Hey friends! Happy Monday! I hope you are having a fantastic week.

Now that I’m all caught up on cat house posts, I will try to post on Fridays with weekly updates of the house progress. Here’s what happened last week!

Not Moving In

We started the week by finalizing apartment plans after we decided not to move into cat house because of the fleas. We were disappointed but also relieved. I had previously lined up cleanings for the entire house as well as the duct work, so I cancelled those. This was the second time I cancelled duct work cleaning (the first was when we discovered the fleas), so I’m pretty sure that company hates me now.

I also let the basement cleaning company know that we weren’t moving in so they could remove us from their priority list (they were trying to fit us in around their jobs related to hurricane damage). Hopefully we can get the basement cleaned out in the next few weeks.

Architect Plans

Temporarily giving up on cat house left me feeling kind of defeated, but our architect ended up having plans ready for us to review this week. What a bright turnaround to such an annoying situation.

Just to give you a little bit of background about the house, it is 2800 sq ft, 4 bedroom, and 4.5 baths. The original house was 2000 sq ft, 3 bedroom and 2.5 bath, but there was a really crappy addition built onto in the 1980s to add additional square footage. The addition is not structurally supported, and we knew this prior to purchasing the home.

You can kind of see in the photo above but the original house is in brick (ends under the covered patio) and the addition is in siding. Our plan with the renovation is to remove the bad addition and expand the original house to make up for the square footage we’re tearing out. The house has also been badly neglected over the past 20 or so years so we will also be giving it some TLC in the process.

We are removing ~800 square feet when we tear out the addition, and this includes the family room, 1 bedroom, 2 full bathrooms, an office and a sunroom. We hope to build back this square footage and add a little bit extra, as well as make up for the bedroom and 2 bathrooms that we’re tearing off.

House Wish List

The fun part! Back in August, we put together a wish list for the architect of things that we would love to have with this renovation:

• bigger dining room
• create an open kitchen / living area
• add master suite upstairs
• add laundry room and small office somewhere
• build drive-thru carport
• create more storage / closets
• draw plans for detached garage

Draft #1 of plans

Our architect put together a couple of different drafts of plans and we were able to review them with him on Thursday.

It is really cool to see what our house could potentially be in the future. We felt like the architect included everything we asked for on our wish list, so now we just have to decide what we like and what we want to change based on the flow and layout of the house. We had a chance to sit on our thoughts over the weekend and get some feedback from friends as well.

We are also hoping to check in with our contractor about the budget this week. We think that will be a deciding factor in a lot of our decisions.

Moving Forward

We started our apartment lease on Saturday and started moving smaller things over the weekend. Our big move is on Saturday. I feel like my mind is scattered so I’m not sure how much of the plans we’ll be able to get to this week.