Week one update

As Craig mentioned, we started demoing last Friday. One week later and we’ve made pretty good progress.
It started out looking like this:


And after a week of this:

It looks like this:

(taken from the same spot as the first picture above)

The first few days went better than expected. The next few, not so much. We had trouble turning off our water to remove the sink. The cold water valve under the sink was broken so we planned on turning it off to the whole house to remove the sink and its plumbing then replace the valve. But it wasn’t so easy, we kept turning the main water valves but the water kept coming. It was odd and discouraging. We aren’t planning on moving any plumbing so while it isn’t our area of expertise, we didn’t expect problems and were beginning to feel really stupid. We finally realized that one of several valves in the basement must also be broken so the next day we called the plumber for help.

Turns out, our system is more complicated than it should be and one valve was broken so even the plumber had difficulties figuring out what was going wrong. Twice he came up and said “that should do it, let’s just make sure nothing comes out” only to then turned on the faucet and have water came out.  Luckily Lucy can’t read lips or she might have picked up some new vocabulary I didn’t want her to have :-) But a couple hours and $230 later, we had a couple new valves, a better understanding of how our water system is laid out and a renewed sense of confidence.

The next night, with the water successfully shut off, we finished removing the sink and lower cabinets. Underneath that cabinet we saw just what we didn’t want to – asbestos tiles. Before we even had time to contemplate what that meant, we accidently nicked a copper pipe. It was at that point that I began to worry and wonder just what we had gotten ourselves into.

But Craig made a quick trip to Home Depot for a repair clamp (which was cheap, simple and worked great) and I did some thinking. I was planning on taking Lucy to my mom’s soon anyway so we just extended the trip to ensure that Craig has plenty of time to finish the tile removal and thoroughly clean up before we bring the baby back so it has all worked out okay so far. Just another reason to keep my eyes on the prize.
My goal was to have the demoing done so we could schedule the electrical work. Thursday night we finished up the last bit of drywall removal so we are right on track and we’ve already got the electricians and drywall installers scheduled and on the calendar so onward we go!