Redesigning the floor plan.. opening up walls

If you haven't already, take a look at one of my earliest posts describing the floor plan in this E-11 Eichler. Did I say E-11? It turns out we actually have a E-41, but I'll get to that later.

So our original floor plan has a fairly large kitchen/family room, a separate (relatively small) living room, a bonus room, and four bedrooms. Family room has atrium and backyard windows. Living room has backyard windows and bonus room has a huge slider door to sideyard. I guess here is what architects/builders had in mind in 1959 when they built this house: The family is going to eat and hang out in the kitchen/family room area. When there are guests, people are going to dress up and sit in the formal living room. The bonus room is for storing junk, and you can easily haul in additional junk into that room with the oversized slider door exiting to the sideyard.

We'll repurpose the rooms for our way of living, and here is the plan:

- Former kitchen/family room: Party room! Did you notice that people always hang out in or around the kitchen when there is a party? We'll have the kitchen here, throw in a few bar chairs and a sofa. We may also add a small table. Of course, we'll also have meals as a family in this room either on countertop bar or on that small table.

- Former living room and formal bonus room: We think having a bonus room is the first step to becoming a chronic hoarder, and it is a total waste of space. Do you know how much $/sqft we paid while buying this house?! So, we'll combine bonus room and former living room to create our living and dining area by removing the wall between bonus room and living room. This way we can throw a TV on the fireplace, throw a sofa right across, and set a nice dining area in place of bonus room. While sitting on that sofa, you get the TV in front of you hung on a nice brick fireplace. You turn your head right and see a full wall of glass to the backyard (no fireplace towering in the middle of your backyard view like a medieval defense outpost as you'd see in some floor plans). You turn your head left and you see the nice dining area and whatever you got in the sideyard behind that oversized slider. (ok, this is a weak point, we got to plant some good looking stuff on that sideyard. Right now I see stacks of construction debris).

Of course, we plan to close off the boiler/washers area by putting  a new wall and creating a hallway/engine room towards the garage with all the boilers and stuff. By the way, Mr. Eichler, I think putting the boilers inside the house was a stupid move as they suck all the oxygen out of living spaces.

Net net, here is what our floor plan is going to look like after opening up that wall:

 

 How are we going to open that wall? Well, that is the big project. Please read on..

Ikea cabinets are in place!

We've achieved a major milestone today. Cabinets frames are installed!

Here is the full story on cabinets:
I spent a couple days in the last two weeks assembling the kitchen cabinets Ikea delivered. I had about 12-13 pieces of cabinetry and it pretty much took a total of 10 or so hours to assemble all. A good chunk of that was spent on just sorting and identifying the right pieces out of the stack Ikea delivered. Ikea unloaded everything I ordered shrink-wrapped on a large pallet and left it in my garage. As you may expect, the parts you need first were placed at the bottom of the pile, so I pretty much had to re-sort everything.

Once you get to the items you need, then assembling the cabinets is fairly straightforward. It takes about 20-30 mins for each cabinet from unboxing it to completing frame. High cabinets are a bit bulky and heavy, so you probably need a helper to carry/move them around.

After I assembled the cabinets, our contractor Michael (mikep-at-garlic.com) came over, first put in drywall, and then started installing the cabinets one by one starting with the high cabinet for built in oven/micro in the corner. Easier said than done! Lifting and installing cabinets is a lot of work not to mention the hassle of dealing with issues like sloping floors and walls. It took a few days to install all the cabinets, and we'll wrap it up tomorrow by completing the cover panels around the island.

Tomorrow, Ikea's countertop contractors will come over to take the measurements for countertop cut. Here is the sink that will be installed under the countertop:

We're going with a 30" single  bowl sink on a 30" cabinet. We were also interested in zero-radius sinks for a really modern look, but they all come with four ridges on the bottom going from the corners to the drain, and that is necessary for proper draining per a salesperson I spoke with. Anyway, I saw this nice sink on e-bay. It has relatively sharp corners and no ugly ridges, so I pulled the trigger. It was a bit pricey ($160) for a piece of steel, but it looks like sinks are outrageously expensive for some reason.

My weekend plan: Start putting the doors and drawers in...

Foam roof and skylights are being installed.

Our foam roof install work has started a couple days ago. Here is how Abril Roofing is installing our foam roof:
- Remove all the gravel, leave the tar paper on.
- Raise the roof flashing by ~2" to add extra height for the foam
- Raise skylight curbs accordingly
- Reposition drains
- Put all new skylights (I've got Keith from MasterCraft Builders doing the skylights in coordination with Abril)
- Apply foam
- Apply base coat
- Apply top coat with some granules. Why the granules? No idea..

Removing all the gravel involves a bunch of people on the roof tearing out pieces as well as a powerful vacuum setup that is ferried around on a truck! Here is what that vacuum setup looks like:

I can't really describe how noisy that machine is. When it is running, it is noisy enough to suppress any conversation on the entire street. On day 1, this machine suckep up all the gravel on my roof. Here is a snapshot of the roof after removing the gravel. Note that some sections were removed all the way down to the decking:

After removing the gravel, Keith from MasterCraft builders came over and installed 4 new skylights for us. Here is the 2x3 one that we've installed on the kitchen:

I must say that skylight makes a huge difference by bringing in a lot of indirect light.

Abril has immediately applied the foam on my roof on day 3 to make it watertight at a minimum, because we're expecting rain on day 4 :). After  the rain is over, they'll apply the base and top coats on the foam.

More updates to come later..

Gerry the tile pro at work!

We found a great tile contractor. Gerry has come in, inspected the job that was partially done by the previous contractor, and has started fixing their mistakes right away! He replaced the poor cuts around the edges, doors, closets and he is applying the grout. Kitchen floor is coming out nicely as seen below.

I'll take more pictures after it is all cleaned up. 

We're now progressing into the master bathroom, hall bathroom and the hallway itself. We're holding off the living room area for now, because we first want to remove the wall between bonus room and living room.

By the way, you can reach Gerry at gonzalez0077@yahoo.com if you are looking for a tile installer especially for large tiles.