Scott put took down the wall and put in the beam today. 

At the end of the day, I was a little crestfallen looking around to see our accomplishments. It didn't look commensurate with the damage done to both our bodies. I guess it is also the phenomenon of not being able to keep an accurate "before" picture in mind when looking in real time at the "after."

First, Scott removed an enormous slab of concrete with a sledgehammer. The slab used to be under the pump house he took down last weekend. When I say enormous, I mean  insanely enormous: insanely thick and insanely heavy. Normal people don't think of touching such things with their bare hands. I felt bad watching him work on it. It took so much effort. Then, after sledging chunks off, he'd load them into a wheelbarrow, cart them down to the river bank, unload them, and arrange them neatly along the shoreline.

Second, we finished gutting the bathroom and then removed all the wallboard from the walls and ceiling of the eventual kitchen. While Scott was working on the slab, I started taking the wallboard down after removing the trim and switch plates. Then he came in and did the bathroom, which included smashing a tile wall, a concrete shower pan, and a concrete floor four inches thick.

I don't have any good picture of the bathroom from the outside where you could see the 3-foot wall on the right where the tiled part of the shower was, the 2-foot wall on the right that housed the pocket door, or the pocket door. All I have are these which show the two walls but with no good idea of context or scale.

We kept the fire burning all day, and when we were exhausted and ready to go home, Scott loaded the last of the mattresses on the truck to put in the trash.

Scott wanted to rethink the moving of the bathroom. We decided (at first) to keep it where it is. Had we not changed our mind later, the first bedroom would have been closets and a laundry room. The second would still be our office. The entry to the bathroom would have been through the office, then the laundry. 

One other brainstorm was to think about storage under the stairs. I went looking for inspiration and found pictures like the following. 

I wanted that SO BAD. 

But Scott went back to the house and looked closely to see if the new ideas would work.  He said the stairs would be too overwhelming in the space we have and that the kitchen would be too small. In the end, we decided to stay with our previous plan, which is to keep the expanded kitchen into the bathroom and use the second bedroom for the bath/laundry combo.

Another thing we noticed when we were there yesterday was that the office has two windows, one of which looks out onto the sunroom heat pump. While the river is in the distance, it's still a pretty hideous view. So we decided to remove that window and put a couple big windows on the nature-preserve side of the house.

One new brilliant idea Scott had was to use a couple feet of the bathroom for a pantry. Here are the latest, and hopefully, final plans.

We've been rethinking a few details.

We added some closets, switched a full pantry to a cabinet pantry, put the washer/dryer combo in the bathroom, and for now, Scott has agreed to doors on the side of the house facing the river.

The pantry cabinet will surround the fridge.

Cabinets and counters will flow in a U-shape. The planning software says there is enough room; I hope so! 

Here's the new bathroom layout with the laundry. 

More views where you can see the closets. 

The office, with another view of the broom closet (door on right). The door on the left goes into the bathroom.

Another view of the office. The cabinet in the lower right is a bookshelf that is against the (invisible-in-this-picture) wall.

Here are the new doors to the river.  C'mon. This is super sweet. Oh, and a new furniture plan for the sunroom.

Views of the living room with the TV above the fireplace. The sink and flanking cabinets are showing up for some reason, but the other appliances and cabinets against the back wall are not. Maybe so we can see into the rooms.

Scott took a dead tree down and moved it with the help of his truck to the burn pile.

Our water will be delivered to the house and stored in a cistern. Scott ordered the cistern  a month or so ago and picked it up today. Oh, my. Nerves of steel.

He got it there safely, though, and got it moved off the truck.

We made a LOT of progress on Labor Day!

We worked from around 9:30 to 7 with one short break for lunch. Here's a summary of our accomplishments

• Cleaned out every room, removing all furniture, shelving, knick-knacks, mirrors, pictures, pillows, bedding, rugs, curtains, rods, etc. from the house except for the stove (the lot will easily fill one dumpster and then there was plenty more volume that we burnt)
• Gutted the kitchen
• Gutted the bathroom
• Removed the bedroom doors
• Removed the fireplace insert
• Opened the wall into the sunroom, removing the barn door and the wall extension that had been built there
• Opened the wall between the kitchen and living room
• Demolished a hutch 
• Demolished an outdoor structure (we discovered from some writing on construction materials that the building was called the pump house at one time) 
• Burned a bunch of stuff

Every item made out of wood, from kitchen and bathroom cabinets to the outdoor hutch, was insanely over built and difficult to bust up and heavy to carry. Also screws. So many screws in everything.

Bathroom Gutting
Still more to do in here, from removing shower, tiling, wainscoting, and trim.

Before-ish and after Bedroom #1
So...no before pictures in the first bedroom? I am not a very good photojournalist. I do have three of the living room from which you can see a little into the first bedroom. That's the best I've got.

Before and After
More to be done in here including removing fireplace housing, removing trim and wainscoting, removing and replacing floors, windows, and doors.

All my post cleanout pictures.
​Again, terrible photography skills on display. So much furniture up here that had to be taken down and out.

All my living room pictures.

I have no closeup picture of the hutch pre- or postdemo. But in the picture of the house, you can see the shed to the right of the house and the hutch between the house and the shed, against the back wall of the house.

Mattresses cost $60 a piece to take to the dump!!! So we're carting them back to our house.

Scott worked with the legendary Frank Roman to install the backup generator and heat pumps, one for the upstairs and big part of the house, and the other for the sunroom.

Scott and Thomas repaired the roof on the garage. A bigger job than Scott expected, but now it's nice and new.

In process

Another day Scott cleared brush from the river bank.

I started playing around in a 3D home reno app. I started to get excited about how nice the house could look. The rendering on these pics is odd; I only got the basics of the app down. So, for example, the back wall on the pic below is transparent, allowing you to see the back of the stove and fridge and the microwave and upper cabinet (hanging on the wall).

Other angles below. The ideas on the inside are to

• knock out the wall of the kitchen to open up the space
• extend the kitchen into the bathroom
• turn the two bedrooms down below into a new bathroom, a pantry, and an office/multipurpose room
• Move the barndoor to the office
• open up the opening into the sunroom
• build real stairs
• Put French or sliding doors on the back of the sunroom. We are butting heads on this one. I want it BAD and he doesn't

On the exterior, we will

• fix up the garage and turn it into his workshop
• build a new deck, patio, and dock
• clean up the landscaping
• put on a new roof
• redo the exterior siding

Of course, there is the infrastructure

• fix the septic system
• install a new cistern
• install 2 heat pumps for HVAC
• make the house MOUSE PROOF!