Demolition and Reconstruction

As soon as we had gotten all of our property itemized and thrown out they started ripping everything out.

This was the kids' first time back in the house since the fire. The doorway and window you see here are the ones that were in the back of my closet (as seen from the front room), we had just taken the door out and framed the wall back in, the window is still inside the wall.

While we were living in someone else's house, whenever we said we were "going home" the kids would ask if we were going to the "burned house" or the "new Todd's house" (That's what they called it, but it wasn't Todd's! He's a guy in the ward whose name they know.). The kids still sometimes refer to our house as the "burned house" although they usually say "but it's fixed now".

We found out our ugly wallpaper wasn't just one layer thick!

And our ugly carpet had ugly linoleum under it too. When we ripped out the foot lockers in the toy room we found out they were covering old cement planter boxes. We knew that wall used to be the outside wall before they built the toy room addition (hence the brick wall) and there are still cement planter boxes adjacent to these ones just outside the current front/side door, but we didn't know these ones were there!

From the front room looking into the hallway to the bedrooms - you can see the kids' room in the back, mostly untouched. After the demolition Curtis and his dad and grandpa came in and moved around/got rid of a couple of walls and doorways, like the doorway to our bedroom and the hallway between the kitchen and bathroom.

Then a crew came in and painted everything with an oil-based paint to keep the smoke smell in.

That's how the house was when we had Tara come in and take our family pictures.

There were a few things we decided to do ourselves to save money. We weren't able to do everything we could have done because then we would have slowed the project down and we were excited to get back in, but we did do some things. We decided that rather than buying linoleum and paying someone to come lay it (which is what the insurance would cover) we'd take that money and buy tile and lay it ourselves (to come out about even and still get an upgrade). So here we are laying the cement board for the tile.

We know how to paint and could have done it all ourselves, but the contractor's painters could do it weeks faster than we could have (they were done with the whole house in 2-3 days), since we still had kids and work. So we chose one room to paint ourselves (it would have cost way too much to do what we wanted done in there) - the toy room. Curtis also replaced the windows himself, with his dad's help.

Here's the new kitchen cabinets coming in. And you can see our tile work.

And our tile work in the bathroom. You can also see our short tub! We completely changed the layout of our bathroom and ended up not having space for a traditional tub. If we hadn't needed a tub (how else are you supposed to wash a baby?) we would have put in a shower, but instead we ended up finding a tub that's a foot shorter than traditional ones.

Wow, that went a whole lot quicker than it actually did. It took about 6 months to get it ready to move back in.