To say that this project has suffered from scope creep is an understatement.

This all started at a party.  My wife (Yvonne of infinite patience) runs her parents’ horse farm (shameless plug for Level Green Riding School).  Since we live next door to the farm we often host farm related functions.  In November 2016 we were hosting the after party for the Calais Horse Trials.  Because of the layout of our house these parties would always turn into two separate parties.  One on either side of the doorway into the kitchen.  For whatever reason, there is a 30” doorway between the kitchen and living room and invariably someone would park their carcass in the doorway and divide the space into 2.  You can see it on the floorplans.  Yvonne said something like “If we could just open up this space a little bit we wouldn’t have this problem”.  That was nearly 2 years ago.  In light of the current state of the house, I suspect that Yvonne might regret uttering those words, but as I mentioned she really does have the patience of a saint as mum would say.

Since we had already decided to redo the kitchen we decided to roll the wall removal projects all into the kitchen project and move forward.  I drew up some plans, nothing fancy, but sufficient, and submitted them to the county for a permit.  The county requested more detailed plans.  I ditched my crappy CAD software and set about creating a 3d model of my house with some different software.  There was a bit of a learning curve with the software and a lot of crawling around the grosser parts of my house with a laser measuring device, but I got a really accurate representation of my house.

Once I had my model it became clearer what needed to be done and let me see the true scope of what we wanted to do.  We kept finding ourselves saying “Since we’re already doing x we may as well do y”.  Technically, we could have done this without removing all the flooring on the first floor or re-plumbing everything or re-wiring, etc…, but since we were already opening up a ton of walls, and floors and ceilings, it was now or not at all since I’m not opening up the walls again.