This project was huge, and it required so much work that there was no way I could have gotten it done myself. We hired a general contractor to demolish the ceiling, build the new wall, and redo the electrical wiring in the kitchen, while I focused on removing the existing flooring, painting, and installing the light fixtures.
We are lucky to have found a general contractor who really knows what they are doing, subcontracts to talented people, and is willing to work with us on the project scope to meet our budget. If you live in Fort Collins and you are doing a home remodeling project, I highly recommend hiring McHugh Remodeling. We first hired them for our bathroom remodel at our old house, and they seriously outclass the other 2 general contractors we have hired in the past.
They did all of the things in our initial plan as good or better than I could have done them myself. The only regret I have is that we should have had them deal with the permitting process as well, because we were not able to get our permit approved on the tight timeline that they were able to start and it ended up delaying the project a couple weeks. We were kind of abandoned by the civil engineer that we started off working with, so to get a letter verifying that the walls we were demolishing were not structural we called a good friend of ours who asked to not be mentioned since she doesn’t normally do small projects like this. But seriously, thank you so much!
While our contractors were doing all the technically difficult work, I got the ceiling popcorn tested for asbestos (negative) and then de-popcorned, textured, and painted the ceilings in all the bedrooms and living room. I still have to de-popcorn the stairwell, but that’s going to have to be an after-move-in task. Meanwhile, McHugh Remodeling and associates demolished the walls, installed new electrical lines for ceiling lights, installed a new electrical panel, drywalled, textured, and installed the new flooring. It looks amazing.
This post was current about a month ago. The contractors have finished their work, and I’ve been installing cabinets and doing other remodeling stuff since then, but I’ve fallen a bit behind on documenting it.