Eta and the Dining Room

At this point I don't think it's fair to say the focus of this post is "progress" as that is technically the point of the entire blog, but every week we are truly making progress toward having the home we *want*.

I keep saying that 'slowly but surely' things are coming together, this week had a heavy emphasis on *slowly*. Last week ended on the high note of (mostly) reclaiming our living room from the dust, but brought the dust into the next area of focus: the dining room.

Let me start by clearing up some confusion. Since starting this remodel, we have switched up the location of some of the pre-defined rooms. What started as the dining room, is now the living room thanks to the expanded footprint we gained by filling in the sunken "living room". The living room in the original footprint was small and narrow and lacked proper wall placement to really have a standard "couch facing a tv set" up, and the family room was similar with so many doorways and windows. Once we filled in the sunked living room we created one level space that could be used as the living room/game area (to come, way, way down the road), leaving the other side of the kitchen as the dining room. I'm hoping the floor plan will help clear this up. I've added what the rooms are NOW.

The above picture is actually a picture of one copy of the survey we received with my chicken scratch measurements drawn on that we used to calculate the amount of flooring needed. It is most definitely not to scale. Only the solid lines are walls, the dotted line in the living room is what used to be the step down from the dining room into the living room. That's all one level and is officially the "living room" now, which leads into the "game area" which isn't set up yet. It also looks like a dotted line between the kitchen and game area, it's not, it was just me not committing to the location of the wall. The dotted line straight through the whole drawing vertically is the vaulted ceiling.

So if you're looking through our "before" photos, the room where the dining room table (and snazzy chandelier) once were is now our living room. The place where two awkwardly placed couches and a tv were is now our dining room that looks into the kitchen.

I realize our "after" photos technically look worse because at least the "befores" had flooring, but I promise this is an improvement!

So, to wrap that up in a nice bow, we have started the work on our NEW Dining Room! This is the second of the two largest spaces in the home, so when we "complete" it (will it ever really be complete? I feel like this is a relative term...) we will have a huge item checked off our list. This week that work began. We took down the popcorn ceiling while Chris was here, leaving us with a vaulted ceiling in need of some TLC. The corners where the ceiling meets the walls have been a struggle for us, they aren't perfectly square and it was really hard to get the popcorn 100% off in the corners of any room, so we decided a while back to eventually do crown moulding to cover this. In the dining room the ceiling has a very low vault to it, so we wanted the option to maybe not do crown moulding, or at least make the ceiling look "good enough for now" until we get to that point. Scott got to work replacing and repairing the drywall tape in the corners, while I started sanding and filling irregularities in the walls.

Scott also had to cut, and patch, a big hole in the wall under the window. That part of the wall gave when you pushed on it and had previously been repaired with what looked like caulking, so I was terrified it was wet, and moldy. Luckily, we cut out that section, found no mold, and the drywall wasn't wet. I honestly have no idea why it felt the way it did on the wall, but it's been replaced with new, clean drywall and is looking great!

In last week's update I mentioned the struggle with painting old walls, you can't just slap paint on it and expect it to look new, you have to have a smooth surface from the get-go. I don't know if the dining room was painted in the dark or what happened, but the walls were ROUGH. I started sanding any bumps and paint drips I could find, and that turned into an entire wall of sanding, then when I started filling my spackled area just got larger, and larger. Eventually I said to Scott "am I cool to just... fill this entire wall?" he said "go for it" and I did!

Hurricane Eta made her dramatic appearance not once, but twice this week. If you remember a few weeks back we brought our boat to the house and put it in the water for the first time (it had been trailered previously), so Monday night was a bit stressful wondering if it would be ok, if the bilge pump could handle the amount of rain they were projecting, and if the wips would hold ok with the wind. If I thought Monday was stressful though, I was not at all prepared for Wednesday. Here in Cape Coral there were a lot of warnings about Eta for Monday, but there was little more than a murmur about Wednesday. Wednesday we were hit with massive amounts of rain and wind and at one point our kayaks tried to break free. Luckily, Scott and I were both home and he was able to save them and pull them up to dry land. We have both a seawall and a retaining wall behind our house, so we were in no danger of our home flooding, but we were very concerned about the boat (and kayaks). The water breached the seawall and covered our dock by probably 3 feet at the highest point. Luckily, there is no damage, just a really dirty dock in dire need of a powerwashing.

I spent quite a bit of time snapping photos to send to friends and family checking on us, so once we were out of the woods this gorgeous sunset pic also made its rounds. I will never get sick of our sunset view!

With the storm behind us, we were back to work. My mom and dad had a day off in the middle of the week so they came to help while I was working from the lanai. Mom finished filling the remaining two and a half walls and dad worked on the drywall tape (I cannot stress how lucky I am to have them!).

Once the walls were "filled", they now needed to all be sanded. For reference, I'm 5'4" on, like, a really good day, first thing in the morning, after a big stretch. So I sanded from the floor to up about 6 feet, just what I could reach without the ladder. Scott worked on the drywall tape (I'm positive professionals get this done in one-go, but we are no experts and are truly just trying our best). There are a few things that I excel at that come in quite handy in our projects, they aren't big items, but they tend to be helpful. Spackling is one of my strengths (along with caulking, which is something I haven't had the chance to do in this home... yet), so Scott relinquished the drywall Hawk (my latest favorite tool) and let me get to work on the tape on the ceiling, thank goodness heights don't bother me!

There are two arched doorways in the dining room that Scott was able to remove this week. I, personally, love the vintage feel of the arches, but they do have a tendency to date the home and make it feel smaller than it is, so he took them out without much trouble. He also moved the light switch from the wall we first opened up so it's no longer just hanging in the breeze. This was the archway that opened into the living room, we didn't just remove it, we actually widened the opening, leaving the light switch hanging from the ceiling, so it felt great to have that in place.

If you were paying close attention, our kitchen got a bit of an organizational update. The first week we were here we took out the set of upper cabinets that separated the kitchen from the NOW dining room, and that made a huge difference. The kitchen still had a big island in the middle and a peninsula separating it from the dining room. I have a vision in my mind of what I want the kitchen to look like, and that vision included a huge, long island perpendicular to where the current peninsula sat. To get a feel for what this layout will be like when we redo the kitchen, we actually removed the island all together and flipped the peninsula away from the wall into the middle of the kitchen to serve as the placeholder for the new island. I LOVE IT! It opened up the kitchen so much and created much better flow between the kitchen, living room and dining room. Where you once had to zig zag through the kitchen around the island to get between the living room and dining room you now have a straight shot. There's plenty of room to beef up the size of the island when we redo the kitchen and this helped cement that my vision is not only going to look nice in the space, but that it will be super practical as well.

Toby is a lot more excited about the new layout than he appears in the photo above, don't worry!

One final struggle we've had with the rearranging of spaces is that there is no light where we'd like to put a table. A couple of weeks ago I purchased a table and chairs from Facebook that need to be refinished; they've been living in the garage gathering dust (as opposed to being in the dining room gathering dust, ha!), so we hauled the table and some chairs inside to see where we would want it and marked the spot on the ceiling.

Clearly I should not be the one designing our chandelier, but you get the idea!

We hired a guy off of Nextdoor to run wiring from the current fan in the middle of the room to place we had marked that will be over the table.

We still aren't quite happy with it as this wiring means the fan will have to be on in order for the light to be on, but updates are TBD.

In case you've been questioning exactly how dusty our home is, I snapped this pic of my computer, that's been sitting in the living room (not the space we are working in) for the weekend. We have four vacuums currently residing in our home, and at least one of them is ran daily. It's just a ton of dust!

This weekend wasn't all hard work, we crammed in a little play too and took my parents, neice, and nephew out on the boat for a ride and some fishing.

My dad and Scott dropped the rest of us a Sanibel for some swimming and seashell hunting while they looked for bait. We came across a huge, dead, jellyfish on the beach, Zane's shadow for scale.

Back in the boat, Scott was the only one to catch any fish, but the dolphins gave a great show off in the distance.

Don't mind us rocking out to Michael Jackson in the background!

While I'm deeming this week's progress slow, it's only because I wanted to feel like another room was checked off the list, and we didn't quite get there with the dining room. That just means it moves to next week's goal!