Renovation – Phase I

Hello all!  This is Bacon’s mom here.  I wanted to break down the entire renovation and share our experience of ups and downs throughout the process.  Today is Phase I which includes the start of everything.  Our house was cluttered.  Pure and simple it was.  We have been here 16 LONG years and throughout those years, we have had many surgeries, illnesses and taking care of family members that some things taken second – like the house unfortunately 😦

I was having a couple of weeks of feeling good physically. One never knows how long these days last when you have rheumatoid arthritis.  So when I told the hub unit I was ready to do it, he couldn’t believe me.  We made an appointment with the floor guy first.  We *had* to get rid of this awful carpet that had seen way better days.

The appointment was made 3/28/2015 with the flooring peeps.  They came out and we went over all of the measurements and looked at the different types of flooring that was available.  My husband gave me full reign over the remodeling so I picked a tan flooring.  We signed the paperwork and picked the date of 4/16/2015 for installation. This gave us a little under three weeks to de-clutter, purge and get the house in shape for the floor.  No small feat with what we had to work with as you can see from the pictures.

This same date, we went furniture shopping.  A joyful occasion to most… except me.  I despise shopping for anything.  The most important factor was that whatever we picked the hub had to LOVE his sofa.  I personally wanted something in the way of an oversized chair with an ottoman, etc – something that would be absolutely comfortable when I came home from work at the end of the day.  We went to a company called American Signature Furniture and picked out a sofa, an oversized chair, an ottoman and an electric fireplace mantle.  Sounds like heaven huh?  We expressed several times that the furniture had to be delivered on 4/17/2015, the day after the floor installation.

Now as you can see from these pictures of the living room, there was a LOT to clean.  I basically wanted to clear out everything and start fresh.  But in order to get to the bare basics, I had to de-clutter and separate items into (1) Keep; (2) Donate; and (3) Junk.  Just looking at the pictures you can tell that it was an overwhelming feat to start.  If anyone is in the same position as we were, two words – BABY STEPS.  I had a calendar and every night when I came home from work and on the weekends, we hit a different spot.  Slowly, things started going away.  AND, you know what we learned from all of this?  Letting go can be medicinal and therapeutic.  We made three trips alone to the Goodwill donation center down the street in the first couple of days.  I know that our garbage collection company probably thought what are they up to because we had loads of stuff we threw away.  Phase I took us the longest to get through – 9 days.

And then came the date that we asked Salvation Army to come to the house on 4/9/2015.  They actually had to make two trips because we gave it all away:  sofa, love seat, entertainment center, china cabinet, hutch, kitchen table, six chairs, rugs.

After they left, we cleaned more and started making a pile of trash.  On 4/11/2015, we had 1-800 Got Junk to come out to the house.  This junk company will come to your house and pick up your trash.  According to how much you have to fill their truck, is how much they charge you.  We had scheduled them to come out on this date between 3:30-5:30pm.  To our advantage, they were running late so (1) we got to pick up and clean more and (2) the later they were we got a discount – which is always a great thing in my book.

The company *finally* got at the Hotel Thompson around 8:30PM – which they had been calling throughout the day to keep us aware of their schedule.  I never got upset with them and it was a good thing.  Other people had in their schedule.  They came to our house and gave us a $125.00 discount for waiting.  So it cost only $100.00 for them to come in, lift and take out our final junk.  A bargain in my book because by this time we were so over lifting.

Now our neighbors had been watching all of the activity happening at our house in the pass 9 days.  Word got back to us that we were moving which we laughed off.  Nope – we were just doing some MAJOR spring cleaning.  All of this work was Phase I – come back tomorrow for Phase II my friends 🙂