Between the before and after

I've been back blogging the work we have done since October when we arrived, here we are on the last day of March with 13 days left before we get on the road back to The Bay. We are up against a fast approaching deadline with more work to do than is reasonable, but this is what we do, we love to set our expectations at unreasonable levels. It keeps us feeling alive. 

I've been back blogging our experience and the work that has been done because I want to document it in the order in which it was received. But today I feel the need to put up a post about the challenges we are currently facing. These challenges are the real stuff that happens between the before and after, it's certainly not all easy peasy, there are serious complications and sometimes major failures that come your way and make you question why you decided to get into this in the first place. Often times I feel my job as a designer has nothing to do with designing, I manage the project, the budget, the scheduling, the subs and I am also a problem solver. The latter is perhaps my most important role, when things go wrong or we find something unexpected behind a wall it's my job to help solve the problem and also keep the stack of dominos from falling behind it.

Here are some funny things happened this week, some humorous, some frustrating and others downright heartbreaking. 

First, not such a big deal but my pretty herringbone marble backsplash delivered with 90% of the product damaged in shipping. The lesson here is that some issues can be remedied fairly quickly, TheBuilderDepot has been great and new product is on the way. Hooray for companies that make it easy.

Next up. Josh was working on demolishing the master bath and making swift work of it too. When I interrupted him to talk about the new plumbing...  well, Josh ended up flooded in water with me running to the basement to shut off the main valve. Standing is a soup of recently demo'd drywall josh had to sift through it for 2 springs and 2 gaskets the size of a peanuts. 

Seriously, this man is a trouper. There was water everywhere.

These things are par for the course. We have to shrug them off and just move on. Oops. What happened next is not something we could shrug off and honestly we are still baffled and not sure what the best way to move on is. The painting sub I hired to paint the kitchen cabinets (one of the few things we are hiring out) turned out to be one of those dishonest, smarmy contractors that talks out of both sides of his mouth. I won't bore you with all the details but I had to fire him and now we are stuck with cabinetry that will cost as much to fix as to replace. This is one of those major domino situations, our schedule is blown, our budget is potentially blown and we are on hold while we try to figure it out. 

I'm pretty sure it's common knowledge but you have to sand cabinets, especially lacquered wood ones before painting them and.... you aren't supposed to use Direct to Metal (metal paint) to paint wood. See the shiny wood under the paint that isn't sanded? the paint has nothing to stick to. 

I've been trying to save them myself but it's a no go with the time we have left. There are 55 doors and drawer faces not to mention the cabinet bases. 

The paint scratches & peels right off of all of these cabinets. Either all of the paint has to be scraped off and we start the process over or we have to replace it. Cost is about the same but impact to the schedule and the other work is significant. 

This is the in-between, the tuff stuff, the hard decisions and the heartbreak. It will end up looking beautiful and I will share those fantastic before and after photos because we won't let it turn out any other way. 

Onward.