Deconstructing Home

I am sitting on the original parquet wood flooring, lightly coated in sheetrock dust, surrounded by canvas tarps in the skeleton of my former living room looking out into small expanse of our newly opened up house. I feel both thrilled at the progress and consumed with pangs of horror for having destroyed the place we call home. A live-in remodel is not for the faint of heart, and doing it all with children is just bananas. There's a reason why people move out. After almost a year of planning, a month long battle with the city about a 13 sqft addition, and an eleventh hour refinance to restore our budget after having to bring on a structural engineer we have arrived, one week into a seven week renovation, making toast in our garage and doing dishes in a work sink. This is the ugly part, the deconstruction. Here is the past week in pictures...

Last Monday we cleared out the last of our belongings from the kitchen, living room and dining room. We are donating the original 1960's wall oven along with the remaining appliances to Habitat for Humanity. The fridge found a new home in our garage, a makeshift kitchen/storage facility.

The morning routine is the trickiest. We stumble out to the garage, start the coffee, the boys squeeze around an old table and eat their cereal. We're dressed in robes and slippers, it's kind of cold, and really cramped, but it's also a little like camping which makes it fun for now, and we keep thinking about how great it will feel to move in to a more spacious home.

The boys had a few friends over for a wall breaking party before the real demolition began. We opened up a section of the wall to make sure there was no electrical, and let them smash the drywall and eat cupcakes.

The remainder of the walls came down over the course of last week. The original layout was pinched, the light was blocked by the kitchen wall and the side wall created the dark hallway that separates our bedroom from the main space. As it turns out, none of this was structurally necessary to support the roof. The light now floods the open room and I when I walk out of my bedroom I see windows instead of wall...

Here's the 13 sqft addition. We are bumping the entry to the house 2ft to create more space when you open the front door, closing up the window so that we can have a little wall storage and getting a new front door with glass panels to let light in. It'll be time to say goodbye to the little lemon colored door...

The view from the street. We've got it all packed in there. 6 more weeks... six more weeks.