Macheesmo

So, it turns out that maybe 2020 wasn’t the BEST year to start a massive home addition to our 1892 Denver home. But, the thing about home additions is once you start them there isn’t exactly a rewind button!

WE ARE IN IT.

It has been a few months since I’ve done any sort of update on the house, mostly because the last few months have been a complete blur, but we have made serious progress on the house and so I thought I’d give some photo updates!

A Quick Photo Tour

We finally made the big connection between new and old. The original house stops at the brick wall that has been cut on the left and everything back from there is all new.

The room closest to the camera used to be our kitchen and will be a living room in the new layout. The new kitchen will be the big open area in the back!

This is the view from the kitchen island. There will be two large french doors that look out onto a big deck that will go up to our fence. It’ll have some great outdoor entertaining possibilities once we can, ya know, actually entertain again!

Past the kitchen is a powder room bath on the main floor (YAY!) and a small entryway closet and then a new staircase that will go up to the second floor of the addition!

Once you are upstairs, there is a second full bathroom and a little nook that will be my new office. It’s small but will have great light and is more than enough space for a humble food blogger.

There is also going to be a nice guest room upstairs (which is the first photo in this post). It will allow us to more comfortably host our parents and friends for visits and just have a little more space in our home.

The Outside Space

All construction projects have plusses and minuses and the big minus for our project is we are losing a lot of our backyard. We will have a small grass area and a small patio area but if the kids want to really run, they will have to go to the park!

What’s Old is Really Old

While demo-ing some of the walls to open up the house, we found some absolutely bonkers old wall paper. It’s actually really pretty and almost like art. We are trying to figure out if we can preserve parts of it now that we know about it!

I love this photo with the very old wallpaper right over the new construction.

My Personal Project

Along with the LARGE project, I had a list of a dozen or so smaller things I wanted to do while we were out of the house. One thing I wanted to do was re-grout our bathroom off of our bedroom. Seemed like an easy task, but as soon as I got to work on it, I noticed that the bathroom was completely wrong. Most importantly, there was ZERO waterproof membrane behind the shower.

Not sure if you knew this or not, but showers are wet.

So I decided to gut it and redo it myself (with some help from my contractor who is guiding me along)!

The plumbing in the bathroom, it turns out, is an absolute nightmare including some drainage pipes that actually flow uphill. I don’t need to get into the knitty gritty details on why that’s a bad idea in a bathroom.

So we will see how long it takes me to redo this sucker. I feel like it’s a race between me working on this tiny little project and the professionals working on the massive project.

Currently, we are slated to move back in sometime in mid-late August. As with all construction projects though, that is up for change on any given day!