How did we renovate our home while still living there?
Let me start out by saying this... Renovating our home while living in it was rough. Seriously you guys, it was torture. Trying to confine my kids to our back three bedrooms was pretty intense. The kids were troopers and stayed happy through almost all of it, but there was a point close to the end when Ava started asking when we would get our house back. Sad.
So talking logistics now, I've had some people ask how we navigated through the whole thing and I wanted to share with you some of our great ideas and some of our not so great ideas.
We last left you with pictures of our concrete pour, up next: framing, roofing, and insulating...
Renovation: The Wall from the outside, before demolition
The best idea we had (Thanks to my awesome contractor Dad) was to build the addition first. So, for the 400 sq ft addition we poured the concrete slab, framed it, ran electrical, insulated, and roofed it. Once those things were done we knocked down what used to be the exterior wall and connected the existing house to the addition.
Renovation: Before the Wall is Demolished
Renovation: After Parts of the Wall are Demolished
That gave us as long as possible in our house before disrupting the kids normal routine and moving life into the back of the house. To anyone adding on to their home: Do this!! It is so smart!
A not so great idea we had was assuming we would just "wing it" when it came time to spatially plan for the kitchen. Oops. Who knew it would be so difficult to decide how big we wanted our center island? We moved the sink to be in the new island, but we needed to know exactly where we wanted it placed before we could trench for the plumbing. So, the time it took us to decide on that stalled our renovation a bit.
Another not so great idea was trying to fry an egg on a barbecue. That takes FOR-EV-ER. Trying to be resourceful backfired in that moment when I realized after 15 minutes, the egg would never cook. You live and learn, I guess.
And for you middle of the roaders, there was a kind of good and kind of bad choice in trying to save and reuse our existing floor. The good was saving some extra dough, the bad was trying to keep the floor covered through the renovation so it wouldn't get destroyed. And then trying to join the new floor to the existing floor was about as fun as getting your eyelashes plucked out. Hello there 17 hour project that should have only taken 3.
All in all, the beginning stages of construction went pretty well with minimal set backs...