19  Demolition

February 2025

With us moved out, construction on our project has finally begun! And what that really means is tearing down the walls and ceilings in our kitchen, hallways, bedroom, den, and foyer.

Just to give you a sense of what this looks like, here are some before and after photos of our kitchen.

Our kitchen before demolition

Our kitchen after demolition

Although we’ve lived here for the past 22 years, we really didn’t quite know how the house worked under the covers. We’re now getting a better idea of that.

As we wandered through the house today, every room gave us new perspectives. For example, we never felt like one of our son’s bedrooms overlooked my old office space, yet with the walls down, it obviously does.

With the walls down, we get a better look at the bones of our house. And we made some interesting discoveries, such as this coffee cup left inside a wall for us by prior builders.

But in addition to finding long-abandoned coffee cups, this phase of the project has demolished more than our walls. Somehow in my construction naïveté, I had always imagined that our renovation would have several different teams working on different parts of the project all at once. For example, I thought one group might rework the kitchen while another might simultaneously be building out our new bedroom balcony.

But of course, that’s not how it works at all. It’s really more like the batch processing mainframes of yesterday: for most of the project, one task takes place at a time. So now we’re in the demolition phase, and once that gets done, we start on framing.

Paying by the milestone

The final version of our design-build contract proposed a schedule that looks like this:

The tasks specified by the contract fall into the following phases. The completion of a phase constitutes a milestone, and that triggers a contractually obligated payment. The phases and payments work out as follows:

Schedule and Payments

Phase	Description	Estimated Completion	Payment Due
0	Initial Deposit	Contract signing	24%
1	Demolition Substantially Complete	February 28, 2025	14%
2	Framing Substantially Complete	April 14, 2025	16%
3	Electric and Plumbing Rough-in Substantially Complete	May 2, 2025	13%
4	Blueboard & Plaster Substantially Complete	June 4, 2025	14%
5	Interior Trim and Flooring Substantially Complete	July 22,2025	4%
6	Cabinetry Substantially Complete	August 22,2025	5%
7	Painting Substantially Complete	September 8, 2025	4%
8	Mechanicals Substantially Complete	September 26, 2025	5%
E	Substantial Completion Achieved-Final Building Dept. Sign-off	October 24, 2025	5%
F	Punch List Complete	November 14, 2025	1%

If we plot cumulative payments on the project versus the amounts remaining to pay over time, the schedule looks like this:

When I view this graph, I observe that the project plan:

• Front loads many costs. Our initial deposit for the project is roughly a quarter of the total project cost. This isn’t really surprising. Gilmore has to put down deposits on high-cost items like the elevator, and we need to order all the appliances, cabinets, and framing materials.
• Requires payment for three-fourths of the project by summer. Assuming no schedule delays, we’ll have paid for more than 75% of the project by early June.
• Has a long tail of completion. Despite the above, the last 25% of the project will extend 5 months past that June milestone to mid-November.

All these front-loaded payments have me eager to get our line of credit in place, which will allow us to spread out those cash payments through the beginning of 2026 instead of requiring me to make huge withdrawals from my IRA early this year.

But with demolition expected to be complete this month, our die is now truly cast. Half of our house now has no walls, so if we are ever going to live here again, we have to put them back up again!