Renovation Reality: Timing is Everything

HGTV never shows you how timing can really screw up a renovation. I guess telling homeowners who are new to the process what to expect is like telling your kids what adulthood is like: You can't. They just have to experience it for themselves.

Patio doors and windows? Ordered. When will they be here? Next week.

Cabinets ordered. When will they be installed? Three weeks from now.

Granite slab ordered. When can they do final measurements? After the cabinets are installed.

And what do we need to have finished by then: wiring, plumbing, drywall, and painting and flooring installed.

This week's fiasco (and last week's, too) has been wood flooring. I've traveled a few hundred miles in town and surrounding areas looking at the various options of various flooring companies. And what I've found is not what we want. Or if it's what we want it's out of our price range. Or If it's a close match to what we want, it's not available until October. If it's a good runner up, the reviews scare us off. If it's a good bargain, well, it's there's a reason for it. We can't seem to win. These are just some of the samples we've looked at:

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First, we loved the hand scraped teak floors, until the salesman told us they weren't available until October.

Then we found these beautiful maple floors. They were perfect except they were $2 more per square foot than we wanted to spend. So we thought about it. For about 3 days. Then we read the reviews online. They were so bad we just couldn't chance it.

Then I found a beautiful distressed maple floor at a nearby warehouse. It was the right wood, color, price, and the salesman said we could probably get it in about two weeks. So I called the salesman the next morning. Three times. Apparently he thought I was desperate. He calls to say he could get it in a week, but at almost a dollar more per square foot.

Really?

After a few angry words hurled at that salesman, hubby and I go back to a local place with his sample. Hubby found something even better. It was closer to our original pick, with the same price as our original pick, that will be delivered the end of the week. Take that evil salesman!

After all that, I'm exhausted, and it's only one hurdle we cleared. There are so many more hurdles.

Next up is a kitchen door. You'd think it was easy to pick a door style, say wood, fiberglass, or steel, then a color, then glass design, then voila. You have a door. It's a cinch, actually, if you are rich (you don't have to be famous), and money is no object. Even if you could afford the $2,000-4,000 price tag, good luck finding something you like in the store; it's not the right color, style, or size. They'll have to order it. And you guessed it--it takes 30-45 days to even get it. There goes our schedule and budget. Just look:

Yes, Maisey modeled a door for me. They're enjoying being dragged from town to town, store to store, to sort through appliances, doors, windows, floors, light fixtures, countertops, paint samples and whatever else I've been searching for this past month.

Not.

They're banshees in the store, but at this point, I'm over the judging. I just want to get in there, find out what they have and how much it costs, and get out of there.

So not having a kitchen door is going to hold up progress if we can't get one by this weekend. Why? The builders can't lay the stone siding without it; they can't install the wood floor until it's properly acclimated to the room (at least a week), and they can't start any new projects (to keep them busy) that will take away what little living space we have left (and those odds and ends jobs are all we have left to do). But worst of all, if work is stopped while we wait for wood floors to acclimate and front doors to arrive, the builders will likely go elsewhere to work. And who knows when they'll come back.

So it's more than decisions. It's decisions and stress.

And I haven't even mentioned all the "little things:" paint colors, lighting fixtures, outlet cover colors, trim and baseboards, door knobs, lock sets, yada yada yada. These are just some of the light choices we have to make:

And the cabinets have to be done and installed by 8/5 so the granite guy can measure for our slab to be cut. And if the cabinet guy isn't on time...well, we won't have a kitchen until September, because it takes between 1-2 weeks to cut and prepare the granite before it's installed. Here's the granite we picked:

Looking at this picture, the center of our granite slab looks like the face of Chewbacca with a very large boufont hairdo. I don't want Chewy's face on my island.

So when someone says how easy a renovation is, they've probably just been watching HGTV. Did I mention this was my inner circle of hell? Layers of decisions, wrapped in a schedule, held aloft by oily salesmen and their elusive suppliers. I thought planning a wedding was difficult. Meh, planning a renovation is like wedding planning on crack, wrapped in valium and sprinkled with hope. Just a little.

Renovation Reality: Bites

So we're all set for the new kitchen, right? Wrong. We had to go back to the drawing board to be sure the new door and window placements were accurate to fit our sink and dishwasher, and when we laid out the kitchen in the room, we realized just how massive that island we designed really is. So we scaled it back to accommodate the inswing French doors, but then it was small and weird looking. Then we changed to outswing doors and larger outside steps.

We went back and forth from angle cabinet to corner cabinet, and determined that the corner will support the measurements better, even though I like the angled cabinet idea. Dang. The sink has to be centered under the new window, or it's just weird looking, so function and fit over form here.

The good news is we are ready to give the cabinet guy our measurements. We've ordered our appliances. The bad news is, we still haven't decided on a color for the cabinets because we're still looking for flooring.

And once we looked at the ceiling height, we thought we wanted a vaulted ceiling in the kitchen. Except by the time we allowed for attic space (ventilation), insulation, and the drywall for the vault, it wasn't much of a vault at all. So we decided on a tray ceiling instead. Add a week of work and a lot of money, and here we go. The good news is the pot lights are more easily placed in the tray than on a vault. So that's a plus for me, because who wants to decide where potlight should go in the ceiling?

So the doors and windows are coming out and being switched. It was weird to leave the house like this.

And come home to this.

But it's progress. And I love it! Can't wait for the new doors and windows to be installed.