Double Trouble

Fear not!  Our heat was fixed on Sunday (for a very reasonable price) and it couldn't have happened any sooner.  The temperature dropped into the low 20's that evening, so we were very grateful to have heat.  We also learned a valuable lesson: the wires feeding into the thermostat can't touch metal.  The wires must have touched metal at some point during demo, which fried the thermostat and the transformer in the furnace.  Both are fixed now and we're moving on!

Andrew breaking through our pantry

On Sunday, we also finished demoing the first floor and settled on a layout: we're going to stick with our original plan, but leave the HVAC on the first floor in place which will only make the kitchen a tiny bit smaller than our original design and require a different powder room layout.  Because we will be moving the plumbing, we've decided to also move forward with upgrading our second floor and add another bath while all the plumbing is exposed!  Now the chaos has spread to two floors!  This is the current state of our first floor:

Kitchen (view from dining room)

Kitchen - wall where fridge and range were

Old powder room

Site of old coat closet (we're going to reorient it 90 degrees)

Dining/living room

Living room with fridge plugged in!

Late Sunday afternoon, we created a tiny leak in a copper plumbing pipe.  We plugged it with a toothpick, finished demo, took showers, and cut the water off to the house.  That evening, we went to Home Depot to get all the plumbing supplies Carter would need to create closed loop in the basement and they had no 1 inch CPVC fittings (even though they carry 1 inch CPVC pipe), so we remained without water that evening and through the next day.  We had to go to Thos. Somerville on Monday morning to get the appropriate fittings. Carter worked all day to create a closed plumbing loop in the basement so that only the basement will have water until we're done with the plumbing work for the top two floors.  It took a long time, but he did great work--no leaks!  I spent the day moving all of the contents of our upstairs bathroom into the basement bath, storing all the contents of the four closets to be demoed and rebuilt in different places, and starting upstairs demo with my dad (who has been a wonderful help).  We also accumulated a lot more waste than we expected tearing out the first floor, so we had to order a second dumpster on Monday.

FIrst dumpster - almost all of our first floor

On Tuesday, Carter, my dad, and I worked together to demo the second floor, which is still only about 60% done.  Carter went back to work today (he had taken Monday and Tuesday off to work on the house and finish out his 2010 vacation days).  After five days of hard manual labor, I'm ready to rest!  We're going to take today off and resume work tomorrow.  We'd like to start framing on Saturday.  I'll post pre and post-demo pictures of upstairs when we're done.  I'll end with a picture of Kahlua who can sleep through anything as long as she's close to us:

Kahlua, with dust on her face, sleeping through demo