2000: The Diningroom

Thanksgiving came and went. We did have dinner in the new diningroom, but it was not what I had pictured. Though we had electricity, we had no lights. We had one wall that was full of pipes. We had cut holes where the windows would be, but they were covered with plastic. There was no heat.

New diningroom

We also had a problem with the floor. Ours was the kind of garage that was a single step lower than the rest of the house, except for the back of the garage where the laundryroom was, which was the same level as the rest of the house. but the laundryroom was too small to be simply converted into a diningroom. This meant that the slab dropped off in the middle of what would be the diningroom floor.

Diningroom We puzzled over this situation for a good while. We would have to pour enough concrete to fill 33 square feet of slab to a depth of about six inches. I am not sure how many bags of concrete we mixed and poured. A ton, literally, if not more, counting water. It was heavy labor, that's for sure.

When we finished, as luck would have it, the old door from the garage to the kitchen straddled the new change in elevation, right where the new diningrooom wall would tie in. It was time to close off the old kitchen door and break a new archway into the house.

Up to this time, the Mother of All Projects was all going on outside and in the old garage. At least, at the end of the day, we could shut the kitchen door to the garage and forget about it until the next weekend. This was about to change.

According to the domino effect that we had come to know so well, we couldn't close off the kitchen door until we called out the home security guy and got the door de-wired. And we didn't want to do that until we put in a new door leading out to the new garage, so we could get it wired at the same time.

We did all this: installed the new door, had the security rewired, closed in the old door and broke through to the kitchen. We were finally, finally, finally ready to frame in the rest of the diningroom. We started the following week.

Continue: We Build the Diningroom