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!

Ruby too!

And just for kicks...here's our little pumpkin. She is a riot - talking up a storm in mixed languages and running (seriously!). Ruby is the light of our lives.

Ruby's room

We are lucky to have Lynn with us for a couple of weeks. She and Jules have been working on some murals for Ruby's room. The pictures are from a beautiful book that Ruby enjoys. The work looks incredible considering the plaster in this room was the worst of all the rooms we've worked on so far.

Our Room

Our room is basically done. We have finished the painting and now we need to just get our furniture in. Here are some before and after pictures.

Dining Room Drama

After a week of considering our options we are back to taking down the chimney to open up the kitchen into the dining room.

So far we have acheived some demolition and tomorrows plan is to move the back door into the laundry to make room for the fridge in what will be an expanded kitchen. Here's some photo's of the progress. It was incredible to think the walls had been closed in for almost 100 years. We found plaster lath walls and casted nails.

1 Room Down...Only 7 to go

We started with the smallest room in the house to get a feel for the workload. As you can see the office is now nice and bright. It is a dramatic change from the orginal blue (that took 2 coats of primer to cover). The only surprise was how unlevel the ceilings are. We decided to put moulding around the top of the wall to clean up the wall / ceiling edge. It was a bit of a surprise to see the moulding flush withe ceiling in the middle of the wall but 1/4 of an inch away at the corners.

Jules is making great progress on our bedroom so the top floor is really starting to clean up nicely.

Painting the office and demolishing the laundry

It's been a busy few days where we have taken down the wall coverings for the kitchen / laundry wall and then started on painting upstairs.

The goal of the demolition is to open up the kitchen. This is all going to be dependent on whether we can brace a loaded wall enough to remove it.

As for the office paint job 2 coats of primer and we are closer to turning blue into yellow (actually Banana Split). I managed to get the roof painted tonight so the next step is to start on the wall color.

Jules has been prepping the walls like a demon so now we are almost ready to prime what will be our bedroom as well.

Once upon a time....

On the 29th of August we closed on our first house. We had been looking for the right place since moving back from Vietnam and although there is no such thing as perfect everything before this house represented a bigger compromise away from the ideal than we were happy with.

I saw this house first when I was out on a run and didn't even mention it when I came home because I didn't think there was any way we could afford this. Our price range for this area was leading us in the direction of small cottages or bungalows. The house next popped up on one of Jules online searches and she asked me where it was. The house has 3 bedrooms and is about 1600 sq.ft. It was built around 1923.

From the time of writing the contract to closing was about five weeks. Over that time we have plenty of time to imagine renovation scenarios but since we didn't really know the house we were really just dreaming. As of last Friday we own it so now the fun begins.