The Great Flood of 2014: Part Two

On Friday, January 10 we awoke at 4:15am to catch our early-bird flight out of Knoxville. We barricaded our cats up in the master bedroom, and said adieu to war-zone downstairs. We arrived in Fort Lauderdale to board the Celebrity Equinox (same ship as our honeymoon) and learned our room had been complimentary upgraded from a window to a balcony room. We couldn’t have been more ecstatic! The next ten days were filled with sleeping-in, room service, beachfront naps, massages and tropical drinks. We still kept in touch with events and decisions being made back at home, but really enjoyed ourselves while we were away. The contractor and workers had started piecing our house back together from the day we left, so great progress was made in those ten days.

 

St. Thomas, USVI

Barbados

Champagne Coral Reef

Champagne Coral Reef snorkeling in Dominica

Hot Springs at Trafalgar Falls, Dominica

Dinner date with my love

When we arrived home on Monday, January 20^th, nothing could prepare us for what we saw as we walked in the door. The walls had been torn down to the studs, insulation was removed, and plastic was hanging everywhere. We were literally living in a construction zone, and still are! In the meantime, they’ve insulated and hung new drywall, replaced all baseboards, and painted all walls, baseboards, crown molding and trim. The new flooring has been acclimating inside for a week and they begin that project on Monday. We went shopping for all new appliances, and purchased items to be delivered next weekend. Lastly, new custom cabinets won’t be in for a few weeks, so this project will ‘be continued’ until I can unveil official ‘Before and After’ pictures. It’s been stressful planning a complete redo of your entire downstairs, but all-in-all it has a silver lining to the entire fiasco. Our insurance company, American National Property & Collision (ANPAC), has been awesome throughout this entire experience, and I can’t say enough positive things about the way everything has been handled. Afterall, we’ve only been homeowners for six months and now we will have a completely renovated downstairs. The first three photos are before the disaster, and can be read about here. Here’s some photos taken while we were gone and also the progress made this past week:

Note location of kitchen window as reference guide. To the very right of the photo is the back patio french door.

Butlers Pantry across from dishwasher

Long view of kitchen. To the left of the fridge is the garage door. Note fridge location (this is where the leak occurred in the ceiling/wall)

Studs and concrete slab floor exposed  (note window and french door location)

Kitchen window and looking where the stove should be

When we arrived home, drywall had been put up and the entire bulkhead removed (YAY!). You're looking at the garage door, and to the left the hallway containing the laundry closet and half bath.

Butler's pantry location (left door is the pantry and right door is the half bath)

Current living room view (old fridge and stove under plastic). Note new baseboards, newly painted walls and molding.

Kitchen window and french door

Kitchen view with garage door

Butler's pantry

Hallway into dining room

Half bath

View from dining room back into kitchen (Jack is very unhappy with the renovations)

Dining Room (new flooring in the boxes)

In living room looking toward front door and dining room

Reesie is also very unhappy with the current accommodations 

Stay tuned for the final installment, The Great Flood of 2014: Part Three!!

The Great Flood of 2014: Part One

Ok, I may be exaggerating using the term “Great Flood” to describe what occurred in the Westerling Residence on Tuesday, January 7, 2014, but it certainly was a great disaster of chaos. An arctic blast cold front had moved into much of the country, and Knoxville was hit with near record-low temperatures of negative degrees with wind-chill. I arrived home at 6pm from a severely exhausting arm-day at a personal training session to open my garage door and see a waterfall springing from my attic. It was picturesque, and as I sat in my car for a whole minute my brain tried to comprehend “Is this a joke?” and “why is it raining inside?”. When my wits finally returned, I tried calling my husband over the Bluetooth system in my car, but apparently the kind, female, robotic operator can’t understand the voice of a frantic woman! I reach over to start dialing the numbers manually into my phone (like some kind of animal!) only to cry out in pain from my sore, debilitating, T-Rex arms. I unlock the screen and start randomly pressing different apps (Facebook, Instagram – why won’t my fingers press the correct buttons?! Weather Channel, Photostream – I just wanna make a phone call!!!). Here’s where I’d say I must’ve been in shock, because for the life of me I couldn’t make myself unlock the phone and call Rob. I felt trapped with no way of communicating, putzing around while my garage continued to pour in water by the gallon. THINK MICHELE! I was finally able to select Rob and the phone began ringing…

View from my car (I still hadn't gotten out to see all the damage yet)

“How’s my sexy wife doing?” Rob exclaims as he answers the telephone. “Drop everything and GET HOME NOW!” I frantically yell. “Did a pipe burst?” he calmly asks, as if he can already see the terror through my eyes. “I’ll be home in 5 minutes, I don’t know how to explain to you where the water shut-off valve is,” he states, and then he’s hung up before I can say another word. Five or so agonizing minutes pass by, and I’m still sitting in my car twiddling my thumbs. Gah, at least it’s contained to the garage I think to myself as Rob pulls into the driveway. We both rush through the garage shower and open the door to the inside of the house, but nothing could prepare us for the horror awaiting us...

Collapsed ceiling and attic insulation

A shower was spewing water from the ceiling in the kitchen like some kind of geyser, and there was two inches of water pooling on the downstairs floor like an ice-cold water park. Utter chaos and shock as we waded through to the water heater closet to try and cut the water off to the house. As I squeezed myself into the too-tiny closet to reach the knob, Rob ran outside with a wrench and tools to turn off the water at the street. Once the water was off at both locations and it quit dripping from the bulkhead, we made sure the cats were ok (hiding upstairs and meowing like broken records, but safe). The entire first floor of our house was completely and absolutely flooded with at least two inches of pooling water; everything from furniture to area rugs was waterlogged. The house was built on a concrete slab, and this caused the water to have no escape to the outside. We stood there in absolute dismay as thoughts of who to call first passed through our minds. We divided and conquered like the great team we are J Rob called his mom and they worked on getting a restoration company to come and clean up the mess that evening. I called my parents and told them to rent a U-Haul so we could get all of our furniture out of the downstairs part of the house (maybe it could be saved!). Then, I called our insurance agent to relay the news. Lastly, I called every nearby friend I could think of to come and help us with all the work.

Hard to see, but lots of water!

Soaked rugs/floor

 Long story short, Reynold’s Restoration and Cleaning (RR&C) is the best company on the planet. Not only did they make a special trip for our house (Thanks to Nancy’s connections), but they got there quickly and started the cleanup process of taking up flooring, helping move furniture, and beginning the dry-out process. The RR&C team was timely, professional and courteous, and I would most definitely recommend them to anyone needing their services in the future. Wonderful friends and family also showed up to help move odds and ends into the moving truck and into safe territory upstairs. RR&C didn’t leave until midnight, and our house had transformed into a construction zone in just a few hours. Turns out the ice-maker pipe burst in the ceiling above the garage/fridge area and it kept dispensing water the whole day...

Flooring pulled up and commercial grade dehumidifiers turned on

Kitchen MESS

Floor being pulled up

Garage ceiling

Living room view with fans galore

Dining room

Reynolds Restoration & Cleaning

The funny part of this story is Rob and I were set to leave in just 3 short days for a non-refundable ten-day Caribbean cruise vacation. Great timing! In our final days before the trip, we scrambled to pick out new flooring and cabinet color (left cabinet style and other renovating details to Rob’s parents). We said BonVoyage! that Friday and left the winter turmoil for blue skies and beach!

Stay tuned for The Great Flood of 2014: Part Two!

How to Build a Cornhole Set

So, we moved into our new home about four months ago, and I feel like it's finally time to show off our new pad and host a party. This upcoming Saturday we decided to combine hosting a friend's birthday and football party into one GIANT celebration. There will be friends, football, grilling out great food, and lots of games, including cornhole. Now, I like cornhole, but I'm just really bad at it. I can't throw straight, or maybe I just never had my own cornhole set on which to practice. Enter Rob. Rob decided, at my suggestion, that he would build us our very own cornhole set to use for future get-togethers at our residence. He printed off the ACA regulation instructions at one of the following websites, like here. Then, we went to Lowes to buy the supplies, which was around $50. In the meantime, I ordered our cornhole bags off of ETSY because you can choose a variety of colors and patterns. After much discussion, we decided to go with UT orange and Grey, which looks fantastic together (and it's the same colors as the new UT uniforms). It took a couple of hours to cut and build the boards, and another evening to paint them. I'd recommend painting the tops of the boards all white as a base color, before applying your actual colors. This will help the colors to look bright, and you won't need to apply so many layers of colored paint. Also, choosing a unique pattern or design can spruce up the look (I saw some awesome boards with the chevron pattern). Below are some photos for your viewing pleasure. All in all, if you have the skills and tools to build your own cornhole set, it's more economical and I treasure them more knowing Rob built them.

Building of the frames

One board complete. Just add retracting legs to the base.

Final product: Our paint colors and design (we just inverted the colors)

Looks pretty sleek and stylish :)

There are so many wonderful colors to choose from in this ETSY store (we went with the solid Orange and Grey, DUH!) And of course, these bags are up to ACA regulations as well with correct weight, size, stitching and material).

I'm so excited to try out the new set when the cornhole bags are delivered tomorrow. Time to step up my game!! Happy Playing!

Extreme Renovation: Porch and Patio Edition (Part 2)

So, once we had the porch done we still had no where to put our outdoor fire-pit, our grill, and the wood patio furniture we received for our wedding. We knew when we were doing the screened porch we would eventually add in a paver patio, but we decided to tackle the project much earlier on than we both expected. So, again, here is how the outdoor space originally appeared.

Looking out from the house

During the digging process

Rob using a rented mini-excavater 

More views

Endless digging

They had a planter bed up against the house filled with pea gravel and monkey grass, an over-sized trampoline in the yard (inhibiting the grass from growing), and virtually no place to safely put the grill or fire-pit  Rob read some instructions online and next thing I know, we're building a paver patio! Thanks in advance to Ken Rather and Joshua Landreth for all your help with this project. It was the most strenuous thing Rob and I have ever attempted. Ok, so first we had to dig down 7-9 inches to start our base. The clay was so compact in this area we decided to rent equipment for the weekend (THANK GOD!). It would have been near-impossible to do this by shovel. The mini-excavator was able to do the hard-core digging for us but we still had plenty of shovel work, and wheelbarrow towing to displace the dirt. We filled it with six-inches of gravel (lots of shoveling) followed by lots and lots of sand (more shoveling). 

Gravel

Finished with sand on the first day

This creates a nice base for the paver patio and allows water to drain from it rather than to pool in areas. We saved alot of money by getting the sand and gravel from a nursery, rather than buying bags of it from Home Depot. Then, you level everything, compact it, start laying your border and lay your patio pavers. We chose to go with the half basket weave design and I LOVE IT! Finally, we filled the cracks with sand grout. 

Viola!

Planter bed

Added hanging baskets off the porch and planted red petunias 

Gorgeous zinnias!

We planted two pink dwarf azaleas and two flowering hostas surrounded by numerous orange zinnias in the bed up against the house. We arranged our patio furniture around the fire-pit in the center, placed the grill in the corner and set out some mosquito-fighting tiki torches (thanks Sean Ellis!). I got the awesome outdoor pillows covers, including pillows, from a garage sale this past weekend all for $6! Can't wait to host a barbecue!! What do you think of the outcome?

Great view!

I love this patio....

Are the pillows awesome or what?!

Love seat in front of the planter bed

Fire-pit centerpiece

Ready for guests!

 I'm so happy with the outcome, but we definitely didn't know what we were getting into. So glad we were able to finish it and our hard work paid off.

Extreme Renovation: Porch and Patio Edition (Part 1)

Super excited to show everyone how hard Rob and I have been working to transform this house into our home. I hope you all enjoyed the kitchen blog, and now you'll see the next big project we attempted this past weekend. The back room off the kitchen/living room was originally a sun room dungeon for lack of a better term, and the previous owners had used it as a playroom for their 2 kids. It had 5 windows (2 ft by 1 ft) that were about five feet off the ground, so it let in very little light. The room had no heating or air conditioning, and had so many problems with the initial construction I can't even name them all. It had standing water in the walls, mold in the carpet, extreme water damage, unsafe electrical outlets, crooked beams and that's just to name a few issues. We decided before we even bought the house this room had to be completely demolished. We went back and forth between converting it into a sun room or just keeping the roof and turning it into a screened in porch. Because there were so many issues with the structure we just decided it would be better for our budget to convert it to the latter. Here are the photos of what the room looked like at the time we toured the house.

Standing at the back garage door looking at the dungeon

Standing at the back corner of the yard (the window on the far right is the kitchen window)

Another view from the other corner of the house

View standing at the back french doors looking into the dungeon

Another view inside the room

These next few photos are of the demo/building process. To save some cash, a coworker and I demolished the drywall, took out all the insulation, pulled up the carpet and Rob and I took off the siding to be reused inside. Next, we hired a contractor and crew to take down the walls and set the frame. When the walls came down, so much light came through the french doors into the house. It was incredible and really brightened up the whole downstairs. The building crew put in a railing, put up the screens, installed the door and put up soffits in the ceiling. We were glad the recessed lighting was able to stay.

Great crew!

Walls coming down! 

These final photos were after Rob pressure-washed the carpet glue off the cement slab, and painted it with a slate gray apoxy. Then, we purchased a nice 4-piece patio set on sale at Kroger to fill the space, installed my flat screen TV in the upper corner of the room (can't wait to watch some Tennessee Football games back here. GO VOLS!), filled it will both living plants and an artificial palm ($3 at a garage sale, Woo-Hoo!) and installed a Hampton Bay outdoor ceiling fan to keep the area cool during the summer months. 

Beautiful oasis in the back yard :)

Flat screen TV and cushion storage doubles as additional seating

It couldn't be more perfect!

Everyday after work I come out here and enjoy the patio with the kitties. They LOVE the outdoors, especially watching the bird feeder. Jack can't wait to be let outside the porch :) Quite the transformation I'd say!!