We're getting a discount for working over Christmas, and since we didn't really have major plans over the holiday, we decided to go ahead and start the project late next week. Eek!

It's a pretty extensive renovation. We're taking the kitchen down to the studs. Currently, the layout is...convoluted. When you walk in from the garage, there's a mud room entry with the laundry area, a half-bath, and the pantry (one cabinet of which is the laundry chute!). You have to hook around it to get to the kitchen. The fridge and range are on the opposite side of the wall that the W/D are on, and it curves around into a U-shape with a sink on the bottom of the U, facing a wall, and a peninsula for the other side of the U. There's only a small opening to get out to the rest of the house past the kitchen, because the doorway to go down to the finished basement is right there at the top of the peninsula. I'll post "before" pictures this weekend, once we get the kitchen area cleaned out.

We're moving the entire laundry area upstairs, and building a laundry room off of our guest bedroom. Once that's done, we'll be building a new mud room entry that includes the half bath, and also has a little cubby nook for coats and purses and shoes. Where the kitchen currently is, there will be a built-in banquette. The majority of the kitchen will be in the room that was supposed to be a dining room -- we moved our dining room to the room that was supposed to be the formal living room when we bought the house, because we have another living room and a sun room on that floor, and a fully finished walkout lower level too. Four living room areas is ridiculous. But I digress. We'll be knocking down two walls to do that, one of which is load-bearing, but this will double the size of our kitchen.

And since we're doing all that, we decided to rip out the carpet in the sun room and use the same tile throughout--the sun room currently has white carpet (who DOES that?) which we managed to ruin in six months with our toddler and pets. We're relocating our downstairs hall closet in order to make our entryway more open. And we're blowing out half of the wall enclosing our stairway to the basement, putting a railing and pillar in its place.

Whole thing should take about four months. We have our final site review on Thursday, our final materials review on Friday, and then we're set to start. I'll be documenting the whole thing as we go!