dishwasher. He cut off the pipe and capped it off for us. Since we have plans to totally gut the kitchen and redo it, we decided to do a temporary fix (and it better be very temporary). Dan spent most of the day working on fixing it. Here’s what it looks like:

Looks like we finally found our slab leak! 041 I came downstairs and found water pouring out of a wall in our kitchen. Looks like there is a leak down in the slab under that wall. Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while may remember that we have been having wet slab problems for years – July of 2004 to be exact. Every plumber we’ve had out to look at it says there is no leak. Well now they can’t say that. We called around and the soonest we can get a plumber out here is tomorrow morning. So, we are left with this problem until then. We have to keep the water turned of because it comes pouring out when it is on. We will leave it on for a bit for baths, but will have to keep the wet-vac on sucking up the water. At least it’s on the tile and not the carpet.

Here’s the whole in the wall where the water was coming out.