Respirator day. Insulation was raining down.
Soffit gone. Kitchen at 95% demo.
Backyard at night. Wood pile cleared, patio visible again.
Blog / House
January 8, 2026
Finished the demo on that weird soffit in the kitchen. It's finally gone. Between the dropped ceiling and this thing, the kitchen is starting to feel like an actual room instead of a claustrophobic box.
The catch: quite a bit of insulation was dropping from the ceiling during the work. Full respirator day. The kind where you look like you're about to defuse a bomb but you're actually just prying out drywall.
That giant wood pile on the back patio? Basically gone. All moved into dumpster six from yesterday. Feels good to see concrete again.
Respirator day. Insulation was raining down.
Soffit gone. Kitchen at 95% demo.
Backyard at night. Wood pile cleared, patio visible again.
We're at 95% now. The final 5%:
After that, we're done tearing things apart and start putting it all back together. Two months until move-in. Let's go.
Emma met with the IKEA design team for kitchen cabinets. We went over a lot of details together, created a Pinterest board for what we want, and we're planning to go to IKEA this weekend to finalize things.
Taking tomorrow off. Some stuff to handle in the morning, but should get solid progress this weekend. Hoping to fill up this last dumpster.
Still on Walter Isaacson's Einstein biography. Today something clicked that I've been struggling to understand: the theory of relativity.
The core idea is that time is relative to the observer. To you, time always feels the same. But when you factor in accelerated speed or increased gravity, time literally warps. If you're moving close to the speed of light or on a planet with much higher gravity than Earth, time slows down for you - even though it doesn't feel that way.
Compare clocks after a year: one on Earth, one on a high-gravity planet. They'd show different times. Both observers would feel like time passed normally, but the measurements would be wildly different.
Hard concept to fully grasp, but it's starting to make sense. Fascinating guy.
Big shoutout to Spencer Ford for buying me a coffee through the Venmo link. Grabbed one from Chick-fil-A and it genuinely motivated a productive day.
Spencer just had a kid - super proud to be his friend. He's also the one who helped me get into this house in the first place (thanks for the headache, Spenny). Love you man.
Spencer's a five-star realtor and has real home remodel experience - flipped a couple homes himself and done a lot of the work hands-on. Adding him to the team roster.
Also: built some cool bidding software at work today. Really excited about where that's going.