Enter: The Foyer

Before we move into the foyer work, let me just catch you up real quick on the progress upstairs. With the upstairs flooring done (remember that?), we were able to move into our own bedroom and sleep in our own bed! We finished up the guest room for anyone brave enough to visit during the “Pardon Our Dust” period. And we created a proper office space for Warren and I to run our businesses from (because we did have to make time to make money throughout this renovation chaos)!

Time Flies

At this point in the renovation, it is April, 2016. Hard to believe that it has been almost 3 1/2 years as I write this post. We are now living in a fully renovated home and every time I jump back into flashback mode for these posts, I’m amazed that we made it through so much work! But at the same time, it makes me love our home that much more!

Welcome to the Foyer (Foy-Yay)!

Okay, now we can head back into the foyer. Mind you, at this point there is still wallpaper to come down in this space as well as several other rooms throughout the house. The original wood flooring within the foyer still needed to be pulled up to make way for the new flooring (you can revisit that decision in this post). And there was the little issue with figuring out how to create an appropriate entryway.

Enter: Brandyn

During this time, our son Brandyn had begun flying in from Texas now and then to lend us a hand with the renovation (we diligently watched for cheap tickets and he even got to bring along our youngest grand kiddo a couple of times since she was still flying for free!) It was great to have another set of hands for several projects and a little grand-kiddo-fix was a nice pick-me-up for Warren and I during the throes of the renovation.

Why Can’t Anything Be Even?

Yeah so let’s talk about the entryway into the foyer since this is where we’d have to actually change some of the footprint to make it work. You see, just like so many other areas in the house, the entryway was also asymmetrical. The walls on either side of the front double front doors were two different depths! Why???? Did the kitchen cabinet guy do these walls too? Why can’t anything line up? Sorry, I digress…

Anyhow, we really wanted to create a tiled entryway since we live where we actually have weather. Remember that we moved to Colorado from the Southern California desert where we had only 2 seasons: “hot” and “not hot” and neither season offered much in the way of precipitation! A tiled space at the entry was most definitely desirable for catching water, snow, and mud from our dirt driveway! Given the wonky wall depths, we had no way of creating a symmetrical space to tile. I wish we had gotten a good picture of the “off” that was this entry area but alas, we missed that shot!

Warren (and Brandyn) to the Rescue… Again!

So we (well not me) did what we had to do and Warren evened up the walls on both sides of the front doors. He built one side out to match the depth of the other and voila! We now had a space to install tile for the entryway. I’ll share that process in a future post when we talk about the downstairs flooring.

Just When You Think You’re Making Progress

You know what’s really sad? It’s that time when you returned from dropping your young, fit, and really helpful son off at the airport after one of his visits, only to find a really big unplanned project (okay, a couple of unplanned projects) waiting for you. Stay tuned; more fun coming!

Blessings,
Shelley

P.S. Did you see her? The house’s namesake, Annabelle, is the newel post light that we just had to keep. Her name is a play on my maiden name along with a reference to the Victorian Queen Anne style of the home. She’s so quirky but couldn’t imagine the house without her!