This Odd House

In the afternoon light, after a one-year makeover.

July 7 2013.  A year ago, I hosted the “Before” Party.  I had just taken ownership of This Odd House, and was making my plans for it and wanted to have people see it in its “before” state.  The responses I got ranged widely, from enthusiastic support to expressions of concern over my mental health, from “awesome, don’t change a thing” to “run away, run away, as fast as you can”.

I didn’t heed any one person’s advice, but took counsel in all of it.  A year and a savings account later, where am I?

Well, I am not where I expected, which is to be “completed”.  As was entirely predictable (and many did), the project was much bigger and more expensive than I thought.  Some of it was reasonable, scope-creep occurs in every project.

Much of it happens because opportunities arise that, if not taken, would incur greater cost later.  When the walls are open, and expose bad plumbing and rotting floor joists, it would be foolish to not make the repairs.

That was a case of unexpected discovery and mandatory repair.  There were also moments of esthetic opportunism.  When the ceiling is open for ventilation work, why not also install a solar light tube to bring daylight into a windowless bathroom?  Not in the original design concept, it is an example of scope creep, but one that was deemed worth it.  If the budget constraint were perfectly rigid, it would have been a far less satisfying, even frustrating, project.  But that was not the life experience I was after.

There were larger “misunderestimates” of the project.  It was pointed out to me at the Before Party that my Eurovan would not fit in the garage.   This was an unpleasant surprise!  I knew that someday the garage would need to be updated, but I had not considered that it would be completely useless in the meantime.  I would like to replace it with a modern garage, one that has a nice workshop bay, but it will have to wait for another year.

I had also expected to have an array of solar collectors on the flat roof.  I have been working with Innovative Power Systems, which applied to Xcel Energy on my behalf for their renewable energy rebate program, but the bureaucratic wheels grind slowly, and I have not heard on whether it has been approved.  Probably for the better, there are many other renovation items to finish.

The punch list of remaining projects is hydra-like.  Each item seems to spawn at least two more before it can be checked off.  The nature of the items has shifted however, from things that are clearly new design and construction (providing kitchen ventilation) to things that mark a transition to normal maintenance (painting and deck repair).

The year has provided yet another interesting chapter in my life.  I got to invoke and satisfy my design urges;  I acquired a much deeper knowledge and appreciation for modern construction materials and methods, and lessons in how houses work.  They are far more complex than one might expect, with subtle details that if not attended to properly can create subsequent problems.

As an engineer, I sometimes overestimate my abilities to analyze and solve problems.  Renovating This Odd House has been humbling.  Having seen the handiwork of amateurs (including me), I am no longer reluctant to seek help from professionals; even the clerks and assistants at hardware and home stores have specialized know-how that I now try to tap into.

The year has included a transformation of lifestyle.  Initially living comfortably in a townhouse, I started the demolition and renovation of TOH as an off-site property owner.  Then I moved into the thick of it, not truly moving in, but bringing my possessions into holding zones, and beginning a twelve month bivouac while construction activities ensued around and sometimes within my camp.  Essential tools were located and utilized, but the cry to this day is still “I know I have it somewhere, I just don’t know where”.

My interrupted lifestyle changed again when Portia joined me at the camp, bringing her worldly possessions to be interred alongside mine.  We improvised mightily as construction continued, braving the occasional heat, water, and electrical outages as the infrastructure in This Odd House was replaced and renewed.

Major combat operations are now over, and our possessions and activities have diffused into the newly opened and remodeled spaces.  It has been an organic process, not planned or optimized, but we now occupy the space and architecture I envisioned a year back—an open feeling with natural lighting and clean stylings of contemporary design, built within and despite, the constraints of an old and awkward structural framework.

I like the neighborhood and community in which we are embedded.  We are gradually knowing our neighbors, and the foot traffic past our house to the light rail train is a reminder of one of our great benefits:  easy access to downtown and the airport.

Yes, there has been much that has changed in the last year.  I sometimes forget how it once was, and how different it is now.  I look forward to showing it to the Before Party attendees: they may be impressed at the transformation.  For others it might be just another banal exercise in interior decorating updates.  I may have tried to “turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse”.  Fortunately, even though the result is no silk purse, I will be enjoying the outcome of the effort for many years.

My life has evolved and changed with This Odd House over the last year.  I had always planned to have an “After” party, but I must now acknowledge more than just a year of renovation.  I now have a new life partner, baptized in the unpredictable waters of plumbing repairs and heating outages.  We both will be celebrating milestone birthdays in August, and acknowledging a commitment to live together in This Odd House.  The After Party has now been expanded and enhanced into “The (happily ever) After Party”.

One year on:  it was a good year, let’s have some more.

One of the hazards of humans using tools to leverage ourselves into modern civilization.

I like the term “maker” for those hobbyists who take on constructive projects and build cool things.  There is a local club called “Twin City Makers”, operating out of the “hack factory”, a building outfitted with shops and specialized tools that are out of reach of many young inventors, but are made available in this community setting.

I am not especially skilled at woodworking or metal working, or many of the other skills that have been needed in the renovation of This Odd House, but I have found the need to acquire rudimentary crafting techniques for many small projects.  The major renovation is done, but there remain many details to reach a state of “completion” (see punch list blog entry).

One of the remaining items is to fill in the hole in the wall left by the window air conditioner.  The old behemoth was replaced by a small energy efficient mini-split heat pump, which did not need any of the wall space previously used by the A/C.  This left a 1-1/2 by 3-foot opening.  What to do with it?

The options were to make a stucco patch and cover it over, replace with an actual window, or to make some “feature” that would fit in the space and provide an accent to the house.  We opted for the latter, thinking this would be least expensive, and the easiest, and allow us to use the space to uniquely post the address of This Odd House.

A simple frame around a wooden panel would do, how hard can that be?  Of course, a simple frame around a panel would be too simple, it needed something more—a ceramic panel maybe, yes, and with custom made tiles.  Oh, and it needed to light up at night so the pizza delivery guy could get here without confusion!  A design was made, and the project begun.

It was well along, the frame had been constructed, primed and painted, and the LED lighting system fabricated and attached.  But at one of the final steps, an accident occurred.  One of the tools used to cut the optical diffusing material to size caused the traumatic removal of the end of one of my appendages.

You may think that I should be better trained with power saws (and I should), but in this case the tool was a pair of scissors.  Yes, it was just a pair of scissors, but at that particular force and angle, it removed the end of my finger.

It was just the tip, a slice of skin, but deep enough that simple pressure was not enough to stem the flow of blood.  A trip to Urgent Care and an hour of embarrassment later, I had a coagulation bandage on it and was returning home.

The illuminated address panel will be delayed a few days.  I am usually quite safety-conscious, insisting on safety glasses and work gloves for activities involving tools and high forces, but this episode illustrates that accidents can happen just about anywhere.  I wasn’t running with scissors, but was being a little too casual with these sharp metal objects, whose very design is intended and leveraged to split materials in two.

A few of the lists I make for myself, attempting to avoid things falling through the cracks and keeping tabs on the remaining items in the renovation/remodeling plan.

In every construction project, the major parts get done, and then there are the finishing details.  You have probably experienced this yourself with home improvement projects; the first 80% of it takes 80% of the expected amount of time, and the remainder takes the other 80%.

The finishing details are diverse and dependent, and annoyingly difficult to complete, but they each get a line item on “the punch list”, a term I first heard from the builder of my previous home.  For the subcontractors to receive payment in full for their various works, they needed to truly complete them.  The punch list contains all the loose ends, unfinished details, and re-work, as identified by the builder (and the owner, if he is on top of things).  As each item gets completed by the respective subcontractor, it gets checked (“punched”) off the list.

At This Odd House, a large part of the remodeling and renovation was managed by a construction contractor, but it was limited in scope, largely to the kitchen, bath, windows and second floor work.  I played a role as contractor for the rest, finding the structural engineers, asbestos abators, plumbing, heating, and AC subcontractors, flooring, and some of the carpenters, sheet rockers and painters.

These tradesmen did their jobs well, but their jobs did not include all the leftover details that esthetically tie things all together, that make the house into a finished emotional space to call home.

Those details are left to me.  They include things that I could not capture in an architectural drawing or specification.  And they include things that I had not quite figured out yet—I needed to see what the space looked like before deciding how to proceed.  And they included things I felt I could do myself, with my own limited skill set, saving the expense (and communication overhead) of hiring someone else.

And so here I am, with my own punch list and no one to dispatch it to.  Here are some examples of what is on this list (a partial sampling, the actual list is many pages):

–       Fill the space vacated by the first floor air conditioner.  This is now a big hole in the wall, how should it be repaired?

–       Provide a cabinet and space in the upstairs “back hall” (formerly part of the bathroom), for linens, towels and a broom closet.

–       Install storm doors for weather and security

–       Curtains and curtain rods

–       Install ceiling fan in porch

–       Mount former bathroom mirror on bedroom wall

–       Install security camera system

–       Build cabinet under bathroom sink

–       Fix the screen door on the main level porch

–       Remove the “water feature” that has become a mosquito breeding ground.

–       … you get the idea…

There are innumerable things to fill, touch up, drill, hang, mount, wire, re-wire, paint, replace, remove, and repair.  These are things any homeowner is familiar with, but the concentration is particularly high in my case.

As these items on the list are each targeted, one by one they are checked off, and even though new items are continually added (when do renovation tasks transition to standard maintenance?), there is progress that is noted.

The most recent was the framing and installation of a stained glass artwork by William Saltzman, retained from Portia’s former residence (he was the prior owner), now an accent above the Jacuzzi, and providing a brightening splash of color in the morning sun that we enjoy every day.

This was one of the punch list items that yielded a high satisfaction level when it was checked off!

The stained glass artwork, mounted above the Jacuzzi.

An energy-harvesting toggle switch, which will be wall-mounted. It transmits signals to a remote control without the need for batteries. The copper generator pickup coil is exposed here, wrapping around the switch perimeter.

One of the design errors I committed was underestimating the ventilation requirements of an active kitchen.  It is common for an over-the-stove microwave to provide a vent fan for removing the fumes from the chemical reactions common in the preparation of certain foods.  In many kitchens, the air is vented to the outside, but in our case, we are working against an inside wall, and, not wanting additional penetrations through the flat roof, the (filtered) air was redirected back into the kitchen.

This works in many cases, but evidently not for us.  Portia is an enthusiastic cook, and I am an inattentive one.  These both lead to conditions of high aroma concentrations, whether from her elaborate sautéed garlic and olive oil creations, or from my burnt toast episodes, both of which are detected by our exquisitely sensitive, city-inspector-required, smoke detectors.

So additional ventilation is required, and it must be to the outdoors, not just recirculated to different parts of the house.  A little research resulted in determining how much ventilation is needed (air volume replacements per hour converts to cubic feet per minute (cfm) of fan performance).  And the tunnel to the kitchen skylight was a perfect opportunity for an external sidewall fan, rather than figure out how to penetrate the roof.

I ordered the fan, a 250 cfm unit with a 6-inch diameter intake, capable of replacing my upstairs kitchen’s air 8 times per hour.  I expected to make a 6-inch hole in the wall, mount it, wire it, and be done.  As usual, it is simple in principle, but the details get in the way.  I needed to move an existing outlet in order to have enough room, and there were other complications.  But with enough trips up and down the ladder to get the next required tool, and the desire to avoid smoke alarms in the middle of dinner parties, I was able to mount the fan and its intake duct in the course of an afternoon.

Because this was not part of the kitchen-remodeling plan, there was no provision for wiring a ventilation fan.  Fortunately, I had instructed the electricians to bring power to an outlet on the outside of the skylight hatch, and this is what I used to power the fan, but the control, the on-off switch, did not exist for it.  Running a new wire would be very difficult now that the walls and cabinets were in place.

Ah, but I had acquired some interesting remote controls that might solve the problem.  They utilized what is called “energy harvesting” technology.  This is a current trend and research area where small amounts of energy are obtained from the environment to do intermittent tasks.  These include solar cells and thermal junctions and strain gauges.  The one that I obtained was a contemporary styled “rocker-switch” which, when you push on it, causes a spring to snap a magnet past a coil, generating a small voltage, which briefly powers up a circuit long enough for it to transmit a code over a wireless channel to a receiver.  The receiver recognizes the code as either a signal to turn ON or to turn OFF a relay that powers the remote device.

It’s all quite amazing, because the entire sequence happens in a few milliseconds, and no external power (wiring or batteries) is needed.  And it worked great as the fix to my design oversight.

The exhaust fan now works by this remote control.  It is not silent, but it is powerful, and I am looking forward to my next episode of overcooked bacon to see how long it takes for the smoke alarm to be silenced.

I started the renovation of This Old House by considering its energy usage.  An energy audit was performed early on,  and I have replaced the old boiler and asbestos-clad pipes, and last summer I started investigating the replacement of the window air conditioners, ancient behemoths that consumed vast amounts of electricity, frequently blowing fuses, but providing very little cooling for all their effort.

But other renovation activities took priority, including the installation of the new boiler in August, safely in time for the fall heating season (which didn’t actually arrive until almost December).  In addition, the upper floor air conditioner was removed and replaced by a new window.  Knowing that the asphalt-clad mansard roof was an efficient solar heat collector, often making the upper level uncomfortably warm, I grew concerned about providing a way to remove that heat.

One of the trucks delivering parts and workers to install the AC.

I selected a heating and air conditioning contractor to install a new technology for air conditioning known as “mini-splits”.  In a typical central air conditioning system, there is an outside compressor unit that removes heat from a coolant, which is then sent to a central place to cool the inside air, which is then forced through ducts to the various rooms in the house.

A mini-split system does not use a central forced air distribution system.  There is still an outside compressor, but instead, it sends multiple lines of coolant (the mini splits?) to local room heat exchangers.  In my case there are three such cooling heads: two on the main floor, and one larger unit to cool the more open upper floor.  The heads are each on their own individual thermostats, calling for coolant only when needed.  They respond to hand-held remote controls that tell them the desired temperature, fan speeds, scheduling, etc.   They even have heat-sensing eyes that survey the room and determine where to aim their fan vents!

I am told that these are the highest efficiency systems available for cooling, but unlike some of the other energy sinks in a house, there are no incentives or rebates for them (I received utility rebates and tax credits for the high efficiency boiler).  I expect my electricity costs to be lower this summer.  I don’t really expect to live long enough to amortize this system, but it was the morally right thing to do.

The HVAC company expected to install the system in one day.  As usual, This Odd House put up some resistance.  In particular, drilling through the 1-1/2 foot foundation to run the coolant and control lines was a problem.  In one location, the masonry drills were used to their full 2-foot depth without penetrating the inner wall.  A new location was selected for the hole.

The drill went in as far as it could go, but did not emerge on the inside wall. I speculate that it was drilling into the side foundation wall (1-1/2 foot thick).

Other setbacks caused the installation to spill into a second day, May 2.  During this day, a snowstorm blanketed the city and temperatures plunged below freezing.  Air conditioner technicians were outside performing cooling system tests and measuring Freon-equivalent coolant quantities.

Pressure test preparation.

Air conditioning compressor, ready and waiting for the May snowstorms to retreat.

We have experienced this weather over the entire month of April, and it is continuing.  I was concerned about getting the cooling system in before spring, but since spring has been cancelled, the urgency is gone.

Instead, on the day my new air conditioning system was installed, I found myself learning the remote control buttons to switch the heat pump direction into reverse, and enjoying the warm air that spilled into the bedroom on a cold May evening.

The stairway “runway lights” offer a colorful invitation to the second floor living space.

One of the quirky features of This Odd House are the “runway lights” that  accent the stairway to the second floor.  They are on a dimmer switch (of course) and are fun to light up when company comes over (“who would do this?” is a common reaction).  I happen to like them for their whimsical style and I intend to retain them.

But over the months of construction workers lugging stuff up and down the stairs, and the multiple movings of possessions by both amateurs and professionals, the vulnerable lights have suffered casualties.  As the accidents occurred, replacements were installed, courtesy of a supply of bulbs left by the former owners.

One of the runway bulbs after meeting its demise at the foot of construction worker or mover.

But now that supply has run out!  I thought it should be easy to simply go to a large light bulb supplier like Home Depot and buy more.  It turns out that the little colored bulbs are not common and Home Depot, extensive as their lighting aisle is, does not carry them.

Instead, I have had to conduct an extensive internet search.  Along the way I have learned far more about light bulbs than I ever expected to know, and I am now sharing that knowledge.

How would you go about finding a specialty light bulb?  There are thousands of them and it took me a while to find the search keys for my stairway lights.  The obvious ones include the technology (incandescent, not fluorescent or LED), the voltage, and the wattage, but that only narrows it down to thousands.  Think of all the candelabras, night lights, make-up mirror lights, instrumentation lamps, accent lamps and movie marquees that you have ever encountered and you begin to see the wide world of lighting devices.

In my case, the key to finding it was the base.  Small as they are, the runway lights screw into a standard light bulb fixture, what is eponymously called an “Edison socket” (aka Edison screw).  It turns out there are several variations of the Edison socket, but the one we all know and love is the E26, which specifies a diameter of 26 millimeters.

The online bulb suppliers (Dons bulbs, for example),  have search engines tuned for finding light bulbs.  The main keys for finding a light bulb include the socket type and a code for the shape of the glass.  Bulbs come in all shapes and sizes ; their shapes are encoded by a letter, such as “G” for globe, “T” for tube, “F” for flame.  It may not be surprising that the familiar incandescent light bulb has the nondescript shape code of “A”, followed by a size code of 21, the number of eighth-inches across its diameter.  So the standard U.S. light bulb mixes metric and English units:  E26-A21.

I thought that my bulb was a “G” (globe), but after finding very few candidates, I discovered that it more likely is an “S” (straight sides), with a diameter of 11/8 inches.  Unfortunately it is rare enough that many bulb suppliers do not carry it, or they have a small inventory and can charge $20 each for them.

I had to do some further searching for vendors, but now that I knew what I needed (120V 7.5W E26 S11), I could search for suppliers that had reasonable prices.  I found one  that offered them for about a dollar each.  I ordered a dozen in various colors.

My stairway now has a full set of runway lights.  A quirky feature, I know, but one that makes This Odd House what it is.

I have had a dry spell in blog entries recently because of health issues.  Not mine, but rather of my partner Portia.  Several weeks ago she had a blemish on her face removed, one that had been present for many years, but which aroused concern from her physician.  It was excised, the skin discreetly and expertly welded together over the gap and was on its way to becoming an invisible scar when she learned, two weeks later, that the suspicious patch that was removed was actually a tumor, a melanoma, the most concerning of the various types of skin cancer.

The diagnosis launched a rapid response action from the health care system, and within a week she was back in an operating room, this time to locate and extract the “sentinel nodes” of the lymph system, the mechanism by which cancer spreads to other organs.  And while she was there, an additional margin of tissue around the original tumor was removed.

It was a week of uncertainty-hell.  I learned more about melanoma, and cancer in general than I ever expected or wanted to know.  As one who has spent a career on the “bleeding edge” of technology, I was both amazed and aghast at the state of knowledge in the field of cancer.  On the one hand I was exposed to decades of research in the “war on cancer” that has been a theme and cause in our culture since I was a child in the sixties.  We know so much more than we did a half-century ago.

But I was appalled at the protocols we follow in the battles to conquer it.   First, I wondered why after the initial blemish was removed it would take a full two weeks or more for a pathology report to convey the discovery that the tissue contained cancerous cells.  In an age where just-in-time inventory, immediate information turnaround, and zero backlog has proven its value in the industrial and manufacturing worlds, why would an examination of tissue take TWO WEEKS to generate a diagnosis?  (Later I would find out that pathology reports can take less than two days, and sometimes even within-the-hour response, so I know there is not some intrinsic latency involved).

I learned a little about the world of pathologists, experts in the appearance of normal and abnormal tissue samples.  I have been a subscriber to technical journals in image processing and pattern recognition for the last thirty years, and having read their technical articles (admittedly over my head), I fully expected and assumed that examining tissue samples under a microscope had been automated long ago, the technologies harnessed to make objective and quantitative measurements of normal versus abnormal cells, and estimates of the mitotic rate of cell division.  But evidently this is not the case.  Tissue samples are, today, still manually examined by trained specialists.

A pathologist’s day must be extremely tedious.  Thin slices of tissue are prepared and dyed according to a complex technical procedure.  A view under the microscope reveals the cells and their structure.  Most samples (>80%) are normal.   Of the others, many are ambiguous.  I don’t know how pathologists work; I would hope that more than one set of eyes reviews the slides in order to make a conclusion, but I can imagine that the sheer volume of samples and the assembly line process involved, could inure a pathologist to the signatures they are looking for.  They become weary, fatigued, or distracted, or preoccupied, and a target visual alarm pattern could easily be missed (ala  Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain).

I was also appalled at what I call the “margin of ignorance”.  Even though the original excised blemish of a few millimeters was examined and found no cancer cells at its periphery, the protocol for the cancer’s cure called for a full 4-centimeter diameter surgical margin.  This is a large fraction of Portia’s face, and even though her life and well-being are worth far more than a disfiguring cut of this dimension, I was surprised that it was removed immediately, without the additional information of the state of the sentinel lymph nodes.  (Is this the result of some insurance-driven cost efficiency of operating room expense?)

In her case it will result in a long scar, a badge of honor in winning the battle against melanoma, but as I thought about others, including a sister-in-law, who on finding a tiny lump, undergo a complete removal of their entire breast and sometimes even both, I cannot help but think of Star Trek’s Dr McCoy’s reaction to 20^th century medicine as “barbaric”.  Surely there is a better solution than this!

At the very least, computer vision and image processing algorithms can be put to bear on the detection and diagnosis aspects of the problem.  I will be researching more into why when today we have Siri and Shazam, and Facebook-friend face recognition, we do not also have automated cancer cell measurement.

Portia had a clean pathology report on her excised lymph nodes.  We celebrated, we laughed, we made love, and we made plans for our life together, including more projects for This Odd House.

The minimalist set of spatulas, carefully selected from our combined collection.

With the renovated and remodeled kitchen now complete, it is finally time to “move in” to This Odd House.  You may recall that I purchased the property in July, spent a month doing demolition, then packed my possessions and transferred them into a storage and holding pattern, furniture and boxes at their intended final floor destination if possible, and to the basement if not.  Ever since, I have been conducting the renovation of TOH from the command and control center on the first floor, which has itself undergone some remodeling.

In December, Portia moved in to that base camp to help direct the final stages of action, bringing with her the worldly possessions of her former life.  We now had two households of furnishings, packed into half a house.  But this was a temporary condition and we managed to solve the Tetris problem of fitting boxes and furniture into a finite space, leaving almost no gaps.  We located the corkscrew and other survival equipment to get us through the harsh days of sheetrock and sawdust, paint fumes, and plumbing interruptions, and have been improvising meals, laundry, and life ever since.

The dust is still settling, but the flow of workmen and inspectors at early hours has ebbed, and we may now move in.  This means finding those packed boxes from the basement and other storage-hiding places, opening them and delivering them to their proper place in the now-open-for-business upstairs living space.  This has exposed the next challenge:  both of us have chosen to downsize our lives to this modest south Minneapolis house, but we both have our original set of (often several sets of) household items.

A weekend was dedicated to identifying the multiple redundancies and selecting which we should keep, an which to find new homes for.  This was harder than one might expect.  Especially for me, a scientist who cannot destroy gathered data, with a family ancestor whose name translates from German to “packrat”.

Assemblies of kitchen items, not all of which will survive the multiple rounds of draft picks.

A typical scene involved the kitchen floor, completely covered with the full combined arsenals of stovetop cooking equipment: pots, pans, woks, and boilers (double and pressure), rice cookers and steamers, arrayed by size and types: aluminum and stainless, traditional and Teflon,  light and heavy, both in mass and in usage.  The task was to select the set that provided the best range of  cooking functionality, and still fit within the designated drawers and cabinet space.

Even with the delicate acknowledgements of sentimental forces of longtime ownership and use, there were difficult personal choices based on practical uses and technical, esthetic, or quality levels.  I am pleased to say that we navigated this treacherous territory well, and in the end feel that the best choices have been made.  There are some things that are “on evaluation” to demonstrate the correctness of a specific decision, but overall, the merging of two long separate histories was successful.  It helped that we both felt a bit of the embarrassment of riches in the very need to take on this task, and in the interest of achieving the not-so-big life, were motivated to find the balance between utility and nostalgia.

Culling the kitchen accoutrements.

A view of the upstairs kitchen, before.  The sink is in the far corner next to the bathroom.  The door to the (inefficient) pantry obscured the window.  How to envision what it could become?

In the course of this project I have engaged with many craftsmen and construction professionals.  I have also described my plans and desires to friends and relatives, often finding myself at a loss to accurately or convincingly convey them.  The polite response has been “well, you must have more vision than most.”  I take this as a compliment, though I suspect it is usually offered in skepticism.

My fear is that I am simply dressing up; attempting to “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, “pouring good money after bad”, and all the other expressions that apply to unrealistic or quixotic ambitions.  There is indeed this risk, but when I think some more about it, I can re-frame the goal.  This is not about buying a house, remodeling and flipping it for a profit; it is more like buying a bad painting, under which is a canvas stretched on a frame, and deciding how to repaint it to my liking.  This is about sculpting an environment to meet my visual desire and lifestyle.  The foundation, floors and walls are the canvas on which I may work the new living space.

The most dramatic transform has been the upstairs living area, centered around the kitchen.  The original kitchen was unique, but suffered some weaknesses.  The kitchen sink was crowded into a corner next to the bathroom door, a pantry closet stole space from the kitchen but was only awkwardly usable for storage, and the lighting control was excessively fine-grained, with every bulb on its own dimmer switch.

The demolition of the kitchen has been documented on these blog pages, but the vision of its replacement has not.  Here are some images that helped me to visualize how it might be, despite how it actually was.  Visualization software has advanced dramatically from when I did this 20+ years back!

A rendering from the Home Depot kitchen designer. It gave some initial concepts but was quite expensive.

The rendering from Ikea’s design tool.  Countertops were not included.

A rendering from “Live Interior 3D”, design software that I purchased. I was quite impressed at what it could do for its modest price.

A photograph of the nearly completed kitchen.

Remember this?