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

Still no sheetrock...

I left you guys a little over 2 weeks ago knowing that the front door was being moved and cabinets were being worked on, so now for an update. To start off this update I want to let everyone know that we have been working nonstop to get this house closer to the finish line. Which I'm sure you can guess is pulling me away from having time to write posts so over the next couple weeks or so you are going to have to bear with me on the frequency of the updates.

Anywho, the front door we purchased was installed and the old door opening was blocked in and fitted with a window. Below is a picture of the new door installed and on the right is the old doorways I showed you guys 2 weeks ago.

So after every door and window was finally in it's place, my husband got back to work on creating the floating walls all through out the house. If you don't remember how or why this was done way back when, basically it's because the whole entire house is made out of concrete block. Because of this, we can't easily put in outlets wherever we want nor hang pictures whenever we want. The floating walls are created by nailing a 2x4 (width wise) onto the concrete wall and then (after wiring of course) nailing sheet rock onto the 2x4s. Below is some of my husbands progress in the baby's room.

Here is another picture of my hubby working on the floating walls/window trim.

During this time, my brother-in-law was working on pulling up that darn tar tile and was able to in a matter of 3 hours for a 10' x 10' room which is all the tar tile in the downstairs minus two bedrooms.

While they were working on these projects I was busy trying to fix/rebuild/paint the old kitchen cabinets. I'll be posting a "how-to" on the cabinets once I'm finished so I didn't want to post any pictures of them until they are completely finished.

-SteffaneB

Rushing to finish

As of today I am 29 weeks pregnant and I didn't feel like my husband was understanding how much time he REALLY had. So I sat him down and explained that today I would be 29 weeks pregnant which means that next week I will be 30 weeks pregnant which mean we have about 10 weeks left until the baby arrives. Although most people would be get excited at this point we both got really nervous because that means we have less than 10 weeks to finish the house to meet our goal of moving in before the baby comes. YIKES! So along with trying to hurry and finish the house, I decided to go ahead and turn our current guest room (in the house we rent) into a nursery for a "just in case" precaution.

While we were worrying about how much time we had left, my mother-in-law was furiously working on our tar covered floors. On the picture below on the left you can see the black tar all over the concrete floors and the picture below on the right is the finished product. My mother-in-law soaked the whole floor in paint thinner which turned the tar in a gooey slurry. She was then able to scrape it up off the floor. To get any left overs she sprinkled sand over the floor to absorb the left over residue. The floor in the main part of the kitchen in the picture on the right looks like it is still covered in tar but it really isn't, that's just from the water left on the floor because she washed the floors when she was finished scraping up the sand.

This weekend my husband decided it would be a good time to get the roof completed so that we could start putting in sheet rock and not have to worry about water leaking in if it rained. He and his brother got started tearing the old shingle roll off the roof early in the morning. Of course at least one piece of plywood had to be replaced so that was done before laying down roofing paper and then installing the painted tin we bought a couple weeks ago. Below on the right you can see my husband installing the tin.

I tried to take some pictures of them working on the roof, so that is what you can see below. Although this is a very laborious project my husband and brother-in-law were able to finish the lean-to part of the house just on SATURDAY! Yay for some light at the end of the tunnel! The wood you see on the edge of the roof in the picture below on the right will later be taken off to be flush with the tin roof. For some reason when the roof was built (a long time ago) they made the over hang something like 3ft! Ridiculous! So we are fixing it and making it a standard length later.

The next day, Sunday, they got started on the first story roof (why they did this last I'm not sure). I didn't get any pictures but we decided to take down the chimney just off the top of the roof because we can't use the chimney anyway (it's just a decorative element on the inside). So below is two pictures of the boys taking the old tin off the roof.

Because this part of the roof was larger than the bottom story lean-to roof, it took a little longer. They got done as much as they could, and if the sun would have stayed up an hour longer, they could have finished.

At least now we can start sheet rocking next week and see the walls come to life.

Steffane B

Still working on walls and the kitchen

I want to apologize in advanced because this post will be a little long. We have been working nonstop on the house trying to get it ready for when our baby is born in January. So let's get to it...

If you remember from two posts ago, I had pulled out the cabinets and rearranged them. Well then we found 2 old exterior door openings (which now open into Bedroom 3). I've posted a picture of the house layout again so you can have something to refer to so you know what exactly you are looking at and then below that is a picture of the door openings exposed.

So the next step for the door openings was to be blocked in to match the rest of the concrete walls, but because I needed a new outlet for the oven (the one that was there was extremely dangerous, frayed, tube wiring) and outlets for the counter and Freezer that will go in the corner. I forgot to take a picture of what the door openings looked like with sheetrock in them but you get the point.

I hadn't totally taken out the all the cabinets so I had to finish doing that. The uppers were the only thing left. They were kind of though due to them being nailed into the concrete walls but with the help of my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law we were able to get them off.

You can see in the picture above that we found another door opening (on the left, covered in plywood). Obviously we won't be using this door opening either because it opens into the stairway which is our door opening for the master bedroom.

The only cabinets we kept on the East side of the kitchen were one set of lowers. You can see in the picture below that my mother-in-law moved the stove into the kitchen. We were just checking out our options but me and my husband decided we would keep the layout of the house the way we had it, so in that corner will eventually be my pantry.

This next part makes me so sad because these floors are going to be the death of me. In the kitchen, and basically every bedroom, is this old tile that was glued down with tar. TAR! This stuff is not easy to take off. We first tried with a floor scrapper which consists of a razor on a pole but then it started to get really hard to get off. We're thinking it was because of high traffic areas. My brother-in-law ended up taking over, his muscles are a little bit bigger than mine. He worked for about an hour and a half and got most of it off the floor but if you look in the pictures below you can see that there is tar still on the floor. If anyone has any idea on how to get this stuff up please let me know. The more I researched it the more I found out that it has to come up because we will not be able tile on top of it.

Anyway, I'll step away from that sore subject and show you guys progress on the walls. So the first room I want to show you guys is Bedroom 3, the baby's room. The closet isn't up in it yet but will be up later.

The room to the North of the nursery, if you are still referring to the layout picture I posted at the beginning, is the bathroom. Below is a picture of what it looks like right now. It doesn't have the wall built for the bathtub or the wall for the door, that will also be worked on soon.

I tried to take an angled picture in the kitchen so you can see the bathroom in the left hand side, Bedroom 2 kinda towards the left center (there's a wall in the way of the view of the bedroom), and then the entrance to the hallway that goes to the laundry room and Bedroom 1 on the right.

 So that's it for now, hope I didn't take too long trying to explain our progress. Let me know what you think.


SteffaneB

Building the Walls for the Northside

So lately I have had to stop working on the house due to filling in for work at a dental office but the boys stayed with it. They decided it was tim to start putting up walls. Oh my goodness how excited I was. To finally see the downstairs coming together has been amazing. Below I have put up a picture of what the house's layout will be eventually. What the boys have been working on is the right side of the picture (containing the laundry room, Bedroom 1 & 2, and the closets).

Scroll up to this picture as a reference when looking at the pictures below.

Bedroom 1 was the first to be built. Funny story, I came into the house to see what my husband was working on and he was putting up the wall in Bedroom 1 for the closet, the only thing was he didn't make a space for the doors. Thank goodness he hadn't nailed it in yet and was able to slide the wall over 2'6" to be the wall separating the laundry room from Bedroom 1's closet. The other wall that is closest in the picture below is the wall separating the laundry room from Bedroom 2's closet.

The picture below will show you how the laundry room was taking shape just after 2 walls were built. The walls may look crooked but it's just the angle of my camera. The window that is in the room now will later become an exterior door so that we can also use this space as a small mud room.

Then it was time to build the frame and the wall for the closet doors and entrance. Below the closet entrance for Bedroom 2 is shown as the wall closest in the picture (they put a 2x4 in the entrance to hold it until they had secured the wall into the ceiling joist and the concrete floor).

If you are still referencing back to the picture of the floor plan the wall separating the bathroom from Bedroom 2 is already up. I just didn't get around to taking a picture of it. Also the hallway for the laundry room and Bedroom 1 is finished. There will be more pictures in my next post of the walls being built.

Steffane B