Before and After

I spent a little time w/ Google SketchUp and rendered these 3d drawings of the first floor layout. It's not to scale, but it's pretty close.

Before

After

Bigest differences:

• No wall separating the front room and living room.
• The wall on your left hand side when you walk in the house is now smaller, making the opening bigger
• The wall behind the bar (that used to have a mirror on it) was removed
  Kitchen island is gone
• A new wall blocking the back bedroom from the bar area

Other stuff that has been going on...

We're in the home stretch. Can you feel it? We're waiting on our first floor flooring to arrive. We order a 4 1/4 inch maple. It has a natural grain to it so it should be a good mix of light and dark pieces.

All of the crown molding is up, primed and painted with 2 coats of Ultra White. The walls and ceilings have both been primed. The ceilings have been painted white, and one set of walls has their first coat of paint. We've been dreading the painting stage, but it has been painless through this point. The boys have a paint sprayer that made it super easy. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes to prime all of the walls, trim, and celing with the sprayer. We're talking almost 800 sq feet of ceiling and who knows how much wall space. This would have been an all day job to do manually.

Once we figured out how to clean the machine and reset it, it took about 20 minutes to do each coat of Ultra White on the crown, window trim and doors. Just goes to show how valuable Nick+Paul are to have as friends.

We celebrated our success last night with a grill fest of BBQ chicken and sausages on a make shift plywood table!

One note: We had our first real casualty of the project. Nick+Paul had to take the french doors out of the bar while leveling the floor. The set it out on the deck and continued working. They heard a big crash and couldn't figure out what it was. Apparently the doors blew over and half of the glash was smashed! Nobody was hurt but as the supervisor of the job, I had to take it out of both of their paychecks. They understood and each drank one less beer that night.