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At 6:15 this morning, I was standing in front of the refridgerator packing its contents into three big ice chests. Last night, I worked at transitioning the last bits of my kitchen, bathroom and service porch/laundry room into either storage or temporary facilities.
Over the weekend, I outfitted my "formal" dining room with a galley kitchen - without the sink and oven. I'll get a photo when I can be in there in natural light. I made a little dinner tonight and it was like taking your new camper on a test trip. So far I've found everything I needed. But I had to retrieve from shallow storage a bucket for waste water. That wasn't so bad.
At 6:30 a.m., Justin, the contractor, and Nathan, the foreman, and a couple of guys and a couple of women arrived in company t-shirts and jeans and hit it. Forty-five minutes later, they had moved the refridgerator and I was putting the ice chests away in the garage. They had also ripped out most of the cabinetry, the moldings and some of the windows and had started beating up the walls with sledgehammers. The toilet was disassembeled on a tarp on the patio. The washer/dryer was re-situated out there, too.
But wait, one of the first things they did was seriously seal off the construction site from the living quarters. When I got home tonight it was clean and once I put some collected leftover items away, I was ready to assemble and eat dinner.
John documented the demolition activity. The lead photo above is the stranded kitchen faucet; ceramic tiles, formica counter, stainless steel sink are all gone. Below, Nathan and one of the guys knock down half of the lovely arch between breakfast nook and kitchen. That arch and the coved ceiling had to go to make breathing room in the new kitchen.
There will be NO laments for that pink tile. It is out of here. 
We decided over the weekend that the front closet needed to be re-habbed. From the closet (which is under the stairs), you can see through the old kitchen to the breakfast nook. The bright light in the back is the front window, from which the window frame and glass were removed to evacuate all the debris.
This is looking through the front window, through the breakfast nook and the old kitchen to the service porch and my red back door.
I love this crew. They are punctual, really courteous, efficient, clean and they smelled good (at least at the beginning of the day). The weather today started off with a nice marine layer and the threat of rain (there is a hurricane trying to make it to Baja). It turned hot and humid, though. And the air quality has been very bad because of the fires (Station and his cousins) in the San Gabriels.
There will be more demolition tomorrow - the plumbing, electrical materials and the old bathroom tile floor await.
So far, so good, on the dry rot, water damage and insect activities fronts. John and I are cautiously optimistic. The removal of the shower pan lies ahead.
