This room was originally Jordan’s bedroom while his actual bedroom was being worked on. It then served as our bedroom, and now it is a guest bedroom / home office for Roby (plus tool storage while we work on the 2nd floor hallway!)

There was only one electrical outlet in the room and a ceiling light with a pull-chain, so the room was minimally useful. It was also very cold in the winter (being the Northwest room of the house).

Before they could start, We ripped out the old trim, closet and window seat (don’t worry, it wasn’t original anyway). We also pulled the windows for stripping and Roby hung new sash cords and re-routed and terminated some existing circuits.

*** We interrupt this renovation for a brief rant about contractors ***

Bringing in a contractor is always a love / hate situation for us that we never, ever take lightly.

We love when the project is done and we love how quickly it gets there (except, of course, in the case of the kitchen). But we hate the process, hate having to babysit / micro-manage some of them (when did we become full time foremen?), hate having to deal with them trying to squeeze you for more money when the job isn’t done and, one of our BIGGEST pet peeves, we hate, Hate, HATE having to deal with the “it’s not my house, I don’t have to be careful” attitude that 95% of them have as they run through your like a bunch of 700 pound gorillas.

If they DO apologize, there’s a 50% chance that they’ll offer to fix it. If they DO, there’s a 50% liklihood it’ll get done right, a 25% chance it’ll get done wrong, and a 25% chance that it’ll get done right or wrong but when done, will have caused MORE damage somewhere nearby.

Maybe damaging 3 doorways, 12 walls, gouging 2 doors, the stairs and more is “normal” for a contractor in a remodeling process of a single room, but AMAZINGLY, when we do similar work, WE don’t cause massive amounts of collateral damage to the surroundings. How can this be?

...sigh...

*** We now return you to our regularly scheduled program ***

About a week later, we had new floors installed, new electrical and new insulated drywall and lights. We also had a good couple of days of minor repairs to he surrounding house.

This left the window, door, ceiling and floor trim to us to do (which was fine by us as we don’t trust the usual 700 lb. gorillas to that type of fine-detail work anyway).

...to be continued