The first remodeling meeting

Our new house is coming up fast! We close three weeks from tomorrow!

I was able to have a meeting inside the house this morning with the remodeling contractor and his "kitchen guy". They looked it over and took measurements and they seem to have a good understanding of what we want. We talked about several options for opening up the space and combining the existing kitchen, sunroom, and family room into one huge room.

They won't know exactly until they take the existing sheetrock off, but they think we may be able to open the space between the sunroom and kitchen with only small pieces of wall at the existing corners, which will tie in well and also hide the discrepancy in wall position and ceiling height (0.5"-1") between the kitchen and sunroom.

Since there are air vents on the floor of the (former) outside wall of the kitchen and the outside wall of the family room, and baseboard heaters in the sunroom, we probably won't need much new ductwork but he said it's possible to do because the sunroom does have a crawlspace. Didn't sound like it was a big deal.

I explained that we needed to reserve enough $$ to replace the HVAC but he seemed to be able to be conscious of our budget and work within that.

We talked about saving money on the countertops and they seemed to agree that using more inexpensive laminate at first would be a good way to save cash for now, with the intention of replacing it 5-10 years down the road.

They also looked over the location for the pantry closet (there's an existing closet stuck in an alcove and I want to enlarge it by walling off the entire alcove) and agreed that would work well as a big storage pantry closet, with an angled door.

All in all, very positive meeting! I think this should work well!

Oh, I also took the contractor guy upstairs to see the attic space and he agreed there was a lot of space there and could make a very nice loft room - just have to re-route the dryer vent. We may want to ask him to work up a rough quote on that space before he's done with our house so we have an idea how much it would cost us down the road to add that room in Phase II sometime in another year or two.

I have some big glossy brochures now to start picking out cabinets. Shopping!! I'm thinking a nice medium honey-oak and cherry-stained hardwood floors. We will probably keep the existing stove which is white and go with white other appliances for the replacements.

I took some more photos, and will start posting them when we get going on the house.