James' Nursery

I've been nesting like crazy, and James nursery is finally complete minus one tiny sewing project and getting the new blinds hung. The curtains, curtain rods and the wall color you see in these photos was what I originally had in there before this room became a nursery. Aaron requested that we keep those three things, since I had the curtains made by a friend and the room had been painted less than a year earlier. We hope you like our black and white "gender-neutral" nursery. I can always change the wall color to blue or add some pink for another child later. (Another of Aaron's requests was to keep the same nursery stuff for any future children we have down the road!) If you know me at all, you know it's hard for me to not redecorate a room and let my creative juices flow every couple of years but I'll just have to save that for James' "big boy" room in a few years! :) As for now, we're happy with his sweet little nursery and can't wait for him to be here and enjoy his new crib!

Baby James - 4D Ultrasound Photos

Our sweet baby boy!




Blowing bubbles & smiling!

Profile of face resting on hand

In deep thought with hand holding chin, or cauliflower boy (as Aaron has affectionately begun calling our baby boy!)

Our little man is already flexing for the camera!

He was a bit camera shy, and kept putting his arms in front of his face.

Big stretch..fingers to toes! That's what I feel all day long right now! :)

We've got a thumb sucker! Here come the braces! :)

It's A Boy!!!

It's a boy! Meet our son, James Gadsby Dettling! He's due on October 12th, and we're counting down the days until our sweet baby James arrives!

BEFORE Photos of the Kitchen

So I was looking through some old photo albums on the computer today, and found these photos of the kitchen in it's original glory pre-reno! What a transformation!!!

Gabinetas are installed!

Last week was a crazy one, but very productive. Two weekends ago, Aaron pushed through and finished all the drywall, painting and installation of the floor (which is absolutely beautiful, I might add!) On Tuesday morning, Lonnie and his assistant showed up around 9:30am (a little behind schedule) but something I quickly became accustomed to throughout the rest of the week. After a couple days work, we had cabinets! Oh what a wonderful week!!! Soon, we'll have countertops and appliances too! It's amazing how the simple things in life can make a girl so happy! :)

From the lap of luxury -- Mom's House!

My husband graciously claims I've been patient. I've tried, but I believe I fall far short in that area. So much so, that I'm sitting at my mom's house in Mobile typing this new entry. Between work on the house and a loaded schedule at the office, I decided to leave my husband to his work and left him to spend Easter alone in Birmingham while I've enjoyed the delicacies of a kitchen with running water and a stove in Mobile. Some wife I am!

As he mentioned in the previous blog, we are expecting our first little one in early October. Although he affectionately calls it our "little guy," we do not know the sex of our newest family member at this time. He continues to say "I'll love him whether he's a boy or girl!" So if you haven't guessed, my husband would be thrilled to have a son to share all his new tools with and teach him how to race cars and build things. But I know that whatever we have, Aaron will fall deeply in love with our sweet baby. And if it happens to be a girl, she'll have her daddy wrapped around all 10 of her little fingers! All I want is a healthy child, and after the rocky beginning we have had with this pregnancy I'm praying that's God's desire as well.

As for the new DeWalt saw Aaron mentioned in the previous blog, I can assure you that he is not the least bit disappointed in the fact that he had to buy another tool. And when it does come time to begin searching for a new house with more than 845 square feet and one bathroom, we will have to be sure we get one with a garage or simply build a second building behind the house for all of the tools we have consumed in the last year! : ) With that said, we won't be moving any time soon. Especially after the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into this extensive kitchen renovation!!!

THIS IS TAKING ENTIRELY TOO LONG

Update: THIS IS TAKING ENTIRELY TOO LONG, but Tally, expectant and all, is being a great sport about it. And things are cracking on.

We got delayed hanging drywall for several reasons. First and foremost, it's really hard work. Hanging drywall is rewarding, because you can really see progress fast when you hang a couple sheets. But it will also make you glad you went to law school...or any school...or even just the being-hit-on-the-head classes as famously featured in the Monty Python "I'd like to buy an argument" sketch. But alas, I digress. It's tedious work, too. The old adage "measure twice, cut once" has no application here. My advice is to measure three times, at least, and then be prepared to skew, strain, trim, and cuss for several minutes until the piece finally fits and you can hold it in its unsteady perch with your left hand, holding screws in your mouth, while driving screws with the drill in the right hand.

Then we got held up with some more plumbing issues. (Yes, come to find out, the supply pipes were leaking too.) Then I wasted several days trying to fix said issues myself. Then I wasted another two weeks researching and ruminating whether to re-plumb the whole house with PEX. Wisely, Tally overruled the idea, with extreme prejudice. Thanks to my man Ed for hooking us up with leak-free copper supply tubing for the sink.

So then we're ready to finish drywalling...and at this point I have to give a shout out to my homies and co-MVPs of the month, Derek and Carter Cavin, ages 34 and 1, respectively. I simply could not have gotten the last piece of wallboard up without Derek's willing assistance. Carter mostly pointed, slobbered, and went "Ooooh!!!" But you'd be surprised how much help that really is.

While working, I ceremonially eat fast food meals in the construction zone. I think it's important to consecrate the kitchen as a place of eating early on in the process.

So, we have legal water and electricity, all of the drywall is now up, and it's mostly taped and mudded. Soon, we can actually do some painting--something Tally is anxious to see happen. And I am too, because that's when we really get to see her great taste and design talents start coming together. (Like when she convinced me on eight lights instead of six...good call on that one, baby.)

And I'm looking forward to putting the floor in, too. This, sadly, required the purchase of a new tool, a DeWalt 10" compound miter saw and 80-tooth finish blade. I was sorry to have to do it, really, because, I mean, who has room for one of those dagone things? But you've got to take the bad with the good.

Really, I have to blame Seth for this frivolous purchase. We were talking construction strategy, when he asked me how I was planning to cut the new flooring to length. "With my flippin' circular saw, what do you think!" I said. Well, he convinced me that this idea was indeed folly. And, probably it was. Lowe's was running a great deal on the saw at 15% off. Seth bought one too.

Right now, honestly, I'm looking forward to a reason to take the saw out of the box and actually look at it, let alone use it.

Maybe it wasn't fair to throw that "expectant" thing in there at the beginning and then leave the reader hanging. Yes, we are proud, humbled, and amazed at God's little handiwork. We're at 13 weeks, and even several weeks ago we saw the little guy moving his little arms and legs all over the place on the sonogram. Speechless with awe.

Hitting Rock Bottom (sheetrock bottom, that is)

Is it weird that the more I tear up my kitchen, the better it seems to look?

I don't know if it's just the fact that I'm removing so much of the foul funk or if I'm going caddywompus from all the chemicals and dust, but we've pretty much arrived at ground zero of the demolition and renewal cycle, and my kitchen seems to look better all the time. I say we're at the very bottom of demolition, but actually the tail end of demolition and the very early signs of new life overlap some. The floor is fixed, and even as I type there are electricians at the house removing the old cobbled together (and very dangerous) wiring and installing new electrical service and lighting. I'm doing most of this work myself, but ya know, sparks scare me. I work in a building, at the top of which is a larger-than-life figure with lightning bolts shooting out of its head. I don't want to be that guy.

I talked to the electricians this morning, and things were really scary in there. We're talking way below code. I mean, code is barely visible off in the distance. Code is an existential abstract concept with no written being, incapable of knowing or being known, kind of scary. Upgrading to comply with the electrical code will require a host of new circuits--who knew you couldn't run a microwave, lights, toaster, and clothes washing machine all off the same branch circuit? (I'm actually not making that up.) And that's to say nothing of how the old 220v service was, ahem, "connected." I'll spare you the gory details. Turns out we're going to need a new breaker panel, too, because there just isn't enough room in the old box for all the new wires we're going to need.

Over the last two nights, I've removed about 90% of the drywall in the kitchen and the original millwork around the doors (intact!). The rest is coming down probably tonight.
Part of what we want to do is to preserve small original details of the house. So, the old solid back door and all the millwork will all be taken down, stripped thoroughly, repainted, and reinstalled.

One last interesting find as I've completed the demo process is what appears to be an old gas pipe inside the wall that wasn't plugged off. I'm not smelling anything untoward, so surely it's not connected to anything. I'm sure we would have gotten blown up years ago if it were. But just to be sure, I'm going to run by Lowe's on the way home tonight and pick up a plug to stick in there.

Catching Up

Well, much has happened since our last blog entry, so let's try to get caught up.

In sum, the flooring, appliances, countertops, and cabinets are all out, and the floor is fixed.

The toughest part of preparing for cabinet tearout was getting the old refrigerator out of the way. That joker just did not want to move. We later found that that was because both of the old coasters had broken off underneath. To make matters worse, we soon learned that the old fridge was too big to fit through either of the doorways into the kitchen (see pics). So, we had to remove the doors. To make sure we didn't lose any food, this had to be carefully orchestrated, much like a pit stop in motor racing. I carefully planned our every move. Two bolts out on top, bracket off, freezer door off handoff to Tally, remove pin, zip-zip two screws, bracket off, fridge door off and handoff to Tally. Then we squeezed the fridge through the narrow door opening and reversed the process. Fridge door in bottom hinge, bracket, zip zip, insert pin, freezer door in bottom hinge, bracket on, two bolts back in on top. Too bad we don't have any action pics of this. It was awesome. And it didn't take that long, either. (The big butt-shaped hole in the drywall is where I was trying to push the fridge out.)

Lonnie, our cabinet guy from Lowe's, is great. He came to do the tearout and left everything nice and neat, and even hauled away our earlier demo debris. With the cabinets out, our kitchen suddenly feels large. But all of the drywall is scarred beyond repair and is going to need replaced (see photos). There are random holes everywhere!

Now, on to the water problems. When the cabinets were removed, the full extent of the damage could be seen for the first time. Yes, friends, I have seen the very heart of evil, and it is sort of soggy and musty. Yesterday, we cut away all the old rotten subflooring, installed a new floor joist, and cut and installed the new subflooring. It's not that hard of a job, just messy and awkward. We don't have any action shots of me cutting out the old flooring, which is a shame, because my hoss DeWalt DW 364 15-Amp Circular Saw and I make a heck of a team. I just set the depth of cut to 3/4", marked the joist centers, and went to town. I didn't worry about cutting through nails, as they were rusty anyway. The carbide toothed blade went right through them and doesn't seem to be any worse off for wear. Tally got a lot of good shots of the new joist install. Luckily, the house has a nice concrete block pier support in the kitchen area, so I only needed a 7' length of 2x8 joist from the rim joist to the pier. Any longer and it would have been a real pain to manouvre into place. The 2x8 joist had to be ripped by 1/8" to fit into place. Again, the DW 364 (with optional rip fence) stepped up to the plate and made another of its consistent base hits. Once ripped to the right dimenstions and manouvred around the plumbing and wiring, the new joist slipped right into place up against the old one. Then I cut custom shims (yep, DW 364), tapped them into place, and trimmed off the excess with the sawzall. Nailing the new joist into place was a chore, with less than 16" clearance between joists, on my back in the aptly named "crawl space," but we got it done.

From there, it was pretty easy to measure and cut pieces of 23/32" plywood and nail them in.

Now our floor is safe and sound, and one day we'll be able to sell our house with clear consciences, knowing that the new homeowners won't be busting through the floor.

Next, all the drywall is coming down, and the electrician is coming out to wire everything up (including el bano, too) and install our recessed lighting. I'm also thinking of removing the existing plumbing and re-doing it, but that will depend on time and energy, since there's nothing really "wrong" with it, 'cept that it's very ugly. Then, I'll hang and mud all new drywall, and we'll be ready for the new gabinetas to arrive.

Be sure to check out our pictures!! You won't believe your eyeballs.

Shameless plug for my own personal project (and a special thanks!)

After many months of hard work, the 5th edition of PORTICO Weddings magazine hit newstands this week. A lot of people worked very hard on this issue, and as always I still feel a bit of a personal attachment to it. I LOVE this magazine and what we're doing with it for brides in Alabama. Even if you're already married or aren't even thinking of marriage, I hope you have a chance to look at it. It will be on newsstands for the entire month of January as the main Portico issue and then in the weddings section for the next several months until our July supplement comes out. You can check out one of the stories that Aaron and I worked on together on the Portico website this month at www.porticomag.com! It's called "Precisely Planned" and is on page 21 of the actual magazine or you can read this story online and see Aaron's hidden talents by visiting http://www.porticomag.com/wedding/guests.html. Happy Reading! : )

And for our RMC readers:
Several talentented writers from Red Mountain Church, as well as a lot of other talented peepes from RMC got small cameos throughout the pages of this beautiful issue! Be sure to check out mine and Aaron's wedding story and all the names of the many people who helped make it so very special in our Essay on page 9, my sweet husband's photography on pages 9, 10, 21 & 22, Carl Walker's "oh so chic" English taxi cab on pages 86 & 88, Lauren Denton's beauty story starting on page 52, Anna Cate Ridley Little's house hunt story on page 59, Kristin Sartelle's modelling debut on pages 82, 84, 90, and 94, Jennifer Pickering's name in the masthead (even though her photos somehow got cut--sorry Jen!) and last but not least, sweet Madeleine Walker who's name appears on page 94 in "a very special thanks to" section of our "Glamour Girls" spread for all her help with the massive photo shoot! We couldn't have produced such a fabulous magazine without all of your help! (Okay, so I'm a little biased!)

Thanks again for all you did in helping with this magazine and for all the love and support you showered upon Aaron allowing us to have such a heartfelt wedding and intimate reception nearly a year ago!!! We are so very grateful to be part of such a wonderful and caring church family!

Love,
Tally

Super Dave & Wonder Heidi - Our Plumbers and New Best Friends

We had a power team come out at 7pm on Wednesday night and after they magically pieced and soldered together various types of pipes to create a new temporary pipe, we spent the rest of the evening (from 9pm to 11pm) washing dishes and cleaning the dining room (i.e. temporary storage space) and kitchen. The inch of dirt that had become a mask for our ugly chipped white laminate countertop is finally gone, and the white Formica has never looked so pretty! Still not pretty enough to keep, though! After our daily visit to Lowe's tonight, we believe we have changed our minds on the color of our new countertops. Wanda at Lowe's is going to just love hearing from us again! :)

A Gruesome Discovery

Tonight I found the source of the water damage. I also tried to fix it, but since I did not succeed in that little adventure we're not going to dwell on it any longer than necessary. The post-mortem photos are posted, but, I warn you, they are not for the weak-gutted, anyone with a history of heart problems, anyone over the age of 65, and certainly, certainly, not for children. Please, put the kids to bed before clicking further.
Using a hole saw on my sweet DeWalt 3/8" VSR keyless chuck drill, I cut two 2" holes in the cabinet kick plate to illuminate and assess the damage. In sum, yeah, it was really bad. Then, using the honkin' Bosch RS-15 12-ampere reciprocating saw, and a series of super-skilled pocket cuts, I cut away an area of the back of the cabinet and drywall to look at the plumbing. I found that an iron elbow where the sink drain meets the house plumbing corroded completely through. As a result, it looks like virtually all of the water from the sink was running out into the wall, onto the floor, and on into the crawl space. The full extent of the damage is not yet clear, but I'm afraid we're going to find damage not just to the subfloor, but also to the wall sill and framing.
In short, zoinks.

We're in a Drought!

When Aaron asked how long I could go without an oven, I thought no problem. People all over the world cook daily meals with much less. When he took out the floor, I thought no big deal--I'll just wear shoes or flip-flops all day. When it was time for the dishwasher to come out, I thought it would be just like moving back home with mom who still doesn't have one. (She always said she had 6 dishwashers when we were going up!) When we found out the pipe in the kitchen was the cause of our rotting subfloor, I thought uh-oh! I'm realizing now just how big of an UH-OH that is!!!

So at Publix today, I purchased two small rubbermaid tubs to fit inside each side of the sink and a cheap drying rack to set the dishes on once we finished washing them by hand (all while attempting not to get a drop of water into the sink.) That will be a difficult task, but the worst came while attempting to cook dinner tonight. I made beef stroganoff, so I boiled the pasta and cooked the meat sauce in a pan on the stove. Then it came time to drain the pasta. I had just filled the sink pans with soapy water for dirty dishes and didn't want to take fresh cooked food into our only bathroom to drain it. So I did the only thing I knew, and took the pot and a strainer outside. I thought I could manage to hold the strainer with one hand while pouring the pasta out with another. NOT SO MUCH! I lost half of our dinner to the ground below! :( UGGHHH! But thinking on the brighter side--we consumed less carbs! : )

Oh, and as soon as Aaron got home the walkie-talkies came back out!

"Over & Out" - Tally

Walkie-Talkies and a husband with power tools!

For those of you who don't speak fluent Spanish (i.e. my husband who likes to think he's very funny but never took Spanish and me who took 4 years but still has to go behind him and look the words up again), no superble means the best in English.

On a trip to Home Depot today (certainly one of many in our near future) Aaron purchased himself some new toys--knee pads, goggles, sandpaper discs for his orbital sander, and lastly his favorite and soon to be my least--WALKIE-TALKIES!

All women reading this: imagine if you will, a 30-something year old man throwing a walkie-talkie onto your lap and running into the next room only to buzz in to say "10-4, copy that" in a policeman style voice over and over again throughout the afternoon and evening. The range on these things is 15 miles and they charge into a plug-in adapter, so they'll never die!!!

I thought it was cute and a fun idea at first while in the store, thinking it would help us communicate through all this demolition or at least the next time my husband knicked a pipe with the sawzall again. I'm starting to rethink the cuteness factor! : ) But at least he's having fun and I'm able to contribute to the building up of his "masculine spirit." If you've ever read "Wild at Heart" or talked to Gordon Bals, you'll understand what I mean!

However, I have a feeling I'm going to get tired of that little beeping noise and the phrases "10-4", "Over and Out", and "Copy that" very soon!

So, over and out! -Tally

Electricity. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

I don't know a whole lot about electricity and wires and stuff, but I do know that the two 120V conductors have to be kept separate from the neutral conductor, or else really bad things happen, generally including fire. The genius who installed our old wall oven apparently thought of this as optional. Oh yes, he did the junction in a box just like code says. The problem is that he put it in there with all the insulation all frayed off, allowing contact between the aforesaid conductors. You can see where the wire strands have made contact, melted, and balled off. Truly amazing. The photos show my cleanup job on this. I'm going to have an electrician come out, take this out, and put in new 240 service for the oven, which, by the way, is going to be totally no superable.

Initial Demo Complete

Phase I demo is complete. All flooring has been removed down to the subfloor decking. Non-essential appliances removed. Now we wait for the gabineta guys to come out and measure and template everything for the new gabinetas and countertops. Then we'll start taking out the old gabinetas, and get the plumber and electrician out here. The electrician is going to have to replace the 240V service and move it to the new oven location. The plumbers...well, don't talk to me about that right now.

Water Damage!!

I have learned some new Spanish words this weekend. My favorite one is gabinetas. That means cabinets. I've learned that gabinetas are muy expensive. I've been walking around just saying "gabinetas" for no particular reason. It's fun, try it. I can't tell you the other Spanish words I learned, though, this being a "family" blog and whatnot.
You see, as we started removing the flooring close to the dishwasher, my leftmost nostril was permeated by a foul yet earthy odor vaguely reminiscent of the delicate scent of stale water mixed with dirt. The fiberboard also got kinda, uh, squishy. Actually, more like the texture of cold oatmeal. When we finally got the old dishwasher out, our eyes were met with a most frightful sight--WATER DAMAGE!!!!! Aaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!
(See photos. WARNING: Graphic detail!)
I would like to strangle whoever did the plumbing (and the electrical--more later) in this house. It turns out that the drain for the kitchen sink (that "pipe" thingie that's supposed to carry wastewater to the sanitary sewer system) is pouring water right onto the subfloor and has been doing so for who knows how long. I won't know the full extent of the damage until we get the gabinetas out of there. For now, we just have a dehumidifier in there trying to dry it out.
Some subfloor replacement is definitely going to be necessary, and I may have to sister up some floor joists too.
But we are undeterred! The Dettling SuperKitchen project goes on.

Our New Year's Renovation

Many of you know our kitchen and bathroom have been in a much needed state of reno for the last year, maybe longer. I didn't expect Aaron to actually decide to do anything until we were much closer to moving out and into something bigger. We've even been looking at houses with more than one bathroom for the last month or so. We weren't planning on moving for another several months, but we were starting to look.

Anyways, plans changed or better said, developed, as of 4pm on Saturday, Dec. 30! We were finally sitting for the first time that day after having gone out looking at houses that morning, when Aaron says let's redo the kitchen. About a half a minute later, he was in the kitchen ripping our oven out of the wall cabinet and tearing the cabinet down to the sheetrock and wall studs behind. The top portion of the the oven had been storage for all our pots and pans up to that point, so I was hurriedly trying to remove everything from the oven as my sweet husband was pulling it out of the wall.

By 8:30pm that night, half of our kitchen floor was down to the moldy and rotted subfloor below after having to pull up 3 layers of linoleum with the last layer full of nails. We had no idea what we'd been living on top of all this time.

Have fun looking at the photos of our own real life "Flip This House" or "This Old House!" We'll be updating this blog site as we go with news of the renovation and any other family news along the way! I thought 2007 would be a more restful year in comparison to 2006, but it's looking like we've already begun the year the only way we know how--busy, busy! But, we're going to have a sweet kitchen when we're done! : )

Needless to say, we'll be here for at least a year but I'm hoping for two! After designing my new kitchen, I'm not going to want to leave it for awhile. We'll keep you posted! : )