Spring Cleaning

Looking at the last posts it's hard to know where the time has gone. Lot's of activity now that the weather is warming up (finally). We have a complete back fence, new garden borders, and a great veggie patch.

The inside of the house is coming into focus as well. Jules did a great job on the dining room curtains and Lynn and Jules recovered the couch to make some old chairs suit the room.

We also made progress on finishing the bathroom downstairs and the office at the end of the dining room (with built in bookshelf).

Next Step - Moving In

Apologies that it's been a while. We had a mad flurry to finish up and then to get moved. There is still lots of work to do but we now live in a new house.

A great saturday

A lot of great progress today.

We had electricians working on some wiring and in the meantime we put up a whole bunch of walling. The hole where the chimney was is finally only a memory and now we have finishing to do on the cabinets, drywall, and soon the floors.

Also great progress on the upstairs bedroom. Great work from Lynn and Jules.

Enjoy to photo's...more to come tomorrow.

Dramatic change

Well the chimney is down and the result is simply dramatic. The space has been transformed, and the sweet little house is now an incredibly sweet open house! It was hard to get a picture that conveys the change, but here's a few. It's been 4 solid (and dirty) days of work and we are so grateful to have Nick and Mike to help us. The biggest revalation was that the chimney was backed up onto a mason wall that was actually the load-bearing or supporting wall for the house. Nick said it was strange and he hadn't seen anything like it. But that was followed by a "no worries, we will figure out how to hold your house up." They even kept the chimney intact on the second floor because it is quite solidly constructed, it didn't move when the bottom came out. I am happy we don't have to worry about the mess on the second floor. It is now just contained to three rooms downstairs. Next steps are to secure the remaining bricks and construct a massive header beam.





Everything else is moving along, we had the HVAC and the electricians over today...resulting in a new vent for the AC/Heating unit and a bathroom fan for the upstairs.





Also, Ruby's room is complete and I have posted the finished mural photos to her room page.

Married to Barbarella

When I got to the house this afternoon I was surprised to see this...

and down she comes...

Lot's of great things happening today.

First we had help to bring down the chimney. After a half day of work Mike had the stack below the level of the roof and the hole in the roof patched. If you look carefully on the before picture you will see Mike on the roof and the crown of the chimney about half way down. He's coming back tomorrow to keep beating on the bricks until they are all gone. The game plan at the moment is to go down to the level off the attic floor and then start on the bottom floor. The hope is that the middle section will stay and we can avoid too much chaos in our bathroom and bedroom shared wall. That means we only have to support the underside of the middle section.

It was also a great day for drywall. A combination of Jules, Lynn, and I put up the back wall of the dining room. By the time we finished up tonight we had finished putting all the door trim on as well. We shrank the left side of the doorway by about a foot which balances it in the room a little better and makes the back sitting room more a room than an alcove.

Great strides on the mural for Ruby's room today as evidence by the photo's. Lynn is over there now and Jules is heading back when Ruby goes to bed.

The dumpster arrived today so we got to dump a lot of the brick etc. straight in as well as all the plaster I have been storing up since the demo on the wall's in the living room. Finally got to clean up the vinyl siding on the back porch. That is one project that is completely done and I have to say it looks great.

We are so lucky to have Nick, the husband of one of my workmates helping it us out, he is a great guy who is passionate about old houses, flow and design - he and Jeff would have a great conversation. He is able to just drop in and give some direction (okay,a lot of direction) and just swing back through later in the day.

So today's photo's - the before and after of the chimney, the update of the mural's in Ruby's room, and finally the back wall which doesn't quite show the finished door frame.

How many walls do you need?

My job for today was to move the back door. The before photo is from our inspection with our agent Katie. The after shows where we closed in the old door space.That mean't taking off the vinyl siding, removing the sub wall in the new door space, building a sub wall in the old door space, and putting the siding back on. You can imagine my surprise when I pulled of the vinyl to find thin cement shingles. Even more surprising was the original weather boards under the shingles. We had 3 layers of wall!

Needless to say the demolition took longer than expected but with Ruben's help we made great progress. The sun was going down and it was starting to rain when we called it a day. Now when you work up the stairs you turn right into the back door when before you would go straight into the kitchen. The goal of this move is to provide more space in the kitchen for the fridge.

The way we left the day was with a new door, with a great lock system installed by Jules, all of the vinyl that we could reuse back on the wall and waterproofing on the rest.

As we were getting to leave we had the most beautiful light. It was fun to see it shining down on our new house!

Lynn was at the house until 1 am this morning and I have updated the Ruby's Room blog to show her incredible progress. It's 9:45 at night and the girls have just headed back to the house to paint some more.

Sunday should be a hoot!