Yeay - a Dining Room .... Finally!!

Well, it has been over a year since the start of the remodeling project.  More like a year and a half if you count the initial planning and architecture phases.  And Andy still has a long road to go.  But, there is still progress to report.... finally!!  He made it just in time for the annual Halloween bash!!  Otherwise, he would have been in real trouble.

The last report was in late July when the kitchen was finished.  The next room scheduled was to convert the former living room into a dining room.  The old dining room was so small that, during a dinner party, if one person had to get up, several had to also get up.  Monica always wanted a large dining room so it was a natural to convert the old living room in to a formal dining room once we lost the old dining room to the stairwell.

Along with the dining room, we also re-did the little hallway off of the dining room.

Short after completing the kitchen, Andy was surveying the living getting a handle on what tasks he needed to accomplish.  He opened the doors to the wet bar and, whoa, it was really ugly and decided something needed to be done.  The house was built in the mid 1980's and the bar really looked the part.  It had yucky formica counter top, a smoked mirror back, glass shelves and a real ugly globe light fixture.  It had to go.

The idea Andy came up with was to convert it to an small open wet serving area.  He decided to use black granite tile on the counter and some black/white mosaic tile leftover from the entry floor on the wall.  He had to remove and lower the counter to file the tile, install the wall tile, install new faucet and new light fixture.

 

The wall tile is the same as the entry flooring trimmed at the top and bottom with the black granite tile used on the countertop.  New faucet, light fixture and electrical outlet/switch covers.

The doors and drawers need to be added but the upper part will remain open.

Then the usual tasks had to be done.  Wall and ceiling prep.  Paint ceiling.  Prime areas that were repaired or were new.  Then time to paint the walls.  We decided to use the same red used as accent walls which is similar to the previous color but much darker and richer with white trim.  Andy wanted to bring some of the other colors as well so he decided to use gray below the chair rail.  Painting was a bit of a pain with all of the picture frame molding.  Very tedious and time-consuming.

The old flooring was removed and Andy installed the same flooring as in the great room.  The flooring was much less tedious than the painting.  We also bought new fireplace doors and curtains. 

Andy finished the room a couple of weeks before the Halloween party in time to bring some of the furniture out of storage and to decorate before the festivities.

Looking from the entry.  New paint, new flooring, new fireplace doors, new curtains, light fixture a the correct lenght and some art on the walls.  The two small painting on the far wall were painted by Monica.  Eventually we will add the armoir that Monica inherited in place of the glass table next to the far wall.

From the other side of the room you can see the newly renovated wet bar and the other wine cabinet whose tops fold out to make a nice serving area.

Looking toward the entry.  A hutch is on the right.  As you can see, there is actually room to fit the table with both leaves and all chairs with room left over.

We are please with how the dining room turned out.  Now that the big Halloween extravaganza is over, Andy is turning his attention to the next room converting the old den into the TV room with something extra.

Somehow Andy will need to incorporate this huge kegerator into the TV room.  This goes along with his new hobby of home brewing beer.  Should be interesting to see what he comes up with.
 

Still chugging along...

It's been a couple of months since the last post, so it's time for an update.

The progress has been painfully slow unfortunately.  We thought we would be much further along than we are.  But that's life especially when the labor is cheap!  But, nonetheless we are still making progress. 

For the most part, we are finished with the new additions with the exception of a few minor items.  We are now moving into the pre-existing rooms.

Andy put the finishing touches on the kitchen.  He had to do a little bit of electrical work to add an additional light above the sink as part of the prep work before installing the backsplash.  Once the backsplash was done, the trim along the bottom of the cabinets was added as well as some trim above the fridge.

The light above the sink adds some much needed illumination in the sink area.  This whole workarea now has plenty of light.  The backsplash is red, white and black glass mosiac tiles.  While time-consuming, they actually went up easily.  The trim around the bottom of the cabinets is hard to see in this pic, but does a good job of hiding the light fixtures. 

Here is how the backsplash looks in the cooking area.  Andy decided to take the backsplash only up to the hood light and paint above that.  He used the same blue that is seen in the stairway and upstairs just to bring a little of that color into the great room.  Again the trim was added around the bottom of the cabinets to finish it.

That pretty much finishes the kitchen.  We are extremely happy with how it turned out.  We've always wanted a nice big, sleek and modern-looking kitchen.  But you can't please everyone.  Karen was working on some type of baking project and complained that the kitchen was too big because she had to walk too much to get the items she needed.  Awww...  Anna, our live-in personal chef, aka our oldest daughter, has not complained.  She seems to enjoy cooking in this kitchen, especially compared to the tiny one we had before.

The first task in the old part of the house is to re-purpose the old living room into a dining room.  But first we had to move some things around as we were still using that space as a living room.  We moved the white leather furniture and the media center into the great room sitting area until we the new media room is done. 

The great room sitting area is a tad too small as a media room with this furniture.  In fact, there was not even room for the sub-woofer and it had to be put just inside the back room.  But fortunately, it is just temporary...somewhat.  If you are sitting on the left side of sofa by the window you get a real close up view of the TV.

Next we had to move the remaining office furniture from the back room (ie: the new media room) to the office upstairs.  This primarily consisted of Monica's desk, her scrapbook storage units and a couple of shelves.

The huge office does not look so empty now.

Then we, of course, had to move the rest of the furnishings out of the old living room to make room for transforming it into a formal dining room.

One feature of the old living room was a small wet bar.  Now that we have the big bar in the great room, we really didn't need a bar per se.  Besides, that "bar" really needed an update.  The old bar was ugly with a formica counter top, smoked glass mirrors on the back, glass shelving and an ugly light fixture.  So 1980s.  Andy decided it needed an update and the only thing worth keeping was the sink.

We decided to use it more as a serving area.  The original bar had doors that enclosed the upper part.  We've decided to leave that open and just have doors on the lower half.  We had some extra boxes of the black/white marble mosiac tile that we used in the entry and stair risers, which we decided to use along with the same black granite tile from the trim/transitions in the entry and kitchen.  Andy removed everything including the counter top.  He had to reinstall the counter top just a bit lower so that the tile would be even with the frame.  The tiling wasn't too bad except there was a lot of cutting of the black tiles around the sink, for the trim around the counter and around the top.  He installed a black switch and outlet with a black cover.  We added a more modern hanging light fixture.  Unfortunately, we did not like any of the traditional tall bar faucets and bought a normal lavatory faucet which had a drainpipe that wouldn't work with a thin stainless steel sink.  Andy had had to improvise a solution and ended up getting a nice push button drain for the sink that he made work. 

Now to work on the rest of the dining room.

The old living room which will become the new formal dining room.  You can see the new serving station on the right and the dining room light fixture hanging from the ceiling.  Once the furniture is back in, those lights will be lowered to the appropriate height.  The color scheme stay pretty much the same but we will repaint using the shade of red that is in the new addition.  We will replace the fireplace doors, new window treatments and replace the current pergo with the same engineered hardwood that we used in the new addition.

In the meantime, it is extremely HOT, HOT, HOT in Dallas.  We hope everyone has a nice summer.  Stay cool and safe.

Still working it!!

Wow!!  It's been nearly five months since we've done an update....  But have been chipping away at the tasks despite the lack of blog update.  Unfortunately, it has been busy outside of this remodeling project.. all of that real life stuff you know.  Most of January and February was lost due to a big work project Andy had in Jan, the passing of Monica's mom at the end of January and Monica getting back to working on her Master's degree.  In spite of that we have made some progress, particularly over the past few weeks as we geared up for a big party.

Here is a quick summary of what we've done since the end of Dec.

So that we can stuff things away, we installed some basic shelving in the upstairs closets.  This is just some bare wood modular shelving from IKEA.  It's not great looking but is very functional and configurable.

This is the new upstairs storage closet.  There is deeper ~24" shelving on the left and 12" shelving on the right.  It filled up in no time mostly with Monica's scrapbook stuff.  Andy was able to snag a shelf or two.

The same shelving system is installed in the two small office closets.  This closet will become a technology closet where Andy will put routers, switches, computers, etc.

The room at the top of the stairs has become an exercise room.  Andy purchased a recumbent bike and a weight machine.  The weight machine was a bit of a bear to assemble.  We also have an elliptical and a treadmill still in storage.  Most likely we will only add the treadmill and get rid of the elliptical.  We'll also put a small LCD TV in here with a DVD player for exercise DVD's.

The "gym"!!  Probably won't get a lot of use until after the renovation is done.

The next big project was the entryway and stairs.  We painted the trim along the stairs and in the entryway and the closet door.  We had already purchased the tile several months ago as they were a special buy.  The tiles are a mosaic of white marble and black polished granite.  We decided to purchase some black granite tiles as transitions between rooms. 

This is the tile we purchased many months ago for the entry and stair risers.  As you can see it is white marble (probably Caldera??) rectangles surrounding a small black square of what is most likely some type of black granite.  The white has bits of gray highlights thrown in.

This is looking from the top of the stairs.  You can see the various gradations of gray in the white marble.  Cuts of black granite tile is used as transitions in the three passage ways.

A closer picture of the entry tile.  In the corner with stairs we will put a small teak secretary that Monica got from her mom's house.  It should fit perfectly.

We used the same mosiac tile on the stiar risers will a small strip of the black granite.

 
After the entryway it was time to start on the "great room" which includes the kitchen, breakfast nook and sunroom.  We had to finish off the painting.  The trim, window sills and doors had to be painted.  The walls had to be touched up especially around the edges.

For the kitchen, we wanted to extend a similar look with white marble and black granite.  We decided on 12" x 12" white Carrera marble tiles with  3" black granite tile strips trimmed around the cabinets and 12" x 12" black granite tiles as transitions to the sunroom and breakfast room.

It was a lot of work over several weekends to lay the kitchen tile but we think it was worth the effort.  You can see the same type of white/gray tile as in the entry mosaic but in a larger 12" x 12" tile.  The same black granite look was used as trim around the cabinets and as transitions between the kitchen and the rest of the "great room".  It's hard to see but the toe kicks have a stainless steel look.

The black granite was also used as a landing for the back door.  You can see Andy checking out how the hardwood will look against the black.

We wanted some type of wood for the rest of the "great room" (ie: the breakfast area and sunroom)  We looked around quite a bit for wood flooring and almost decided on a dark solid bamboo but we just kept coming back to an engineered wood from Thomasville.  The core is high-density fiberboard and the top hardwood layer is Brazillian Jatoba with a Cherry Amaretto finish.  Andy happened to find a closeout sale online at Home Depot for 30% off and free shipping.  He just couldn't resist and purchased 1800 sq ft of the stuff.  Nope.. the great room is not 1800 sq ft!!  This flooring will also be installed throughout the rest of the downstairs including the formal dining room, master bedroom, the other two bedrooms and both hallways.  We should have a good bit leftover for future repairs or expansion.

The breakfast nook and the sunroom sections of the "great room".  The 12 x 12 black granite tile is used as the transition between the kitchen and the other areas.

The bar in the great room.  One of our favorite features in the house.  Notice the "stainless steel" looking toe kicks.  You can see the stainless steel look toe kick better here.

We also installed shades in the sunroom and in the office.

We installed the same blinds upstairs as well.  These are Levelor cell blinds with a cordless lift system.

We got all of this done just in time for our Cinco de Mayo celebration, affectionately known as Drinko de Mayo!  We got a lot of comments about the floor, especially from folks who had seen the bare concrete floor that we've been living with since last fall.

There are still several things left to do in the great room.  We still have to finish the baseboard quarter round trim, install another light fixture over the sink in the kitchen, install the backsplash tile on two walls and add trim to the cabinets.  Then the kitchen will pretty much be finished.

BUT... there's always a but isn't there....  While this will mostly complete all of the new addition, there is still the formal dining room, the media room, the master bedroom, the guest bedrooms and the hallways.  Oh yea.. still have to finish the hobbit hole closet under the stairs.  Whoo boy!  Then finally, after that, Andy will get to work on his garage man-cave.

It wasn't all just work.  Andy upgraded and added some audio/video components.  He purchased to "placeshifter" units, called Vulkano, that connect to the FIOS set top boxes and the network.  This allows us to watch live TV on various clients like iPads, iTouches and our Android phones.  He also added a USB disk drive to each so that we can record shows/movies that can be downloaded to our clients for offline viewing.  Monica can now enjoy TV in her bath.  Anna can now record shows and movies to watch on her iTouch while at the gym.

Our Samsung big screen DLP TV is 3D capable.  Unfortunately it uses the checkerboard format whereas the Top/Bottom or Side-to-Side formats are the primary formats used these days.  However, Mistubishi has an adapter that works with legacy Mitsubishi and Samsund DLP systems and converts new 3D formats to the checkerboard format used by these TVs. So, Andy had to purchase this adapter to keep up with his Geek club membership.  Of course, he had to upgrade to a new 3D Blu-ray player and upgrade the AV receiver to support 3D.  Just like when he adopted HDTV 10 years ago, there is not a plethora of content available  but it is growing.  He is hoping that the Mavericks make it to the NBA finals because they will be broadcast on the ESPN 3D channel.  Monica really enjoyed watching Tangled in 3D

Stay tuned, this blog will have more updates!  We will try to update more often.