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

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