Project Plans

So, I already mentioned in this post that I don’t expect much work to be done inside the house this year. I wanted to explain why we have to do certain things outside before we turn out attention back to the inside. You see, it all started with our kitchen reno plans. I’m sure you’ve heard of one project snowballing into another but this is like one of those epic cartoon snowballs that picks up houses and cars and everything else in its path. The biggest issue is this: Yeah it’s all bad, but I’m talking specifically about this. This set of doors out to the deck needs to move. The flow of our kitchen does not work right now and it makes me a little ragey. The peninsula ends right where the fridge lives which means whenever the fridge doors are open, nobody can pass which is a huge issue for someone as impatient as me. Yes, I could go back around through the study and end up in the other part of the kitchen but I shouldn’t have to do that! What we want to do is basically swing the peninsula around so that it’s along the back wall but those doors are in the way. No big deal, just move the doors down the wall to the dining room. But if we want to move the doors, we have to extend the deck… If we move the doors down to the dining room now, there would be no deck to catch your fall. If we want to move the doors, we have to extend the deck. Not only that, but our deck is in ROUGH shape. I’m talking day after your 21st birthday type of rough. The posts are undersized and sitting on top of concrete pavers and a piece of rotten wood, the joists are undersized, the wood itself is in awful shape, and the whole thing just needs to be torn down. So now, not only are we expanding the deck but we’re tearing it down completely and having it rebuilt much larger (this is one project that we feel is a bit out of our abilities so we will be hiring it out). But if we want to extend the deck, we have to have the floating deck in place. Originally, we were going to put in a paver patio in this area behind the garage. Since then, we’ve decided that we’d rather deck this whole area and maybe eventually put in a pergola. We could probably do this after the new deck is in place but it’s going to look more intentional if the lower deck is already in place. But if we want the floating deck in place, we have to build a new fence. Right now the (very cheap, very temporary) fence ends right at the corner of the house so it’s actually in the way of both future decks. On top of that, the size of the floating deck is going to depend on where exactly we decide to fence the yard. So, before we do the floating deck we have to at least put in one side of the new fence. Jury is still out on whether we’ll just go ahead and do the entire fence but right now it looks like we’ll be doing it three phases. The first phase is the only one we actually need to move forward on the other projects. After that we’ll just have to see how the timing and budget shake out. So anyway, Phase One of the fence is a definite must before we can do the floating deck. But if we want to build the fence, we have to finish the new walkway. Isn’t this fun? To be totally honest, we probably don’t need to do the walkway before the fence but it’ll definitely make building the fence in this area slightly easier. It’s mostly just a project completion thing though. We bought these pavers two years ago (when we first decided we wanted a patio) and they’ve just been sitting against the house. The weather has been nice so we decided to finally get them in the ground. I want to finish this before moving on to anything else because we have way too many unfinished projects and I don’t want another one hanging around. SO. Yeah. That’s pretty much it. As far as timeline goes, we should finish the walkway soon but there will be a few months before we can start on the fence. In that time, I’m hoping that we can finish up the closet and the few other small projects that we already started inside.