Giant dumpster is in the driveway.

Permit is somewhere - they said Monday. Do we have to go get it, or do they come slap it on the front door.

David’s office and mud-room are first on the schedule. We really, really, seriously need to get the garage cleared out today.

For less than the price of our remodel, we could have a house two or three times the size of ours, all sparkly brand new, with a pool and lots and lots of land. In Kentucky. Or North Carolina. Or a whole other host of places outside of New York.

We were seriously considering it. In fact, it’s not off the table entirely, but it’s not imminent.

We have come back down to earth though, and returned to square one. Where there were just two things we wanted: a new kitchen and a fourth bedroom. That’s what we’re going to have. No more designers, no more architects, no more grand plans.

Henrybuilt is redesigning the kitchen within the existing space, and our builder is going to close up David’s office and turn it into a bedroom. David, he can go work in his unused darkroom, which will now see the light of day.

It’s not so disappointing, probably because what we were imagining was so over the top, we couldn’t really see it happening and even if it did happen, we couldn’t really see ourselves living in it.

Stay tuned.

The whole french door thing started to feel too busy and I didn’t like the fact that when you fling open both doors in a very 1930’s movie actress sort of gesture, you have no hands free to actually grab any food.

I prefer the simpler lines of the basic bottom mount models and this one was the right price, had the right layout, had filtered water inside and felt sturdy.

I also found a countertop material I really like and I think we’ve got it narrowed down to two options: concrete or something like this, in Indalo Yellow. I think the contrast between the straight, modern lines of the bamboo and the rough-hewn, fissured lines of the marble could work really well. It’s a beautiful warm color, but doesn’t look to “granite-y.”

Let’s see what the designer has to say….

A surprising number of people shared similar tales of sitting down with an architect and planning a project over months, then finding out, once the drawings were done, that the bids were way out of whack with what they could afford.

Oh really? You think we’re part of a trend? Guess so.

Full story here (reg. required).

Windows….eh, who needs ‘em?

I’m sort of surprised, and I’m sort of not. On the one hand, the price for the remodel is well above the price of an average house pretty much anywhere else in the country. In fact, we could probably buy a very nice, very large brand spanking new house in most states for less. On the other hand, it’s a lot of work.

I guess it’s time to get out the pencil sharperner and start slashing the plans.

One good thing - the designer was right. I feel safe listening to her now.

A couple of weeks ago we had the Big Meeting with the architect, the designer and the GC. It went really well, as we suspected and we had confirmation that we’re all on the same page and in the same camp.

The GC was here bright and early this morning and completed six walk-throughs with four trades, all by 12:45.

Now, we seem to have entered a strange chicken and egg phase, where we can’t get the final drawings until we’ve finalized the budget, and we can’t finalize the budget until we have all the bids from the trades, which we can’t do without the final drawings. And round, and round and round it goes.

The big missing piece is the steel beam and how we’re going to get it to hold up the house. The architect is meeting with an engineer next week to hopefully get that hammered out, and then we’re ready to roll.

We’ve started packing up books and are making serious plans to move in with my parents for at least the summer and maybe longer.

Henrybuilt should have some sort of drawings for us in a week or so, and we’re also getting prices from them to do the media storage off the kitchen. As of now, we’re going with bamboo. We have consensus that of all the samples we have, it’s the coolest.

I don’t need any more confirmation we’re doing the right thing at the right time.

I only hope the house can stay standing for a few more months.

I can’t, however, convert my PDF kitchen layout to a JPEG, so that will have to wait. But, look! Backhoes! Piles of Dirt! It’s official! No, we haven’t started construction, but the new septic is in: