The project

So you need your house remodeled - where do you start? The white pages is a bit hit and miss, everyone seems to have horror stories of how their contractors have turned their palace into a pigsty, their retreat into wreck or their pride and joy into their pain and anguish.

This blog is to follow the ups and downs of a fairly hefty remodeling of our house.

What we're having done:

• Our very large kitchen completely redone, new cabinets, worktops, some minor structural as well as a spiral staircase put in, leading to..
• a basement room, also large (28'x29'), currently unfinished which we want to turn into a useful play area and which leads to...
• a bizarre, damp, windowless, useless room which we want to turn into a home theater.
• Plus some minor wall work in the main downstairs basement room.

Here are some 'before' shots.


Here is the room below the kitchen, we want to make better use of this space and to be able to access it via the kitchen

And who knows what the purpose of this room is, it may not have one, above it is the screen porch so it gets pretty wet and is always cold.
We're working with a company called Hybrook construction owned by Jamie and Wade, who were recommended by a work colleague.

So how is it going?

• Well the prework has been excellent so far, in particular:
• They always show up on time
• The always have ideas and suggestions, but don't try to dictate.
• They did great research on our behalf with some of the equipment we wanted, such as our extractor fan.
• They are really organised and gave us a calendar for when we need to do things to help us be organised
• They are just really nice guys

We've not had any issues so far, of course the quote is more than we were hoping for, but as the saying goes 'if you pay peanuts'....
They also broke the quote down into about 40 items so we could see what everything cost, they included everything (such as carpet, allowances for handles etc) so we were happy we weren't being ripped off.

The first week they were in the house we were away, so we didn't know what to expect when we returned, and I have to say we were very pleasantly surprised. Here are some photos of the first week's work.




Some of these were taken by Wade and Jamie while we were away so they could email them to us - very nice.


As we'd been away for the first week there were a couple of things they needed to run past us that they had to go with. Most of these were fine but we had an issue with the theater room where the boxing they ran round the top of the room meant we were losing 18 inches from the height of the room just where we wanted the screen to go. We called them up, they came the same day and not only did they agree to fix it, they also designed a platform for the rear of the room to put a sofa and a coffee table. They even worked out how to get rope lighting around the edge of the platform without anyone being able to trip over it -that's pretty typical of their level of enthusiasm for their work.

So far then, very, very good.