Long time, no see

So sorry to everyone one out there about not posting anything about the house in the past almost 2 months. We have been really busy with the house and I have slowed down a lot due to our exciting discovery that I'm pregnant :D! After I graduated from college, house demolition of the downstairs was put into full throttle. The upstairs is absolutely finished with an exception of 1/4 round trim along the window edges and sides of the stairs. Since Matthew was itching to take the concrete, load barring wall down, he stopped doing the little detail work upstairs and began planning the take down of the wall downstairs (which is fine with me because I can do the little detail work and feel some kind of useful).

So demolition of the load barring wall began. It took a little while because we had to figure out how big our timbers would be to support the upstairs, where the posts would go to hold up the horizontal timber, and how much we needed to level out the floor before beginning the process. So in the beginning this is what the house looked like with the load barring wall:

The load barring wall separated the kitchen from where we originally thought the dining room was going to go (we determined it was too small of a space to put a table and chairs and just extended the kitchen into that space). It was also right in the middle of the space we decided would be the living room. So once the wall was taken out this is what we hope it will look like:

We began with taking the wall out of the center of the living room because we decided that taking half of the load barring wall out first and then putting in supports before tearing out the other side was the best idea. This is the wall before it came down (my husband and my brother-in-law are discussing the plans):

They began by cutting the wall with a concrete blade just to separate the sides (after supporting the upstairs of course) and then knocked away with a sledge hammer (which is why there is a little whole in the wall in the left of the picture).

The wall came out with ease. The things you see in the center of the picture/room are what was our temporary supports for the upstairs. Once we received our timber support beams we measured them, sanded them, and put the extremely heavy things into place. Below you can see them in the right half of the picture with the remaining load barring wall to the left.

So here we just did exactly as we had done before. We made sure the upstairs was supported with a temporary support and then used a sledge hammer to knock the wall out. Here is the after picture:

This picture doesn't show the beams in place for the other (left) side but I will post pictures in my next update once it is finished. Everything is super open right now which is something I'm not a big fan of. I like a little separation which will be fixed once we build the walls up around the supports.

Steffane B.

Seeing the light

Due to the bathroom coming to a close, we felt like a little more attention was needed in the bedroom and closet. So we got to work. Because the floors were already sanded, we finally go around to varnishing them. Last minute I decided not to keep the same dark stain that was originally in the rooms, but instead just varnish to show off the true pine color.

Just in case your forgot what it looked like before, I have also attached a picture from when we gutted the whole space and was left with bare walls and floors. They've come along way and the floors look marvelous!

Here'a another view from the porch door right next to the stair case. Just in case you were wondering if the unfinished vanities in the previous post were ever going to be finished, I handed that task to my husband and it turned out to be a lot harder than we expected.

Although you can see in this picture that they are basically done minus stain and varnish, they took him a good while to do because I was set on having top drawers even though I was told it was impossible due to the sink. We ended up shaping the drawers to the scoop of the sink and not making them as long. Long story short, I got my way ;P.

Steffane B.

Finishing up the walls and the Bathroom

After the sheetrock was hung on the 2x4s nailed into the concrete walls, we taped them up and mudded them so they could be ready for paint. We went ahead and painted the staircase because we knew that that would be the hardest. Oh yea, and before that we sprayed orange peel on the sheetrock for a little bit of texture. We didn't want to paint all of the walls just yet though because we didn't want the freshly painted walls to be covered in dust from sanding the floors.

So here you can see, the floors finally sanded and all the walls still bare. This was my husband's project. Mine was finishing up the bathroom. Once the walls were built, the plumbing was run, and the cement board was hung, I tiled the bathroom, laid the laminate floor down, and painted the walls (well with help, of course :D).

 

So here is a picture of my beautiful new bathroom, and just in case you forgot what it used to look like, I put a before picture below it. Amazing difference HUH?! If you are wondering where everything is (besides our ginormous shower!) the toilet is behind the shower, to the left of that small door (which goes to our closet), the bathtub is in front of the shower (in the very front left of the picture), and you can see one vanity on the right (the other vanity is behind our exposed brick chimney. 

Here's a picture of the vanity. Matthew is still working on them, but they will be done soon. It's just nice to get an idea of what they will look like when they are done and that's why they have the sink on top.

 

The bathroom door used to be the old front door of the upstair apartment that it once was. I like it for the bathroom door because of the glass (some may feel the opposite haha). Anywho, at this point all was coming together quite nicely.

Steffane B.

Fixing problems and creating solutions

After the bathroom was quickly coming together, we were able to look a little closer into the master bedroom. The house had a termite problem 30 years before it was given to us but that problem was quickly managed. The remains of the damage, however, was left behind and needed to be fixed so that bigger problems wouldn't happen in the future. When Matthew went into the attic he was able to see that some of the support beams needed to be reinforced. But along with the beams it looked like termites liked to damage sheetrock also. So down came the ceiling over the stairway we tried to salvage.

Here you can see Matthew taking the old nails out of the beams so we could install new sheetrock for the ceiling. Behind him is the beams for wall separating the master bedroom and the bathroom. You can see to the left, behind my mother-in-law, the old door opening that went into the old kitchen. 

So after that problem was fixed we noticed that there were no outlets on ANY of the walls in the master bedroom. How do put outlets into concrete walls you ask? You build a floating wall. We had to nail 2x4s 6 inches apart, run wiring through the ceiling and down the walls, and then nail sheetrock to the 2x4s. Now we have new walls that I can easily hang pictures on and outlets for lamps :).

Steffane B.

Constructing the Bathroom

After seeing how simple it was to build and install the bones of a wall, my next task was to build the walls of the shower and the wall hiding the toilet. I started with the toilet wall because it seemed to be the most simplest at the time. Normally, a house would have level ceilings so the wall I had to build would just consist of my nailing 2x4s to the ends of 3 7.5' 2x4 boards. But of course, this was not the case. I had to individually measure each board, cut it, and then make sure it fit before nailing on the ends that got nailed to the ceiling and the floor. 

In this view you are looking into the the corner of the bathroom. The door to get into the bathroom is to the right (not shown) and the door you do see is the door to the closet filled with 2x4s. After building the toilet wall, I now had to construct the shower walls. I decided to make them 4' tall. At this point we aren't sure if we are going to put glass on the tops of the walls or if we are just going to leave them bare. I guess it just depends on if too much water splashes out. Anywho, These walls were by far the easiest to complete. 

The window you see in the right of the picture is where the toilet is (getting a visual?). That white post sticking out of the floor is where the shower water will be coming from. If you are wondering what is on the walls, the walls are concrete and what you see is a mix of light blue paint and glue for the old bathroom shower, oh and who can forget the tar on the wall. 

Here's a pic of me building one of the shower walls. You can see the bathroom door behind me. And if you are wondering what that brick thing is behind me, it is the chimney for the old fireplace that used to be downstairs but was later removed. The chimney was covered with concrete but I wanted to expose it in the bathroom and set the vanities on either side. It's just added character to this awesome old house.

Steffane B

Small changes but still seeing progress

Compared to what we had done before what I'm about to talk about, it seems as if we took a lot of time off, but I think what most people don't realize is that when you are re-doing a house it takes a lot of time. If you want to make sure it is done properly and you don't want problems further down the road, that takes extra time. None the less, after we finished the ceiling and the floors in the bathroom we were ready to see that baby come to life. The first thing that came in was our bathtub and ohhhhhh is it niiiice.

I didn't want to get out of it! It's the perfect size for two people who want to relax and take a big bubble bath. But I couldn't just lay there, we had to get work done! So the next thing on our check list was to clear out the soon-to-be closet (originally a bedroom). We had to remove carpet and carpet padding and we thought we were going to uncover more beautiful 40 year old hardwood floors but sadly they were covered in 20 year old green vinyl.

We decided to leave them in that state for the time being and use that room to keep our tools and such in. On to the next item on the check list! The banister. At this point the stairway was encased by floor to ceiling walls with a small doorway to let you into the upstairs, we decided to change all of that. We knocked down the walls, saving what wood we could and turned it into a half wall.

Just to let you know it is not completed in this picture. We did cover it with drywall later but we'll get to that at a different day. So the reason that we couldn't salvage the wood from the wall that we previously had was due to termite damage that had happened 30 years before we got the house. Thankfully the damage was localized in one small portion of the house and was able to be fixed/replaced. Well that's all for today folks, until next time.

Steffane B 

Prepping the house

I forgot to post a before picture of the kitchen/bathroom in my last post so I decided to do it this time:

The wall to the right in the first picture was knocked out to make the adjacent bathroom bigger (plus we don't need an extra kitchen in our bedroom) and even though the floor in the bottom picture looks clean and ready to go it definitely was not when we pulled up the vinyl floor in the old kitchen. It was covered in tar and just awful. Anyway, after we gutted the house we had to take down the closets that were left to finish up the bedroom.

Now it was time to work on that bathroom! The kitchen that was previously there was missing the ceiling because my husbands grandfather was in the process of remodeling the kitchen so this was in need of replacing. But before we could put up a new ceiling we had to take out the old tongue and groove floor which was not repairable (plus we didn't want wood floors in our bathroom). We ripped those out and replaced them with plywood. Unfortunately in old houses much of the beams inside the walls and floors are rough cut which makes them very uneven, making our new bathroom floors very uneven. After replacing the floors, we then got started on the ceiling. Being in the middle of the summer in the South and replacing a ceiling in an old house which doesn't have any A/C made work very uncomfortable.

The boys were a big hot sweaty mess but we finally got things squared away and things were looking up.

Steffane B