I did a little compilation of some before and after pics to date. Right now, the before pics look a little better than the after pics, but that’ll change!
We’ve been making more progress with the house! It isn’t the kind of progress where you see a noticeable visual difference, but it’s still progress to us! Anything is progress to us 
and one step closer to having a kitchen again that doesn’t involve the tiniest bar sink ever and cooking on the grill outside when it’s 40 degress and drizzling!
We’ve been working on the guest bathroom the past few weeks – we completed the second layer of plaster and have one more to go. I saw a really cool wall treatment at the new Hotel St. Cecilia in the bar area, and I decided to try that on the bathroom walls once we’re done with the last plaster layer. The bathroom is already looking leaps and bounds better with the funny textured red walls covered over! Once we finish the wall treatments in there, we’ll work on laying the tile floor.
Mike got a nice little tax refund a couple of weeks ago so we’ve reserved all of that money to stretch as far as we can with the house remodel. We found a great plumber – Jeff Worrell with Plumb-O-Matic (512) 423-0181. I was really worried about contracting with a plumber because I’ve heard so many horror stories – but they were prompt, neat, and did a great job. And, their estimate was 1/3 the cost of the two other estimates we got. We had pretty big plumbing jobs done – we moved the sink plumbing for the kitchen from one wall to another adjacent wall, we moved a gas line for the range by about three feet, and we also had the showerheads in the bathrooms moved up (apparently people in the 70′s were either much shorter or chose not to wash their hair!) It was really, really nice to hear work going on in the house for the past few weeks – gave us some hope that we will finish this house eventually!
The next step after plumbing was framing and we’ve almost got that completed. My dad (who is a home remodeler in Houston) hooked us up! He let us “borrow” his long time employee Jose for three days this week. We put him up in a hotel near the house and he worked three days straight on framing. He closed back up the plywood floor from the plumbing work, fixed a structural load bearing wall issue, installed my lovely french doors in my office off the kitchen, removed the sliding doors in the kitchen and framed a wall in it’s place (that will have a span of cabinets), framed a partial wall by our staircase, and removed our old window and installed our gently used Gerkin windows we bought from some homeowners in Agave. And all for $600 plus hotel! What a bargain!
He didn’t quite finish everything – we still have to frame out the wall where we removed a closet, and frame a peninsula wall for the kitchen, but that should be stuff Mike can handle (fingers crossed)! We may call out Zach (handyguy) to assist with the closet framing…
Once we complete framing, we’re onto electrical (installation of some plugs, can lights, moving some lights, and hardwiring some lights, and then drywall. Then, kitchen cabinets!
brady bunch remodel
