I think I'm obsessed with wood grain...

Since I didn't do a post last month, I thought I would go ahead and do it now and then big you this months post in the next couple days or so. As per my usual excuse, we have been super busy and things get chaotic, one thing leads to another and I forget to post about the progress of the house. I thought that by this time I would be able to help more on the house but baby duties call and I only get to go over to help for a couple hours at a time. 

I have however been able to complete a project of mine which was to create a wood wall out of pallets. I wish I could have taken pictures of the process. Basically, we cut the boards apart from about 5 pallets with a sawzall (because trying to pry them apart would break the boards). Then I would go through the stack of boards and find a couple that were the same width and nail them in a horizontal pattern to the studs. I continued to do this while staggering the boards all the way up the wall. All in all I think the wall turned out beautifully. I have seen similar walls that people have done which were stained but I like the rustic barn wood look so I just left them the way they were.

After my wall was complete my husband and his mother got started on the tile flooring. We decided to go with a wood grain print and lay them in a herringbone style. Below you can see my husband is the process of mudding the tiles to the floor.

From this project of remodeling the house, I have concluded that I am completely obsessed with wood grain. I have it on my walls, on my floors, and on my ceilings. We did manage to find a ceiling fan that looks like a wood log with blades coming out of it which went with our theme. Below is a picture of the finished living room with the walls and the floors completely done (although you can't see the tile floors in their full glory due to the dirt and dust covering them).

Remember that old dark kitchen we started out with?

Well we finally got the cabinets painted white to bright up that dark gloomy place! And we just installed them not to long ago.

We were going to add granite countertops but our budget wasn't allowing us to do so and since I love wood we decided to go with butcher block. Now my husband is bent on making everything himself so he took on the challenge of building the countertops. According to him it wasn't difficult at all. He took a couple 2x4s, cut them in half, and glued and nailed them together in a staggered pattern. Once the boards were dry he cut the countertops to size, gave them a good sanding, stained them to my specifications, and voila! I am very pleased with the outcome of them. I think they are extremely gorgeous.

If you are wondering what that thing is in the cabinet in the picture below, it's a vibrating chair that we put my son in when he comes with me to work on the house to keep him occupied and happy.

The next post will hopefully be a virtual tour of the finished house. I am so excited that all of this hard work will finally come to a close and we will be able to move into our "new" home. Until next time...

Steffane B.

Sheetrock...&more sheetrock

January 9, 2013 our little baby boy was born. I think this gave my husband more motivation to finish the house because ever since we got back it has been non stop work on the house for him. He has been working on a number of things (much of which I couldn't take pictures of because I was at the rental taking care of our new baby boy). 

The plumbing in the bathroom had to be redone because we decided to move the bathtub, toilet, and sink into more logical spots. So my husband had to cut out the subfloor, figure out the direction the pipes run, take the metal pipes out and replace them into their new positions with PVC. He had also been working on the laundry room plumbing as well (just mainly running it to where it needed to go because there wasn't a laundry room in the house to begin with). And then the sheet rock...

Almost everything in the house has been covered with sheetrock. The laundry room is done minus the installation of the sink:

Below is a picture of what you see when you first walk in through our front door (click the picture to enlarge). To the left is our dining room and the middle/right side of the picture will be our living room. The wall on the very right that doesn't have sheetrock on it will actually end up have vertical boards on it which will end up being the back part of our built in entertainment center.

Below is a picture of what our kitchen is looking like at this exact moment. Still no finished shelving yet, but all in good time. To the very right of the picture, you can sneak a peak into the wide open hallway with the bathroom and the small hallway which leads to the laundry room and "man cave" (for now...) :

I tried to do a small panoramic of the bathroom to show you the haps but the sun was shining in through the window and put a glare on the lights the hubs just installed:

The only room that has any mud on the sheetrock is baby boy's room:

And...that's pretty much it for now. I'm sure the next couple of posts are going to be kind of boring due to all of the sheetrocking and soon we will start tiling the entire downstairs. Until next time...

SteffaneB

Back to work

Wow, it has been a crazy last month and a half. Between dealing with pregnant women drama (referring to myself of course) and family festivities for the holidays, my husband got into a bad 4wheeler accident and ended up breaking his scapula and humorous. This accident gave him 4 metal plates and 3 months out of work. We just started back working at the house because he is getting stir crazy sitting at the rental doing nothing (and honestly, I can't keep him captive at home for too long). So now that you know my excuse for not posting as often as I should have let's get this thing started.

My husband finished putting up all of the beams against the concrete walls in the house so that we could finally start sheet rocking. Below is a picture of the northwestern corner of our living room, on the right is the boards screwed to the wall and on the left is a wall I built to go in between the living room and kitchen/breakfast nook area.

Then once all the wood was up on the concrete, we realized we still needed to knock out this load bearing wall to open up the dining room into the living room. So below is a picture of the wall before...

This is a picture of the wall being taken down (you can still see a little bit of it on the left) and the beam to hold up the weight of the upstairs in the bottom right of the picture.

After some hard work we finally got the beam into place and was able to put the vertical beams up underneath it (might I remind you that my husband had only one working arm, I was 37 weeks pregnant, and my brother-in-law was out of town for a week).

And then FINALLY! we were able to put up some sheetrock. First we put up the ceiling sheetrock because it makes a better seam when you mud. We decided to go with a 5/8" thick sheetrock to add some insulation and sound barrier. Just a little tip for those of you who might we redoing a house now or in the near future, if you are going to hang sheetrock on the ceiling invest in a sheetrock hoist. We got one off of amazon.com for $150 and it was well worth the money and lack of headaches. (Below is the sheet-rocked livingroom)

And then to the south of the living room (our dining room) was beautifully sheetrocked as well.

I attempted to take a panoramic picture of the living room/ dining room/ foyer area to give you a better visual. So to the left is the living room with the three windows and front door being on one wall. To the right is the dining room and a visual of our currently exposed staircase.

Before we started sheetrocking the bedrooms, we decided to put up insulation on the walls and ceiling due to the cold concrete and terrible north winds. The insulation we used looked like something that belonged on the space station but it is supposed to be an awesome insulator and the upside for us was that it was thin and could fit nicely on our jacked-up ceilings.

The last thing we attempted today was installing our ductless units for A/C and heating. They aren't the prettiest thing in the world but they are a lot nicer looking than extremely low ceilings for duct work. Your probably wondering why there is no sheet rock in the room below but that is due to us still currently working on hanging the sheetrock onto the ceilings in the bedrooms.

Well until next time folks. Hopefully it won't be as long as it has been this past time for me to post an update but you never can tell since we have a baby on the way (DUE NEXT WEEK!).


-Steffane B