While we were on vacation we had our trusted friend Jimmy come back and do some more work on the house. We removed the wall between the kitchen and the living room and replaced the tile in the kitchen. As always, it turned out great but I was glad to get my house back just in time for Mother's day.
Jimmy came in on Thursday, the day before we left for Orlando, and began cutting down the sheet rock on the kitchen side. As he was finishing up he discovered a pipe running through the wall and a drain sticking out from the bottom. The pipe ended up being the main water supply line to the water heater upstairs. The plumbers could never definitely determine why the contractor chose to put a drain in that wall.
I had a couple of other contractors look into this project in the past. It's something that I've been wanting to do for a while and nobody ever noticed the pipe running down that wall. I guess part of renovating is discovering things about your house you didn't know.
Another discovery was an outlet left with uncapped live wires covered up by layers of wall paper in my kitchen. That was disconcerting! The electrician that did the re-wiring was perplexed by an extra wire that just didn't go to anything.
My one pet peeve was 'keep the wall paper intact' I don't want to have to re-do all of the walls. The electrician was a bit eccentric and without any notice started poking a hole into an adjacent wall with his screwdriver. I almost had a heart attack. What I didn't realized is that he had found a hollow space in the wall where an outlet should have been.
Probably the biggest headache was the flooring. I ordered tile for a Versailles pattern with four different size pieces. It's a pretty complex project trying to lay it all out the right way as it is. The warehouse messed up the order and gave us the wrong size tile and it was going to take another week to get the correct pieces in stock. So Jimmy just did what he could with what he was given. It took a lot more time on his part to get it working right and we had to think very hard about where each piece went to make sure we weren't going to be short on materials but it turned out beautiful. Truly a one of a kind.
Top right: Wall before remodel - Center: Wall after remodel
Bottom right: New flooring - Top Left: Old flooring
Bottom left: Jimmy hard at work
