Contini's are remodeling!

 Anyone who has driven by the Contini house in the last 6 weeks knows we have something big going on right now.  We have finally started the final remodel on our house!  This is the big one, bigger than the kitchen 3 years ago.  Basically we are adding on to the existing upstairs- over 400 square feet for a master bedroom/bathroom/walk in closet.  Woo hoo!

The first month has been foundation work.  What does that mean?  A lot of drilling, buzzing, cutting into cement, and shit load of dirt on EVERYTHING.

 It has been traumatic for our cat Bochy who runs and hides under our bedspread the moment the hears the workers, refusing to come out.  I swear whenever he hears spanish this is what we will find.  Thankfully my kids are well past the Dora the Explorer phase.

 Pablo on the other hand loves it!  He has way more access to the outside now, and likes to stick his nose  wherever the workers are.

A lot of the outside of our house looks like the picture above.  Stripped to the bones so the reinforcement can happen.

As you can sort of see in the above picture, our roof as also been removed.  It will be off for the next month.  No roof (and our air conditioner has also been disconnected) made for a good time the last few days when the temperatures in Almaden were 95- 100.  Crossing our fingers there are no more heat waves for the next month (yeah right, like that is going to happen!).  Also no rain please!

Does anyone recognize the can above?  One of the workers found it sealed in the wall of the house- the outside wall that is pictured right above the can.  These houses were built around 1969- 1970 so that can is roughly 45 years old.  Very cool!  It also explains the ever so slight downslope felt upstairs...

 See those arches in the picture above?

Now they are gone!  We have always hated those arches so we had them taken out--the house is still standing so all is good.

We have noticed so many people stopping in front of our house and just staring at it (I am sure wondering what the hell is going on here?  Someone asked our neighbor if there had been a house fire.  Yes, it looks that crazy!)  So what did Pete do?  He put the above board in front of our house, with pictures of our plans.  I have now seen cars slow down to look at it.  He also posted a copy of the letter from our neighborhood association approving said plans, just in case anyone had a complaint about it.

Even some of the walls inside the house are destroyed--the above picture is in the kid's rec room.

And now there is scaffolding wrapped around most of the house.  So much for backyard parties this summer!

What other inconveniences have we had to live with?  As I mentioned, the air conditioner has been disconnected for a few weeks.  When they removed the roof, we also had to remove the solar panels for our pool, so our pool isn't as warm as we are used to.  While they were retrofitting there was a horrible amount of dust everywhere.  In fact, when they removed the stucco off that back wall they forgot to close our bedroom window (which is the one you can see up above).  I came home that night to a quarter inch of dirt covering everything in our room.  I wanted to cry!  We are all 6 sharing 1 bathroom--thank goodness I have 4 boys and not 4 girls! (although girls don't pee on the toilet seat.  Hmmm... Maybe 4 girls would have been better.)  We have had to get used to having a crew of workers at our house all day.  I learned the hard way that when they are on the roof they can see right into our upstairs bathroom.  Yep, got out of the shower one day when they were all up on the roof, right outside the window.  Lesson learned.

If I sit in any pee on the toilet seat I am kicking the kids outside to this bathroom!

Those are all first world problems for sure though-- it will all be worth it when it is done!