One big decision when renovating/remodeling your home is whether you are going to continue living there, or move out while the work goes on. Dale normally recommends to his clients that, if at all possible it is best to move out – particularly if you are going to lose the use of your kitchen and/or bathrooms.
In our case, it’s a no-brainer. Not only are we going to completely gut the kitchen and all bathrooms, we are also going to remove and replace all the doors and windows and siding and roofing. On top of that, we will be adding on some new space on all 3 levels which will also be quite disruptive. Add to that the complication of parking the contractors’ trucks and cars and placing a dumpster . . . well it just doesn’t make sense to even attempt to try to live in the house while the renovation is proceeding.
As it turned out, we still own Dale’s parent’s house up in Calhoun, so we made the decision to move there during our renovation. It makes for a bit more of a commute to the office in Acworth, but it’s all interstate driving and the traffic normally doesn’t start backing up in the morning until you get on down around Kennesaw.
The biggest pain was packing up 35 years of accumulated stuff! After reading several books on ‘decluttering’ and ‘tidying’ for inspiration, we spent several weeks packing, donating/giving away, or throwing away all of our worldly belongings. For the things that we decided to keep, they were sorted into things that could be stored and those that we would need during the renovation. It was a logistics challenge, but finally we packed up and moved out.
Once the house was empty, it was ‘Demo Time’! We committed early to do as much of the grunt work as we could in order to stay involved in the process and save as much cost as we could. So the two of us were joined by Jonathan on Saturdays and we started tearing up all the stuff that wasn’t going to stay. First to go was the carpet, and then the pad, and the ‘tackless strips’ – which are normally erroneously called ‘tack strips’. In the days before wall-to-wall carpet, area rugs got bigger and bigger until they went from wall to wall. To keep them taut and in place, tacks were used around the border. That is until . . . the invention of the ‘tackless’ strip which magically held the new carpet in place. Now you know!
After the carpet, we jumped on the interior trim – all the window trim and door trim and base trim and everything else that was attached to the walls had to go. Mainly working on the upper floor, the bathroom was next in line – and gave us some good experience in demo-ing plumbing and cabinets which will come in handy when we get to the Kitchen – coming soon.
