Open House

The project started on January 22, 2007. After four months of hard work, we finally presented the results to our friends on Memorial day, May 27, 2007. Our good friend Chen Chen orchestrated a ribbon-cutting ceremony where Daisy and Li-Chin helped alongside! The whole family (including our beloved doggies Panda and Chocolate) enjoyed the moment immensely.

This is the very first house we bought back in 1983. We lived there for 7 years and our children Alex and Christina were born there. The house is located in a nice and quiet neighborhood in Pasadena. It is a ranch style house with 2000 square-foot living space and a big park like backyard. The original layout of the house had three bedrooms, 1 and 3/4 baths, a spacious living room, dining area, and a family room. After we moved out in 1990, our parents lived there for about 10 years. In 2000, we used this old house as office for a while and finally rented it out in 2003.

In the waning winter light of 2006, we finally made up our mind to take the house back, to have it updated a bit. Our tenant moved out on o1/04/2007 and we started to plan for the remodeling project. We first thought about adding another bedroom and a bath, but a satisfactory floor plan was hard to come by, not without making big changes in the existing part of the house. So we gave up on the idea and decided to focus on modernizing the existing house. Here is a list of jobs completed in the project (top 7 items constitute the originnally planned scope):

• An expanded kitchen with new cabinets and appliances, and a new breakfast area (taking space from the original laundry room)
• 2 new full bathrooms
• New copper pipes for the entire house
• New vinyl windows (except for the sliding doors in the family room)
• A master suite with a French door open to the back yard
• New garage door
• Laundry hookups in garage
• New wood floor throughout
• New steps outside the master bedroom French door
• Uneven patio floor repair in the back
• New interior and exterior paint
• New window covering

The project took about 4 months and cost around $50K (25% over the $40K budget). Major items (the top 7 above) were done by April 30th, that was 3 months after the start date and 3-4 weeks delayed. What might be interesting about this project was that Daddy jumped in and did some of the work himself. He worked early in the morning before he went to work, late at night, and over the weekends. He visited Home Depot at 6AM most days and came home covered with dust at the end of the day. He lost more than 10 pounds for doing manual labor work and a lot of sleep along the way.

Daddy has done other house projects in the past, this one is probably the hardest by far. As he put it, many mistakes made and some lessons learned. So we're starting this blog to share our experience with our friends who might consider doing remodeling themselves in the future.