Normandy Park Restoration

One of the few things I'm not willing to do myself.  Got rid of the old panel and had a new 200amp panel installed. That's the last big piece in the electrical work, now I can start to finalize all of the wiring and circuits.

Came up with an idea over the holidays to take the back wall windows all the way down to the floor.  No question this would require additional cleaning, but it could really make the look of the house much nicer.  I did a rough mockup (ignore the trash in the back yard, that's in the works).  Here is what it looks like now. And here is what it might look like with the new windows (based on my crappy photoshop skills) As part of this, I would also cut the concrete in the patio and create a planted area between the windows and the patio, similar to this type: The raw glass costs about $600 per pane, and there are 12 panes if I do all of the back windows.  Not cheap, but potentially a really nice look. I won't be able to start on this right away, but I may go ahead and rent a concrete saw and cut the planter section.  Eventually I'll replace all of the rear patio concrete with concrete pads, but for now I can start with cutting the planting area.  On...

More work done on the kitchen.  Got the doors on the laundry wall cabinets installed.  Replaced the black test countertop with another cheapo white one.  Added a carousel to one of the corner cabinets, and put the drywall up on the framing walls on front and back.  Still lots to do.

Kitchen is actually starting to look like a kitchen. Countertops are temporary.  Won't really know what kind I want until after I put the cabinet faces on and paint the ceiling beams.  I'm probably just going to go with the all-white cheap Ikea cabinet faces for now.  I think later I'll want to have custom faces made by Semihandmade, but just don't want to fuss with it for now. Had the code inspector come out today and my wiring passed, but the gas line I had a contractor do did not, so I've got them coming back out tomorrow to fix it. Unfortunately there were 2 issues.  When I unwrapped the dishwasher it had a big dent on the back.  When I also took the film off the sink, sure enough there was a ding front and center.  Got the sink off Amazon, so I already have the return setup there.  For the dishwasher it's AJ Madison, so we'll see how that goes.

Great dollar-ninja deal, found a Wolf gas cooktop.  Not fully connected yet, will be soon.

Time for a shower, won't be using the kitchen for a little while If you look closely you can see little sticks stuck to the kitchen floor.  These mark the level point for the base of the cabinets.  I've started the cabinet base framing, and directing the vents.  There's a pretty significant drop of 1/2" from the edge of the wall to the end of the islands, so I'll be doing a fair amount of work to get those level, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Decided to go ahead and take care of raising the wall separations on the back wall in the kitchen.  Here is the start, at this point all I've done is remove the glass. One center section cut out. Here I've installed the new cross beams  And here I've put some temporary drywall in the lower sections to keep the elements out I also put some drywall in the upper sections, to use as templates when ordering the replacement glass, which I'll do this week.