Crumb! I just realized that I had totally messed up my focus on the “before” pictures and now it’s too late to retake them. 🙁 I’ve been pretty tired lately with this renovation prep and didn’t even notice when I was viewing the pics online on a real screen!! Sorry! Hopefully the pictures can still convey the essence of what I’m describing.
Day 1
At the start of Day 1 all of our stuff was piled up in the living room and garage
The morning had the carpeting being pulled out and then the underlying slab assessed. This is where the additional $1,100 prep came from when we found that the slab bore more resemblance to a Six Flags roller coaster than it does to something one might term as “flat”. 
So, after agreements were made the crew was able to start the prep work which involved a LOT of leveling cement.
Day 2
It was found that the cement was largely too wet to proceed Danyel (I think that’s how you spell his name), the team leader was using this slick device to measure the moisture content in all of the floors. Ideally the moisture needs to be below 4 (percent I believe) and ideally below 2. Many of the patches on the floor were pegging the meter. It went to 6.
So they did some cleanup of the thinner patched portions and did a bunch of grinding but were out of here by about 11 am. I needed leave the furnace on much higher than usual for the rest of the day and overnight to encourage the cement to dry.
One thing I hadn’t thought of was that you really need to disable or remove your smoke detectors before the grinding begins. Ditto for when they start cutting wood later. There is a LOT of fine dust that is generated.
