Category Archives: Renovations

Packing Up

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Sorry I have not been a little more prolific keeping the blog updated. If our life was crazy before, it will be even worse for the next 4-5 months as we renovate our house. We signed the contract with DaVinci and have started on the design specifications. Last week we visited a kitchen and bath store to pick out our kitchen cabinets and talk about the design. Late last week we received the design and now we are working on the small details.

DaVinci wants to start demolition of the basement this week. That means everything has to be removed from the basement and packed up. A longbed dumpster was left in our driveway last Thursday. It is amazing how much junk we’ve accumulated over the last nine years since we moved in. There is a lot of broken things that I’ve just never gotten around to fixing. Lots of stuff I put away because, I’m going to use it again and stuff that is just obsolete. All of that is going in the dumpster.

Meanwhile, the rest of our stuff is being packed up and put in the garage. It is a good thing I worked at the Disney Store off site storage location and learned how to fill up a garage with lots of stuff. It will be a tight fit but I’ll get a lot of it in there. The kids have some tough choices to make as to what to trash, store and keep accessible. But once all of this is done…. we hope it will be worth it. Well back to the packing….

Project Status

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The last week or so has been quite busy. There have been some exciting developments and projects moving along. First, I think we have found the contractor for our home renovation. We’ve interviewed several companies and are in final negotiations with DaVinci Construction & Design. Our project manager is taking us to visit a couple of project sites on Monday night. Should we like what we see, we’re prepared to sign the paper work. Then it will be 4 months of torture.

As I go through the selection process, I can’t help but see the parallels between the renovation industry and the wedding photography business. Being on the other side from attending a home show, to interviewing, and selecting a contractor has been a real eye opening experience. There was one contractor who had a really nice display at the home show, we met with them and then discovered they were disreputable. Another contractor did not offer everything we wanted. Still others were not able to complete the whole project. Does this sound familiar to any of you who have recently looked for a wedding photographer?

On another front, we are getting closer to unveiling my new promotional piece. Over the last week it has really begun to take form. There are still a couple of unanswered questions as to the final content but progress is being made. The most exciting part is my partnership with an book publisher who is providing me with a chapter of a book (the one about selecting a photographer) on disk.

I am also working on another exciting service for my wedding clients. I am trying to setup a way to display some of the images from earlier in the day at the wedding reception. I’ve heard nothing but positive feedback from some other photographers who do this. I have a PC, Monitor and I think the software to pull this off. Now I just have to see if I can do it and how much time it takes. I would hate to be playing with this and miss an important image at the reception. I will attempt to try this service at Jennifer and John’s wedding this upcoming Friday.

Renovations to the House

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With the arrival of Michah last year, our bedroom situation became a little lopsided and unfair. We could move our daughter into the boys room and give the boys her room but some how that seemed to create more problems. No matter how we looked at it, we have three upstairs bedrooms which were all different sizes. Kind of like the three bears, A big room, a medium sized room and a baby sized room. When the kids get bigger, we foresee problems.

Next, our kitchen cabinets are falling apart. The previous owners must have known they were planning to sell the house so all they did was reface the cabinets to make them look nice. But, the shelves were still falling apart. There are other concerns through out the house which we wanted fixed and some things we just didn’t like.

As a result over the last couple of weeks we’ve been interviewing contractors. It seems that we have finally found one who will undertake the project(s) we want done. Part of what we like about these folks is they have already said there is no reason to build over the garage. We can solve our space problems with what we already have. Already they’ve saved us nearly $60,000!

We just have some terms in the contract to fix and make sure the statement of work is what we want. Then once we sign the agreement, we hope to be finished with phase 1 in four months.