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

Baby Room Walls and Exterior Doors

Because the roof was finally finished, I was getting a little excited and got ahead of myself with what we were going to work on next. I know in my last post I said we would be able to work on sheet rock but I totally forgot about us having to move windows and doors and also building exterior walls in the baby's room. 

So with the finishing of the roof, my husband and his brother got to work taking out the gigantic, over the top windows that took up the whole wall. They came out pretty easily but the exterior door that was in the room was another story.

If you look in the picture below, you can see an exterior door on the right hand side. That door obviously had to go. We couldn't have an exterior door in a baby's room! So Matthew took the door off the hinges and began taking out the door frame. One side wouldn't come out very easily however. So Matthew began beating on the frame with a hammer to get it out, little did he know that it was liquid nailed to a 4x4 that was bolted into the exterior concrete wall. With every hit of his hammer a crack went into the stucco on the outside of the exterior wall. Thank goodness my mother-in-law was outside and saw the damage Matthew was doing and yelled for him to stop. He ended up being able to get the frame off with a hatchet so he began to block in the empty space.

They worked up until 9pm to get as much done as they possibly could so that we didn't have a huge gaping hole in the wall but they could only finish so much and sadly we left the house with only half finished. But the next day was a new day and the boys began finishing what they had began the day before. Below is a picture of what one of the windows looked like before we began ripping them out. 

And here is another picture of the building in process below. The window in on the right hand side of the picture was put in backwards if you were wondering because the boys just wanted something there to block the wind. The day they were working on the house we had a cold front come in and boy was it cold!

And the picture below here is of the walls pretty much finished. Of course now both windows are now in backwards but will hopefully be dealt with today.

 Meanwhile, when Matthew didn't have the help of his brother he was working on installing exterior doors/cutting out a space for them. If you remember in the laundry room the window that was previously there, we decided it needed to become an exterior door.

So the window came out and a hole was cut for the new door to go in.

Not only did we need to do this in the laundry room but also in the living room at the front entrance. The window that was beside the front door as for some reason wider than the front door (which only measured something ridiculous like 30" or 32" when it needs to be at least 36"). So Matthew cut the window out into a doorway.

Here's a picture of my beautiful front door that we were able to get on clearance!

 Matthew wasn't able to finish the front door because he ended up having to pour concrete. While the boys were busy doing their thing, I decided I could work on some "small" projects. I tried to rebuild the cabinets and was successful with the cabinet in the the back of the picture below (minus my crocked cuts). I wasn't very successful on the cabinet in the front of the picture however. You can see the space on the top of the cabinet that is supposed to be flush with the front of the cabinet. I really can't figure out where I measured wrong so I will have to figure it out while the boys are hard at work.

I also couldn't help myself and decided to go ahead and put one coat of paint on the cabinet door front. These had to be handled differently than normal cabinet fronts because they were made so long ago and the varnish had worn to a point that if you tried to sand it off it would gum up your sander. With some light rubbing of denatured alcohol, I was able get a lot of the gummy varnish off. I also had to use an oil-based primer to make sure the paint would hold.

I also got a new phone and was able to do a panoramic picture of the kitchen area. I didn't do it wonderfully (I think I was a little too close) so the wall with the cabinets and the "doorway" looking thing and the dark open area on the left are supposed to be one straight wall.

Until next time!


Steffane B.

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