Welcome back to the fourth installment of Kitchen Reno Week! If you missed my updates earlier this week, you can check out our weekend prep, Day 1, and Day 2!

When I left you yesterday morning, the kitchen looked like this and we were hoping for a successful building inspection by the City:

I was thrilled to get a text from Sam around 11:30am that the inspection was a success! I was pretty confident because our contractors are awesome, but you just never know. With that underway, they got back to work and at the end of Day 3 when I got home from work it was looking like this:

Um, omg. It’s like a real room. A real single room.

As you can tell, once the inspection happened the rest of the day was dedicated to putting up sheetrock. Or “rock,” as the pros call it (I am not a pro). Sam snapped a few photos:

Below you can see how they perfectly cut a piece to fit with the jagged edges on the left side of the photo above:

And you can see all the screws they use to attach the sheetrock to the underlying structure.

I thought Day 2 was a huge change, but it’s hard to believe how far it’s come yet again! These pictures really show how much light we’re bringing into the rest of the house. You can see how light the sunroom is compared to the rest of the kitchen — these photos are right before sunset when light is just streaming into the windows on the right side of the sunroom (in the photo below), where there are no kitchen windows. It creates such a nice warm glow, and I’m so excited we’ll be able to enjoy that more in the main part of the house.

Even though the bulk of the work has been completed, the mudding and spackle portion can still take awhile because it requires multiple coats with sanding and dry time. The hope is that what they put on yesterday will be dry today for sanding and then that they can apply a second coat and hopefully be ready to sand again tomorrow morning on their final day. Today I’m working from home, but I’m in non-stop meetings from 9:30am – 4:30pm so I’m not sure how many photos I’ll be able to snap. (One thing I love about my job is that it’s pretty easy to work remotely when needed, even on days with a lot of meetings.)

It’s hard to believe it, but we’re nearing the end of this project! Of course it will leave us with a TON more work to do to get this kitchen to a “final” state, but it’s such a huge step.

Happy Wednesday! As you know, it’s Kitchen Renovation Week on Plaster & Disaster, where every morning I’m popping in to share a quick update on the progress in our kitchen as we have the wall between the kitchen and sunroom removed. Yesterday was Day 2 (check out Day 1 if you’re behind), and we started the day with the demo mostly done.

And at the end of Day 2, here’s how it’s looking:

Woohoo!

The task for Day 2 was to rough frame the new header and posts that will support this wall, enabling the old framing to be removed. The goal was to finish that up so that the building inspector can come this morning and hopefully sign off on everything before it gets finished and sheetrocked over.

We purchased our engineered hardwood from Barker Lumber in Woburn, MA, and had it delivered to the house on Day 1 so we were ready to go. I’ll do a final update on costs once all is said and done, but the lumber cost about $450 for the header and posts. Engineered hardwood is more expensive than what we could have gotten, but not tremendously more so and it’s what the engineer called for so that’s what we needed to go with for inspection purposes.

Unfortunately I had to head off to the office before the reno work started for the day, but Sam stayed home and I made him promise to take lots of photos. Here’s what he captured.

A big part of the day was getting the posts and beams into place, which required supporting the roof/second floor temporarily while they removed the old headers and posts to make room for the new. The light wood in the photo below is totally temporary to support the roof in conjunction with the jack posts (the tall black things).

Here you can see the first beam in place (the piece of wood that stops 1/4 of the way from the left of the photo):

And here’s the first center post in place:

And now both center posts and beams in place. You can see what I was talking about yesterday in terms of using two beams, one shallower than the other to allow for higher clearance where the pass through will be.

They also fixed the plumbing issue I mentioned yesterday.

So now the plumbing snakes back into the cabinet and around the new post:

The electrical is all set now too, taking advantage of the center posts (which will look like a single column when they put the sheetrock over it).

Since we are getting new counters, we may add a little length so that the counter comes exactly to the edge of the column, and build a little extra cabinet compartment on the end or something. Extra counter space is always valuable!

Here it is from the sunroom side:

The difference yesterday was huge, but now it’s so much easier to visualize how it’s going to look — and it’s amazing. It totally changes the light and feel of the space. I love the view from the sink into the “other” room. I’ll be adding a counter to this so that we can put stools on the other side and have a breakfast bar.

And the cats are hanging in there, though each evening Murphy is way too curious for his own good. Here he is trying to crawl into a hole in the basement:

And playing with power tools:

Here’s hoping the inspection later this morning goes okay! And I’ll be back tomorrow morning to share an update on today’s progress.