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.