Irwin Weiner ASID - The ground has now frozen hard and is sometimes getting dusted with snow outside our country house in rural Pennsylvania. We're now approaching Week 6 on the project, and demolition has been completed on the walls and floors of our kitchen, back entry area (which has served as our laundry room and catch-all storage area with large old-fashioned potato bins), and a small powder room. Our contractor and his son and step-son banged and pried and pulled and hauled away at surfaces to take off the new and bring it down to the bare bones.

It's exciting to see the layers of old brick veneer taken off the kitchen wall, discover old boarded-up windows, and see the rough electrical and rough plumbing put into and through the walls. In these two videos, you'll see the progress we've made. As I write this, we've had an approved inspection of the rough electric and are awaiting both the township's construction permit (oops!) and the inspection and approval of the rough plumbing. We're trying to push this through as quickly as possible for practical reasons: we want the walls packed with insulation and covered over with new sheetrock to provide more insulation so the new pipes don't burst with our increasingly colder winter days ... and we want all our new double-pane windows installed for the same insulation purposes. Right now we're heating the space and the warmth is seeping outside like a sieve. Oh, and we'd like our kitchen back, thank you very much! It looks like we may go well into February or early March (so much for our original 6-week job completion estimate - but readers of Design2Share posts know that we always advise that these estimates get padded considerably as reality gets in the way of ideal timetables, right?).