At this point most all demo is done. I think all the flooring has been laid. We had to move the furniture out of the front room so we could finish laying the floor in that room. This also allowed us to leave some room for the drywall crew that will be coming.

You can see by this point that all the kitchen cabinets and counter have been removed. More importantly, you can see that we framed a new wall that will divide the kitchen and the living room. We changed the pass-thru so that it will be one large opening in the middle, instead of the two small ones at the ends that used to be there. You can also see that there are two openings at the base on both ends that will house cabinets that face into the living room. We did this instead of using corner cabinets in the kitchen. This way the living room will have some extra storage for dvds, games, blankets, etc.

Laid some more flooring…

Since the house is two levels and we are going to be living here while MODifications are going on we will be leaving the lower level untouched while we work on the main level.
After we gained access to the house on Sunday and I immediately began tearing out the carpet. On Monday, with a lot of help from friends (who I will be in their debt for a long time) we demolished the kitchen cabinets, took off the wall panels on one wall, took out the pellet stove, and continued to get the floors ready for flooring. All this while movers were bringing in our stuff from the old house.
Tuesday we started laying the new hard wood floors. I used SW Quality Floors & More to help do the flooring. He supplied the tools and expertise, while I helped supply some of the labor to help offset some of the costs.
These images show the work made up to Tuesday morning. You can see the demo that was done in order to be ready to start laying down the hardwood floors.
We wanted to use a dark stained bamboo flooring, but they were out of stock. Due to our short timeline for moving in and renovations we had to chose from what they had in stock as anything else would have set us back a month for floor install. We were able to find a great deal on some beautiful Brazillian Koa (aka “Tigerwood”.) While it’s probably not the most sustainable flooring we could have used, it was a great deal, and at least we understand the significance of using rainforest wood, Right?. We’ll just have to try making up for it with some other materials and energy choices like our energy efficient appliances.